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This is an addendum to a previously published broadcast recorded on May 19, 2017. I explored with University of Toronto Professor and Richard Florida some of his proposed solutions he outlines in his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” These include how to transform low wage service work into middle-class family-supporting work and how to update the tax code to make it less regressive and more fair. Dr. Florida also shared his blunt observations on how to empower local communities and address the divide in America between urban, rural and suburban communities.

Every time I have visited London over the past several years, I invariably hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he will say, “You see that building?” nodding towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel. “Some of the apartments cost £50 million or more. And no one lives there—it’s always dark.”

Richard Florida became synonymous with urbanism a decade-and-a-half ago when he wrote a largely upbeat book, “Rise of the Creative Class,” about the renaissance taking place in major cities across the globe.

In his latest literary work, Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a global research professor at New York University, has taken a more sobering look at some of the challenges facing urbanism.

The US City of developer Richard Florida woke fifteen years ago cities around the world to detect the “creative class” in terms of the opportunities provided by economic success. In his latest work pessimistic Florida to declare the message of the new urban crisis that concerns the inner urban segregation. An interesting question is which indicators this crisis can be accessed and find solutions.

On a recent Saturday morning 30 Nashville residents spent two hours participating in a book discussion on how to solve the city’s growth challenges.

There is no pleasing some people. During the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthy fled the west’s big cities to escape crime and urban blight. In the US it was known as “white flight”. Cities such as New York and London were in headlong fiscal decline.

Dr. Richard Florida, author of ”The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It”, and University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto joined the program to discuss the correlation between gentrification and health inequities.

Fri, Jun 2: Toronto continues to grow as a city, but our middle class is shrinking. How do we fix big city problems? Farah Nasser caught up with Richard Florida, one of the world’s foremost experts in urban livability.

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

Governments around the world are trying to create business clusters to grow their economies.

We all know about Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even the Barossa Valley, but there are lesser known hubs as well, such as Schwenningen on the edge of the Black Forest that produces a huge percentage of the world’s surgical instruments.

Alison speaks to urban theorist and author Richard Florida about importance of cities globally and the importance of dealing with deepening inequalities within them.

Rodrigo Tavares, author of “Paradiplomacy – Cities and States as Global Players”, speaks about the role cities and other sub-national governments can play in the area of foreign affairs.

In 2002, Florida’s best-selling book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” focused on a demographic shift happening around the world — an urban revival sparked by young, creative, tech-savvy professionals. Now, 15 years later, Florida has written a far more sobering book, “The New Urban Crisis.” It explores a darker side of the urban renaissance, something he calls “winner-take-all urbanism.” Florida sees deepening inequality in our cities, growing segregation and poverty, and the disappearance of the middle class. Florida will discuss his new book, the dimensions of the challenge facing not only cities but suburbs, and what can be done about it.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”—this is a quote that appears before the introduction section of Richard Florida’s new book. Florida is concerned that cities are failing from been inclusive. The benefits of cities are not reaching everyone.

Richard Florida may be the most widely read author on the subject of cities these days, and probably has been since the turn of the millennium. He first became known for cheerleading the idea that if cities attracted what he called “the creative class” — professionals in the arts, in the media, in tech — they would prosper. And so they did — with a vengeance.

Danish newspaper Politiken on ‘The New Urban Crisi’

The New Urban Crisis Richard Florida talked about his book The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It, in which he examines the challenges cities are facing today.

In 2016, the city of Atlanta launched the Women’s Entrepreneurship Initiative, a program providing 15 women business owners free office space and resources to grow their businesses.

The young, the educated and the affluent are moving back to big cities across Canada, and reversing decades of urban decline.

While this might not seem like a big deal, Richard Florida author of The New Urban Crisis, explains why this trend is actually causing problems.

Richard Florida admits that his career trajectory as an urban theorist owes as much to luck as it does to smarts. The author of the best-selling and widely influential The Rise of the Creative Class says, “I’d actually published three books beforehand, but nobody talks about those. My publisher thought that this ‘creative class’ idea might catch on in some way, and as it turns out, newspaper and magazine editors thought so, too.”

For more than a decade, the transformation of blighted urban areas into glistening global beacons for trendy coffee shops and well-heeled whites has commanded national headlines. Rarely do the articles reveal the behind-the-scenes machinations that result in the systematic displacement of tens of thousands of often black and brown poor, working- and middle-class people who vanish, seemingly overnight, followed by their churches, cultural institutions, beauty salons and other haunts.

Sky-high housing prices. Rising inequality. Segregation. Gentrification. The back-to-the-city movement that has revitalized urban areas and driven growth also has a dark side, according to Richard Florida. He joins The Agenda to discuss his book, “The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class – and What We Can Do About It.

Richard Florida is the author of “The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It.” Here, the urbanist explains how to choose the best place to live for your career. Whether you’re fresh out of college or you’ve just had your first child, Florida has an idea of where you should be looking to live. Following is a transcript of the video.

