Richard Florida lets his thoughts take flight: in this age of Meta Cities and digital connectivity, the need to meet face-to-face has only intensified, writes the best-selling author and urbanist
adminMay 21, 2024
Our mission is to create more innovative, inclusive and resilient cities
Downtown Toronto continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. But its office buildings are far from full, and alarming numbers of storefronts remain vacant. On Fridays in March of this year, office occupancy in downtown Toronto was just 40 per cent of what it was before the pandemic. How does it compare with other cities’ downtowns and what can be done to revitalize it?
adminApril 12, 2024
Rana Florida is CEO of The Creative Class Group, founded by her husband world renowned urbanist Richard Florida. It is a global advisory firm composed of expert researchers, academics, and business strategists. Their proprietary data and research, gives companies and regions leading insights to achieve growth and prosperity.
adminAugust 7, 2023
Dr. Richard Florida is a world-renowned American urban theorist and public intellectual who focuses on social and economic theory. He’s a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow of the NYU School of Professional Studies. Over the years, Florida has tried his hand at many roles, from teaching the next generation of academics to working as an editor and correspondent for none other than The Atlantic magazine, where he was appointed Senior Editor in 2011. He majored in political science and earned a degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. Florida is best known for his concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration, which he articulated in his bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Cities and the Creative Class (2003) and The Flight of the Creative Class (2006). Florida’s theory posits that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of tech workers, artists, musicians, LGBTQ people show higher levels of economic development. Florida refers to these groups collectively as the “creative class”.
adminAugust 7, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic had significant impacts on cities around the world. Many suffered economically and socially, with downtown areas hit particularly hard. Despite that, urbanist Richard Florida says the crisis also created opportunities for municipalities to reimagine their central business districts as more than places for work.
adminJuly 17, 2023
NWA could be a victim of its own economic success if community leaders aren’t strategic about its future development.
adminAugust 23, 2022
In a recent OECD Dialogue on the future of regions: Getting creative about regional development, world-renowned expert on place-based development and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, Dr. Richard Florida shares his expertise on the relationship between a creative workforce and regional economic development. He encourages cities and regions to consider how diversity, creativity and innovation can contribute to attracting creative talent and investment, and shape inclusive and sustainable development. He then unpacks how non-metropolitan areas can benefit from a greater influx of creative people and capital, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
adminAugust 23, 2022
The metaverse isn’t the end of cities. Rather, this evolution of the digital world should be seen as a complement to the physical world, and companies should develop their location strategies to maximize the potential of both the megacities that have become…
adminAugust 23, 2022
America’s downtowns are in big trouble, or so the pundits tell us, thanks to the enduring effects of Covid-19 and the rise of remote and hybrid work. In 10 of the largest US cities, office occupancy averages are less than half, roughly 44% as of mid-August, of what they were back in 2020 before the pandemic hit. That’s better than they looked in May 2021, when the average stood at just 27%. But several big cities, including New York, Chicago and San Francisco, have been stalled at 40% or under for several months — a sign that the workplace disruptions of the Covid era are with us for the long haul.
adminAugust 23, 2022
This past week Intel announced that it will build its new, $20 billion state-of-the-art chip plant near Columbus, Ohio. The company says that the location could eventually expand into a $100 billion complex with as many as eight fabrication facilities. As Intel CEO Jeff Gelsinger put it, “We helped to establish the Silicon Valley, now we’re going to do the Silicon Heartland.”
adminFebruary 1, 2022
Miami Beach has reached a critical inflection point. Spurred by geographic shifts occurring in the wake of the pandemic, the city and the broader region are increasingly becoming new hubs for the tech, finance, media and real estate industries, attracting companies and talent from coastal cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. But Miami Beach also faces some deep challenges, most visible in its so-called entertainment district, the area that runs along Ocean Drive, Collins and Washington Avenues, more or less from Fifth Street to 15th Street. It’s an area that has been rife with partying and, unfortunately, increasing violence.
adminNovember 1, 2021
Elon Musk announced this month that he will move Tesla’s corporate headquarters to Austin, making good on his earlier threat to move his HQ out of California’s Silicon Valley. The Tesla Inc. chief executive officer is hardly the first tech titan to trade the Bay Area for a red state. Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois are just two of the highest profile California venture capitalists who set up shop in Miami.
adminOctober 19, 2021
At long last, it appears that the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic may finally be behind us. Despite early predictions of a lasting urban exodus, people are heading back to great cities. But the pandemic has brought many potentially lasting urban changes, including the attribution of streets once used for cars and parking to bike lanes, parklets and restaurants.
