IN 2013 PROTESTS broke out in Oakland, California, directed against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from pricey homes in the city’s gentrifying areas to jobs in Silicon Valley. “You live your comfortable lives,” read a flyer that protesters handed out to passengers, “surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”
The United States is seeing a new crisis in terms of the middle class, and Ann Arbor is more at-risk than some communities, according to a University of Toronto professor and author.
Back in 2002, urban theorist Richard Florida set the agenda for numerous cities with his book “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
The book made the case that educated millennials in fields such as software design, technology, art and education were the future of cities. They would enhance prosperity and bring the middle class back into urban cores in districts such as Detroit’s Midtown and downtown.
Urbanist Richard Florida is the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, the book that taught cities to focus on attracting people in the creative professions. Below, he shares his favorite books on urban capitalism, innovation, and inequality:
From his office in the Miami Beach Urban Studios, urbanist Richard Florida wrote hundreds of drafts of his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” It’s an idea that was born in a deleted post-script of Florida’s previous book, “Rise of the Creative Class.”
For over 30 years, urbanist and author Richard Florida has observed the life of cities, and has come up with solutions on how to make them work. In his new book, The New Urban Crisis, Florida argues that cities will have to turn to themselves to help themselves and to make them more inclusive for all.
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. The very same forces that power the growth of our great cities have generated a crisis of gentrification, rising inequality and increasingly unaffordable urban housing.
Richard Florida, whose influential ‘Rise of the Creative Class’ pegged cities’ future to their success in cultivating that group, says a new urban crisis is spreading as a few metros win almost all the marbles. But something deeper than city-level policies is at work, too.
In The New Urban Crisis Richard Florida, an American University professor and current director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, compellingly and convincingly defines the problems facing today’s cities and their suburban counterparts.
For over 30 years, urbanist and author Richard Florida has observed the life of cities, and has come up with solutions on how to make them work. In his new book, The New Urban Crisis, Florida argues that cities will have to turn to themselves to help themselves and to make them more inclusive for all.
In 2017, the cacophony of Toronto’s urban discourse—and urban realities—makes understanding the city a daunting prospect. The skyrocketing rents, record waitlists for affordable housing, growing economic disparities, and inadequate transit, are being met with staggering development and densification, growing economic status, and a waxing global cachet that’s rivalled by few cities. Our city leads the world in livability and human development indices, while simultaneously facing an affordability crisis that threatens to make good urban housing the sole purview of the rich.
Columbus remains a beacon in the Rust Belt, known nationally for its fast-growing population and robust economy. But a researcher who studies urban disparity says the city also stands at a dangerous crossroads, one that threatens to choke off the path to a middle-class livelihood.
Miami has been on a roll. It is attracting people at a rapid clip, it is a center of arts, culture and design, and its entrepreneurial ecosystem is growing. Today the region is at a critical inflection point. How can it grow further? How can it deepen its startup ecology? How can it ensure that its growth is inclusive, and that all Miamians can share in a new era of more inclusive prosperity?
To know PR maven Ann Layton is to love her, so when she asks for your support on something, you reply with a resounding yes!
Whether you’re a would-be Philanthropist/Social-Entrepreneur or have spent decades being one. You could be worse-off than to read the short biographies of those who’ve been through the journey before.
Anton Diego, born in Moscow but raised in Havana and Spain, runs EveryMundo, a Miami-based marketing-technology company serving the travel and hospitality industry.
Richard Florida is feeling reflective. He became the equivalent of an urban planning rock star with the publication of his book The Rise of the Creative Class 15 years ago. In the intervening years, the book’s thesis—attract young creative professionals and your city will flourish—seems to have proven both portentous and problematic.
I was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1957, back when it was a thriving city, bustling with iconic
department stores, morning and evening newspapers, libraries and museums, a busy downtown,
Richard Florida is a professor and writer and his latest book, The New Urban Crisis, looks at the way cities can expand and grow with technology and innovation. You can pick up his book now.
Steve Inskeep talks to author Richard Florida — who has made a career studying cities, both culturally and economically. Florida’s new book is called The New Urban Crisis.
Critic Richard Florida predicted the urban resurgence—what surprised him was the reaction of the displaced.
“If the 1 percent stifles New York’s creative talent, I’m out of here,” musician David Byrne threatened several years ago. New York City’s incredible economic success, he wrote, would be its cultural undoing. “Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich,” he continued. “Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.”
In recent years, Indianapolis has enjoyed a remarkable boom in high-tech industry, adding technology jobs at a rate faster than Silicon Valley, amid a broader upswing in innovation-based employment.
With Jane Jacobs gone, there aren’t too many celebrity urban-studies theorists left in the world—but Richard Florida is one. From his perch at the University of Toronto, where he has run the Martin Prosperity Institute since moving to Canada from the U.S. in 2007, he has promulgated his theories about the way so-called “creative class” workers (high-earning types whose jobs require them to be inventive, or to draw on deep reserves of knowledge) drive prosperity in the urban areas they populate.
