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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a once-in-a-century public health crisis, an economic catastrophe, and a human tragedy of the first order, whose impact has been most keenly felt in cities. That’s because plagues and pandemics turn the dense living patterns, international connectivity, and sheer 24/7 busyness of cities—the basic drivers of their productivity—against them. That said, cities have survived pandemics throughout all of human history. The basic force of urbanization is stronger than that of disease.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything about how we live. We know this every time we put on a mask to go outside, monitor for six feet of physical distance between ourselves and others, eschew retail for online purchases, log in to work remotely, and have conversations with friends and family over online teleconferencing, instead of in person. We know this because we have seen the social divide widen, and there are increasing numbers of people who can’t make ends meet, have lost income or don’t have access to the internet.
The coronavirus has run rampant around the world’s cities, bringing them to a complete standstill. The joys of city life have been upturned as restaurants, theaters, and workplaces have all become potential vectors for transmission of the virus.
This week’s episode looks at how cities could be transformed by the pandemic. Will urban residents flee to the suburbs, or will cities persist as they have through past epidemics? Do the world’s metropolises have a rare opportunity to reinvent themselves for a more equitable, sustainable future?
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought some of the world’s wealthiest global cities to their knees. In the current epicentre, New York, roughly one-fifth of all residents are infected and more than 20,000 have died. London has reported more than 55,000 cases and 6,000 fatalities. Yet the spread and impacts of the disease are an even greater threat to poorer cities and slums in developing countries.
It’s a calculated effort balancing the need to protect public health and the demand for economic activity. How long and lasting will this new normal be? It may be a balance between infection rates and unemployment rates — between epidemiology and economics.
Having ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest cities, the coronavirus pandemic is now spreading into the megacities of developing countries. Sprawling urban areas in Brazil, Nigeria and Bangladesh are all seeing COVID-19 infections rise rapidly.
For students attending a college or university in a city, the combination of the two can offer numerous benefits. For some, that might involve close proximity to a thriving artistic scene; for others, being near potential work opportunities might be appealing. But with COVID-19 temporarily closing campuses and pushing coursework into the remote learning realm, that’s led to a substantial change in this balance. And given that no one really knows when things will be back to something approaching normal, it’s worth considering that the future might hold for institutions of higher learning within cities.
History has unfolded in waves of profound depths followed by the relief of buoyant times, only for the depths to return with unsentimental speed. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror gave way to Paris’ jolly Incroyables and Merveilleuses, young men and women who dressed ostentatiously and had a cathartic frolic — for about four years until Napoleon took power. After World War I and the pandemic Spanish Flu, the Roaring ’20s carried Berlin, London, and New York into a new age of hilarity. But then came the global Great Depression.
Richard Florida, PhD, came to Philadelphia for an up-close and personal look at how our city’s revival is reaching a tipping point, a “new urban crisis” brought on by success. Florida, one of the world’s leading scholars and observers of cities, is university professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, a distinguished fellow at NYU, and founder of CityLab. He is author of the best sellers The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis. MIT Technology Review named him one of the world’s most influential thinkers.
As we begin to take our first tentative steps to re-open its economy, it is important that we begin now to plan for our kids’ eventual return to school — not just the K through 12 students, whose parents need to go back to work, but college students. Protecting the lives of each and every individual — students, faculty, support staff, and their loved ones at home — must remain our principle focus.
The COVID-19 crisis has upended urban life as we know it. Cities are on lockdown, and the once bustling streets of Paris, New York, London, Rome, and more now sit virtually empty. Technology has been critical to the way cities and society have coped with the crisis. Online delivery companies have been essential for getting food and supplies to residents, while their restaurant delivery counterparts have helped keep restaurants up and running during the lockdown.
The city’s future depends on how it can best mobilize and marshal its assets to get back-up-and-running safely during this period. Even as the state and city are all out to mobilize to combat the virus, preparation for reopening and recovery must start now.
As the coronavirus outbreak hopefully begins to level off in New York and governors start developing plans for gradually reopening the economy, urban policy experts and economists have begun to reflect on how the pandemic will change American cities in the years ahead, even permanently.
Charles Kenny, author of a forthcoming book on pandemics, is cautiously optimistic that cities will prevail in the era of COVID-19. Here, he talks to Richard Florida about how infectious diseases have shaped cities throughout history, how COVID-19 could impact urbanization, and why preparedness is everything.
The coronavirus is exposing a longstanding class divide in the way Americans work — between the low-paid front-line workers and the stay-at-home professionals with more job security and benefits. The first group — the grocery clerks, delivery workers, transit workers, food service workers, emergency responders, physicians’ assistants, and nurses’ aides — are exposed to Covid-19 in their day-to-day jobs and often on long public transit commutes. The second group is dependent on of the very services provided by these workers.
As we grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and how this will impact the social, environmental and economic landscape of our cities, we’ve enlisted globally renowned urbanist and economist, Richard Florida, to help make sense of the uncertainty. Join us for a live discussion with Richard, who will share his ten-point preparedness plan for how cities can survive – and even thrive – following a pandemic. It’s an event not to be missed.
The lockdown will end before scientists develop a working vaccine. Here’s a four-point plan for how companies should adapt.
The Covid-19 pandemic rages around the world, hitting cities in Asia, Europe and the U.S. in waves: first Wuhan, then Milan and Madrid, and now Seattle, New York City, Detroit and New Orleans. No place seems immune. But some cities seem more vulnerable to its devastating spread, and more vulnerable to the virus’s most insidious impacts.