adminOctober 19, 2021
The U.S. is on the verge of the fourth revolution in urban technology. Where railroads, the electric grid, and the automobile defined previous eras, today, new strategies that integrate new technologies in our cities can unlock striking possibilities.
adminOctober 18, 2021
Growing up din a U.S. suburb – North Arlington, M.J.-Richard Florida felt freedom every time he climbed ooo his bike. When he wasn’t learning Alvin Lee and Eric Clapton solos on his Gibson ES-345, a teenage Florida felt the need for speed.
adminOctober 18, 2021
Cities have been intertwined with technological innovation since the dawn of human civilization. Ancient cities were the centres for advances such as cave paintings, rudimentary
written language, toolmaking, and the first urban walls which were erected in Mesopotamia c.3000 BCE. Today, cities and innovation are more inextricably connected than ever. A substantial literature already documents the role played by density, cities and urbanization in the process of innovation. But now increasingly cities are not only the platforms for innovation but also
adminSeptember 20, 2021
As Chief Executive Officer of the Creative Class Group, Rana Florida manages new business development, marketing, consulting, research and global operations serving such diverse clients as BMW, Converse, IBM, Cirque du Soleil, Audi, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels – to name just a few.
adminSeptember 1, 2021
Well-located, accessible via public transportation, and set up to handle large crowds, stadiums have been used for everything from COVID-19 testing and vaccine jabs to hospital beds and accommodations for essential workers.
adminAugust 20, 2021
Everywhere you look around the globe, discontent in various shapes and forms is rising. Over the past decade or so, a wave of right-wing populism surged in advanced countries and the developing world as well. This can be seen not just in the election of Donald Trump in the USA, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, but also of course in the rise of Brexit in the UK, of Rob Ford in Toronto and the rise of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, Italy’s Northern League, the Golden Dawn in Greece, France’s National Rally, the Swiss People’s Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, the Swedish Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and more.
adminAugust 17, 2021
People are free to make all the bad choices they want when it comes to themselves, but notwhen they put others in danger and incur costs that we all must pay. This is where we findourselves today with the COVID-19 vaccine. Until now, the default has been to err on the sideof liberty, allowing individuals a maximum of free choice and personal responsibility.
adminAugust 2, 2021
his paper examines the geographic factors that are associated with the spread of COVID-19 during the first wave in Sweden. We focus particularly on the role of place-based factors versus factors associated with the spread or diffusion of COVID19 across places. Sweden is a useful case study to examine the interplay of these factors because it did not impose mandatory lockdowns and because there were essentially no regional differences in the pandemic policies or strategies during the first wave of COVID-19.
adminJuly 28, 2021
La Lista: Richard Florida dice que el voto más poderoso que tenemos es el que ejercemos con los pies
Cerca de mi casa hay un un coffice que siempre pienso que si un día escribo la serie de mi vida, ese será el equivalente al café de Friends en el siglo XXI pandémico. Ahí siempre nos acabamos encontrando amigos que hartos del trabajo desde casa, sacamos las compus a pasear unas horas al día.
adminJuly 28, 2021
The pandemic — and its shift to remote and hybrid work — have transformed where people want to live.The U.S. has seen migration out of expensive coastal cities to smaller cities like Boise, Idaho, or vacation spots like Lake Tahoe. But most homebuyers aren’t picking up and relocating to a completely different region.
adminJuly 28, 2021
Aprite le finestre. In senso fisico e metaforico. Più aria per respirare meglio; e per rigenerare le idee che ci serviranno nel post pandemia». L’economista Richard Florida, professore alla School of Cities and Rotman School of Management dell’Università di Toronto, studia da vent’anni i motori propulsivi che portano alla continua trasformazione delle città. È diventato famoso, attirandosi anche molte critiche, per la sua analisi sull’importanza crescente, se non determinante, della classe creativa nei destini della socialità urbana.
adminMay 20, 2021
Even as vaccination increases across the United States and an end to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic seems in sight, the economic, fiscal, political, and geographic fallout from the virus cannot be overstated: a massive public health crisis that left more than half a million Americans dead, an economic catastrophe that caused record unemployment and small-business closures, and a seismic political event that surely helped tip the presidential election.
adminMay 19, 2021
When it comes to the fate of big cities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are two sets of overlapping economic and political consequences, but they are not necessarily what you might expect.