They are not just the places where the most ambitious and talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be.
When we moved to Toronto from Washington, D.C. about a decade ago, my wife and I were shocked by the cost of housing. Since we arrived, Toronto’s housing prices have risen by more than 200 per cent. In the past year alone, prices have increased by 34 per cent.
Even setting the dysfunction of our national government, the fact is that no top-down, one-size-fits-all set of policies can address the very different conditions that prevail among communities.
Richard Florida outlines the steps that must be taken to if Toronto and other superstar cities are to make cities more livable and equitable for the middle and lower classes.
Richard Florida outlines the steps that must be taken to if Toronto and other superstar cities are to make cities more livable and equitable for the middle and lower classes.
As technology companies and the techies who work for them have headed to cities, they have increasingly been blamed for the deepening problems of housing affordability and urban inequality.
The pressing need for inclusivity to be part of urban revitalization was a key topic at ULI’s recent Mid-Winter meeting in Washington, D.C., attended by the Institute’s global trustees, with former ULI visiting fellow Richard Florida and ULI trustee Edward Glaeser leading a discussion on the future of cities.
I was born in Newark in 1957, and witnessed the riots that tipped that city into its long-running decline. As a college student in the 1970s, when New York City was still teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, I observed the first tender shoots of revival that were visible in SoHo, Tribeca and other parts of lower Manhattan, as artists began to colonize its abandoned industrial spaces.
One evening in the summer of 2013, Richard Florida sat down in the lounge of a SoHo hotel to talk to his New York publisher about writing a new book.
The urban revival of the past decade has been nothing short of remarkable. Young, affluent, highly educated people have flowed back to downtown cores in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver. Good jobs, better restaurants, higher tax revenues and even high-tech startups have followed.
In an excerpt from his new book, Richard Florida warns of “the central crisis of our times”—the growing cleavage between superstar cities and those left behind.
Steve Inskeep talks to author Richard Florida — who has made a career studying cities, both culturally and economically. Florida’s new book is called The New Urban Crisis.
Richard Florida has extended his series that began with publication of “The Rise of the Creative Class” in 2002. Pittsburgh is far from unfamiliar with the author. Some may be shocked to realize it has been 12 years since the former Carnegie Mellon University professor departed. He is currently based at the University of Toronto. He has repeatedly referenced his home for two decades, and Pittsburgh continues to impact Mr. Florida’s views on all things city.
Trump’s “Muslim Ban” (Executive Order “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”) has set in motion will be an unqualified disaster for American business and the economy. In his first press conference after the election, Trump modestly declared that he would be “the greatest job producer God has ever created.” Between the trade war that he is igniting with Mexico and China and his immigrant ban, he is setting the stage for an economic catastrophe that will make what happened in 2008 look like a hiccup.
Holiday season or not, snippets of the devastation in Syria flash across our TVs. It’s way too complicated to wrap our minds around and far too tragic to watch, so some of us continue to shop and make plans for our celebrations and try to ignore them.
With Trump in office, Canada will become more and more attractive to global talent.
We are undergoing several nested transformations at once that are causing incredible disruptions of the economic, social, and political order.
President Obama, in your final days, the world needs your voice more than ever. If not for the sake of your own legacy, then for the sake of children who learn from their leaders, you must speak up. It’s time you urge the electoral college to exercise their rights.
A group of prominent Toronto scholars analyzed Jacobs’ ongoing impact a century after her birth. Hosted by the University of Toronto’s Innis College, the panel featured U of T’s Erica Allen Kim, Paul Hess, Michael Piper, Patricia O’Campo, and Richard Florida. Moderated by Urban Studies Chair Shauna Brail, the discussion looked at Jacobs’ contributions—and their limitations in the 21st century context—from a multidisciplinary and intersectional range of of perspectives.
Ann Arbor SPARK will host Richard Florida, one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness, demographic trends, and cultural and technological innovation, as the keynote speaker at its annual meeting. Ann Arbor SPARK’s annual meeting, the region’s premier gathering of business and community leaders, will be held on April 24, 2017, at the Eastern Michigan University Student Center in Ypsilanti, Mich.
Both U.S. presidential candidates were flawed. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary seemed like an entitled elitist to one set of voters; Trump like an intolerant, corrupt, prevaricating bigot. Some might say we got what we deserved.But here’s why those of us who didn’t vote for Trump are still sick over it.
Kansas City, with its much improved downtown and still evolving suburbs, is a logical conversation starter on urban and suburban issues.Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin hold a discussion at the Kansas City Area Development Council’s annual meeting to discuss.
Long lines for service send customers a message that a company doesn’t care.Don’t companies see the fallout of such bad business practices? Many customers end up cancelling their service or switching companies due to a lengthy wait. Yet more customers say their frustrations have caused them to take action of some sort.
”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
