A follow-up article from The Telegraph Journal covers the commentary after the lecture, which I couldn't attend as I had to be up at 4:00 AM the next morning:

But Florida told reporters at a reception after his speech that it's not just big cities that are creative. He said people in big cities are looking to get away to "cosmopolitan country towns" like Sackville.

"There's a study in the United States that shows that certain rural areas actually have higher levels of creative economy than urban centres like Manhattan," he said, sipping a glass of red wine.

"My students in Toronto"Â¦ are complaining about the erosion of natural amenities in Toronto: no parks, no place to get to the water, it takes four hours to drive to the lake. People are looking for places that they can go and work and chill," he said. "What I see here is a place that's at the cutting edge. It has a fabulous university that's top-class. It has great natural amenities and has, for its size, outstanding cultural amenities."