Declining tax revenues, business closures, spiking rates of violent crime and an exodus to smaller communities have left major urban centers anxious about surviving the pandemic’s aftermath and returning to a new normal.
adminMay 19, 2021
Offices are not going back to the way they were pre-pandemic, and neither are the downtown neighborhoods that house them. Just last spring, a chorus of pundits loudly proclaimed a sweeping urban exodus and the impending death of cities. Now, just slightly more than a year later, our cities are springing back to life. Sidewalks are starting to bustle; restaurants, which have spilled onto the streets, are teeming with patrons; museums and galleries are reopening; and fans are heading back to baseball parks, basketball arenas and even outdoor concert venues.
adminMay 19, 2021
The dunes and vineyards of Prince Edward County have attracted weekenders from Toronto for decades. Sharon Armitage has often been their real estate agent. She sold to the political pundit David Frum and the restaurateur Jamie Kennedy.But Ms. Armitage has never seen anything like the “avalanche” of city-dwellers that have turned up in the past 12 months. It’s not just aspiring wine moguls (“grapers”) or wealthy retirees any more. Young families who can work remotely during the pandemic have been pushing home prices skyward – by more than 30 per cent since last year.
adminMay 10, 2021
The 15-minute city/neighborhood, at face value, sounds as inclusive as any urban-planning concept ever introduced — jobs, housing, health care, groceries, shopping, education, parks, services and more within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Fixed-route transit is plentiful, so no one has to own/maintain a car.
adminMay 3, 2021
America’s central business districts suffered greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic through job
losses and business closings, but they also have a good chance to recover if stakeholders can
capitalize on trends that will shape the way people live and work in a post-pandemic economy.
That’s the view of author and urbanist Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto
and author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis.
adminMay 3, 2021
Twenty years ago, Richard Florida coined the phrase “creative class” with a theory that clusters of knowledge workers make more prosperous cities. Now he’s thinking about how we can create better, more equal cities post-pandemic.
adminApril 16, 2021
A year ago, just before the start of pandemic lockdowns, some 10% or less of the U.S. labor force worked remotely full-time. Within a month, according to Gallup and other surveys, around half of American workers were at distant desktops. Today, most of them still are. And surveys of employers and employees alike suggest a fundamental shift. While forecasts differ, as much as a quarter of the 160-million-strong U.S. labor force is expected to stay fully remote in the long term, and many more are likely to work remotely a significant part of the time.
adminApril 16, 2021
Marco Bentivogli, Fabrizio Capobianco, Derrick de Kerckhove, Richard Florida, Elena Granata,
Dario Nardella, Andrea Pescino, Luca Pesenti, Marina Salamon, Tania Scacchetti, Giovanni Scansani, Arianna Visentini
adminMarch 24, 2021
Remote work is probably the biggest single effect of the pandemic. It has been building for some time, but it has really been accelerated. According to the best statistics, we had about 5% of the workforce working full-time remotely before the pandemic and about 20% more likely to work full-time remotely after the pandemic, with about another 20% or 30% likely to work remotely some of the time.
adminMarch 1, 2021
Os bairros urbanos mais animados e produtivos são povoados e ativos 24 horas por dia. São lugares onde as pessoas vivem, trabalham, brincam, fazem compras e vão à escola. Ao pensar no futuro das cidades, é para essa direção que devemos olhar, sugere o teórico americano e professor da Universidade de Toronto, Richard Florida. Ele foi um dos pensadores que participaram do Festival POA2020 – Exponencialidade para Todos, que aconteceu até a última sexta-feira. Nesta entrevista, Florida comenta sobre as mudanças que a Covid-19 está causando e alerta que a pandemia está sendo devastadora para a economia criativa.
adminDecember 13, 2020
America’s political map is famously divided into shades of red and blue. But while most of America was anxiously watching screens and needles to see which hue the handful of crucial swing states would turn, the nation’s future was ultimately being decided at a far more granular scale—in the suburbs.
Geography’s defining role in how Americans vote has increased over the past decade or so, as people have sorted themselves by income, education and ideological outlook. More affluent and college-educated professionals and knowledge workers have clustered in larger cities, as many working-class people moved outward to the suburbs and rural America, widening the chasm between blue cities and red outlying areas.
adminNovember 23, 2020
In “60 Seconds With,” ELLE Decor articles editor Charles Curkin chats with creatives and industry leaders, getting the scoop on their life and work in one minute or less. In this installment, he talks with the urbanist Richard Florida about how city life—New York City life, in particular—will change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. His prognosis is decidedly good. Florida’s one minute starts…now.
adminNovember 23, 2020
From Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany on Wall Street in New York to Louis Vuitton in Hong Kong and Printemps in Paris, design duo George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg have truly paved their own way, placing their indelible stamp on private residences, luxury resorts, restaurants, retail stores, and offices around the globe.