Keeping cities affordable for all
Author Richard Florida talks about ‘The New Urban Crisis’

(Audio Link : http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/multimedia_showcase#wharton_ Americans seem to be curbing their love affair with the suburbs as millennials move to major metropolitan areas for the excitement and amenities of city living. But this shift is creating challenges of its own — increasingly unaffordable housing, rising inequality and strains on aging infrastructure, among other consequences. Author Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, calls it The New Urban Crisis, which is also the title of his book. He discussed his findings on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111.

Americans seem to be curbing their love affair with the suburbs as millennials move to major metropolitan areas for the excitement and amenities of city living. But this shift is creating challenges of its own — increasingly unaffordable housing, rising inequality and strains on aging infrastructure, among other consequences. Author Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, calls it The New Urban Crisis, which is also the title of his book. He discussed his findings on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111.

A little more than 14 years ago, government planners and enthusiastic citizens listened eagerly to a presentation by Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida, whose ideas on the “creative class” they were sure would help transform this city.

When Richard Florida, the 21st century urban studies guru, speaks, lots of people listen. Ears really perked up when Florida admitted, “I got it wrong that the creative class could magically restore our cities, become a new middle class like my father’s and were going to live happily forever after. I could not have anticipated among all this urban growth and revival there was a dark side to the urban creative revolution, a very deep dark side.” (Houston Chronicle, Oct 24, 2016).

Richard Florida is famous for popularizing the theory that creativity helps spur urban development: Artists and other bohemian types make places fun and attractive, and knowledge workers cluster in open-minded, tolerant communities with culture and the amenities that generally come with it. These advantages can compound over time, creating super-cities like New York, London, and Los Angeles, where rents are high but productivity and incomes are even higher.

Interview with Michiel Couzy, senior editor of Het Parool, the main newspaper in Amsterdam on The New Urban Crisis.

No one has done more to promote the return of educated professionals to cities than Richard Florida. In his 2002 classic The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argued that “creative class” professionals like engineers, artists, architects, and college professors held the key to revitalizing America’s cities. He encouraged cities to cater to the tastes of these creative professionals by developing walkable urban neighborhoods well-served by transit and with ample amenities.

Ten years ago, author Richard Florida coined the term “creative class” to refer to the young, talented and affluent people who he believed would revive North American cities and lead them to grow and prosper.

In today’s San Francisco there is hardly any room for the middle class. Soon-to-be tech millionaires leave the city each morning on the Google Bus, headed to company headquarters in Silicon Valley, while the homeless and the permanently poor watch them pass. The Bay Area is home to more than 71 billionaires (second in the world only to the New York metro area) while about 14,000

“Today’s urban rentiers have more to gain from increasing the scarcity of usable land than from maximizing its productive and economically beneficial uses,” writes Florida, also noting that over a 50-year period, over half of New York City’s economic output was consumed by artificially high housing costs, to the benefit of what Adam Smith might have called “indolent” landlords (themselves often corporations, REITs and other wealth funds).

There has been a buzz in the past few weeks regarding a new book by the urban-studies theorist Richard Florida, the “New Urban Crisis.” Remember, Mr. Florida? He’s the one who extolled places such as Boston and Austin as the hope for America’s economy. In his previous seminal work, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Florida had this to say about Boulder: “Boulder has reached this beautiful sweet spot, where it has many advantages of a university town — tech and talent and openness — but without many of the costs and traffic and congestion that may disadvantage incumbent centers of innovation.”

When I was in college and first became politically aware, so to speak, was in the ’80s when Ronald Reagan was president. Many people from that era remember that perhaps the principal economic theory driving his election in 1980 was the theory of supply side economcs, or that lower barriers on

Lesson #2: Superstar cities

Toronto is tied with Stockholm for 10th on the list of superstar cities compiled by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, where Florida is Director of Cities (New York, London and Tokyo are the top three). These cities benefit from the clustering effect of individual talent, firms and industries (especially tech).

When Richard Florida coined the term “creative class” in 2002, he painted a very clear picture for urban revitalization. His book The Rise Of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community And Everyday Life, almost reads like a textbook for mayors. All cities had to do was lure a few artists into live-work lofts in an old warehouse district, maybe convince a startup—they weren’t even called startups then, were they?—to set up shop in a post-industrial neighborhood. Voila! Florida’s prescription for city success.

Lesson #1: What is the “new urban crisis”?

The University of Toronto’s urban theorist Richard Florida is best known to many for his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, which predicted future economic growth as the result of creativity and innovation rather than raw materials and industrial models of the past.

In 2002, Richard Florida became America’s best known urbanist with the publication of his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. In it, Florida posited that the “creative class,” a group which included artists, scientists and engineers, as well as educated knowledge sector professionals such as lawyers and finance workers, was the main driver of cultural and economic flourishing in America’s cities. The theory was enticing to many urban planners and municipal politicians, and cities across the country aimed to follow Florida’s advice on becoming “creative cities.”

It’s been 15 consequential years since urban evangelist Richard Florida first helped popularize and propel the U.S. urban renaissance with his gospel of the creative class. It held that the tech-consumed, enterprising hip young people flocking back to cities were the nation’s new economic driver, and that luring more of them to every burgh was the key to broad prosperity.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/in-depth/article147246494.html#storylink=cpy