As the coronavirus surges across Canada, the immediate response has been social distancing to damp down its spread. But our cities can’t stay locked-down indefinitely. The economic costs, never mind the toll it takes on our society, culture, and mental health, are too devastating. Sooner or later, they will need to reopen.If we want to reopen safely and securely, we have to start preparing now. In addition to widespread testing, careful monitoring and more precisely targeted interventions, here is a short list of practical things we can start to do now to get our cities and economy back up and running safely and securely.
LBJ Urban Lab Director Steven Pedigo sat down for a one-on-one conversation with Professor Richard Florida, one of the world’s leading thinkers in urban studies. Florida is the University Professor at the University of Toronto and the co-founder of City Lab.
This global pandemic is not to blame for a trend that was already in place — it has only accelerated it. While government stimulus and small business loans, financing and subsidies may provide some small businesses with a measure of relief, many won’t have the cash flow, the savings, or the time to wait. Rents, suppliers, and staffs have to be paid.So how can not just retailers, but restaurants, bars, galleries, book stores, hair and nail salons, florists, and fitness centers move quickly to mitigate their losses and stay afloat over the next difficult months?
As the dreaded coronavirus bolts across the globe, city after city has locked down, transforming urban business centers and suburban malls alike into veritable ghost towns. Our cities can’t stay in lockdown indefinitely. The economic costs — never mind the toll on our society and our mental health — is just too devastating. But the reality is we can’t just hit a reset button and revert to how things were before. This pandemic, like all great pandemics, threatens to reappear in subsequent waves over the next year to eighteen months, until we find a vaccine or develop herd immunity.
As the dreaded Coronavirus rips across the globe, city after city has locked down, transforming urban business centers and suburban malls alike into veritable ghost towns. Our cities can’t stay in lockdown indefinitely. The economic costs – never mind the toll on our society and our mental health – is just too devastating.
A ten-point preparedness plan for our communities based on detailed tracking of the current pandemic and historical accounts of previous ones, presenting some key measures to prepare our cities, economy, and workers for the next phase of the coronavirus crisis and beyond.
There is no more important time to study economic geography. As a field, economic geography encompasses two things. It is both the way economic activity is organized across space, and an academic discipline that develops theory, ideas, and research to explain why economic activity is organized the way it is. For most of human history, economic activity sprung up around natural resourcesd farms around fertile soil, trading activities around natural ports, harbors or nodes between cities, and later factories and industrial activity around natural resources like water power, coal, petroleum, or iron ore. But economic activity today faces few such
constraints.
The idea behind this project to develop a matrix for Peterborough that shows which specific occupations are employed in which specific industries and then to compare the matrix for Peterborough with selected benchmark regions. If complete detailed employment data for all residents was available, such a matrix could be easily constructed. However, that is not that case. And while some sampled data is available, other more detailed information is limited to either industries or occupations.
The economic crisis has challenged popular conceptions of economic growth, both in terms of what it is and how to measure it. While engendering growth and bolstering competitiveness remain high on the agenda, immediate attention has shifted to creating jobs, lifting wages, addressing inequality, and fostering long-term, sustainable prosperity. This new edition of the Global Creativity Index (GCI), which we first introduced in 2004, provides a powerful lens through which to assess these issues.
Women have become an increasingly important force in the U.S. labor market and especially in its knowledge based creative economy. Some argue that the economic crisis has tilted the playing field away from men, who have borne the brunt of blue collar job losses, and towards women, who are more concentrated in knowledge and service work.
The results of Toronto Public Library’s economic impact study clearly demonstrate that Toronto Public Library delivers a strong Return on Investment, through the delivery of library services that enhance Toronto’s competitiveness and prosperity and contribute to a better quality of life for all. This study is the first Canadian public library study to measure in concrete economic terms the Return on Investment for library service.
Cities have always been the natural economic units of the world. But over the past several decades, clusters of cities and city regions have grown outward and into each other, forming mega-regions. More than just a collection of cities or one giant city, a mega-region is greater than the sum of its parts.
High tech startups are taking an urban turn. Manhattan and Brooklyn, downtown San Francisco, and Santa Monica are all becoming tech hubs. This is a new development. While large urban centers have historically been sources of venture capital, the high tech startups they funded were mainly, if not exclusively, located in suburban campuses in California’s Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128 corridor, the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and in the suburbs of Austin and Seattle. But high tech development, startup activity, and venture investment have recently begun to shift to urban centers and also to close-in, mixed-use, transit-oriented walkable suburbs. This report, which is based on unique data from the National Venture Capital Association, Thompson Reuters and Dow Jones, examines this emergent urban shift in high tech startup activity and venture capital investment.
Design is playing an increasingly vital role in innovation, competitiveness and the determination of economic value. However, assessing the impact of design or isolating the design factor can be a challenge for a number of reasons. Design is an enabling discipline, and designers working with professionals from other disciplines add value to the process and to the end result. Design is also a crucial factor in many activities that successful organizations do well, from innovation and new product development, to operations and human resource management, to communications and branding. And like most serious organizational strategies, design is not a quick fix. It requires investment over time and commitment from organizational leaders in order to deliver significant returns.
Class is an inescapable presence in America, one that influences almost every aspect of our lives—from our education and employment to our income, our politics, and even our health.
Class is also inscribed on our very geography.
”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