adminOctober 19, 2020
“The pandemic will not only reshape cities but it’s going to reshape suburbs and rural areas,” says Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management and a distinguished visiting fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
adminOctober 16, 2020
This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic; the lockdown as a forced experiment; the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks; and changes in the urban form and system. At the macro-geographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system.
adminSeptember 23, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen tens of millions of Americans engage in a gigantic experiment in working from home — one that looks to be more permanent than anyone might have imagined. Corporation after corporation has announced that they won’t be reopening their offices until mid-2021, at least. Some commentators are even predicting the death of the office and the end of cities.
adminSeptember 21, 2020
The outdoor stages are silent. There are no art fairs or gallery walks, no concerts in the parks. The COVID-19 pandemic has decimated arts and culture in America, wiping out as many as half of all jobs for performing artists and musicians, and nearly a third of jobs for all those who work in the creative economy broadly spanning arts, music, theater, design, entertainment and media, according a study we did for the Brookings Institution.
adminSeptember 11, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis hits hard at arts, culture, and the creative economy. This study estimates the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on the creative economy, which is comprised of industries such as film, advertising, and fashion as well as creative occupations such as musicians, artists, performers, and designers. We estimate losses in sales of goods and services, employment, and earnings for creative industries and creative occupations at the national, state, and metropolitan levels over the period of April 1 through July 31, 2020.
adminAugust 27, 2020
The dominant narrative in America today is that urban and rural face divergent futures. The belief that technology is driving urban prosperity and rural decline shapes this view.
This perceived divide is also reflected in popular assumptions about the COVID- 19 pandemic as web searches for homes in rural communities have spiked, ostensibly driven by individuals seeking to flee the dangers of density.
adminAugust 4, 2020
Richard Florida is a researcher and professor, serving as University Professor at University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU’s Schack School of Real Estate. He is a writer and journalist, having penned several global best sellers, including the award winning The Rise of the Creative Class and his most recent book, The New Urban Crisis. He is co-founder of CityLab, the leading publication devoted to cities and urbanism.
adminJuly 28, 2020
Cities will clearly survive this pandemic and the related crises that come from it. Crises like 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 tend to lend themselves to dystopian takes. It’s the end of cities. Cities will disappear. It’s not been true.
adminJuly 27, 2020
In the months since the coronavirus engulfed the world, it’s become clear that society won’t go back to normal any time soon, if ever.
adminJuly 13, 2020
Communities with more resilient economies experience less shock. And economies that are both resilient and high-growth experience shorter recovery periods. This pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to take measure of our regional and city economies and to better understand the fundamental drivers. A key to our future resiliency is the continued growth and development of diverse, export-driven economies across Canada. Surprisingly, some clusters across Canada have an opportunity for expansion during this time — transportation, e-commerce, and health sciences — while others will need support. Economic development officials across Canada must assess the sectors that are most vulnerable in the short to medium run, evaluate the impacts this will have for their labour markets and communities, and plan accordingly to make their economies more resilient and robust.
adminJuly 13, 2020
The ongoing COVID‐19 crisis has put the relationship between spatial structure and disease exposure into relief. Here, we propose that mega regions – clusters of metropolitan regions like the Acela Corridor in the United States are more exposed to diseases earlier in pandemics. We review standard accounts for the benefits and costs of locating in such regions before arguing that pandemic risk is higher there on average. We test this mega region exposure theory with a study of the US urban system. Our results indicate that American mega regions have born the early brunt of the disease, and that three mega regions are hotspots. From this standpoint, the extent more than the intensity of New York’s urbanization may be implicated in its COVID‐19 experience. We conclude that early pandemic risk is a hitherto unrecognised diseconomy operating in mega regions.
adminJuly 2, 2020
Richard Florida and his wife and children spent most of lockdown in their apartment on Miami Beach. When they returned home to Toronto, the city had changed. “When we left, you couldn’t get stuff readily delivered here,” he reports over Zoom. “I literally pressed the Instacart button five minutes before I connected to you . . . and [my order] will be here in half an hour.” Florida is the urban theorist who coined the term “the creative class” and spotted its takeover of the world’s city centres. He’d barely thought about pandemics before, despite being born during the great flu outbreak of 1957 —his parents never mentioned it.
adminJune 25, 2020
”The Creativity index appeared to be one of the best metrics to understand sales performance at Cirque. And correlation are strong, therefor we will be now using this metric to anticipate sales performance and better forecast.
Alexandre AlleMarket Insight Advisor, Cirque du Soleil