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Covid Cities

Covid Cities

What’s the Future of Cities in the Aftermath of COVID-19?

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.

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July 17, 2023
Covid CitiesRecent News

USA Today: The unvaccinated don’t have the right to give us COVID. Crack down on them,not us.

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.

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August 2, 2021
Covid Cities

City Journal: America’s Post-Pandemic Geography

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.

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May 19, 2021
Covid Cities

NY Times: There’s an Exodus From the ‘Star Cities,’ and I Have Good News and Bad News

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.

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May 19, 2021
Covid Cities

Bloomberg CityLab: The Death and Life of the Central Business District

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.

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May 19, 2021
Covid Cities

The Globe and Mail: Remote work has boosted Canada’s hot housing market, but how long will the boom last?

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.

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May 10, 2021
Covid Cities

The Architects Newspaper: Building Back? Richard Florida outlines his vision for a ‘post-pandemic city’

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.

admin
May 3, 2021
Covid CitiesOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Elle Decor: How the Pandemic Will Make Living in New York City More Affordable

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.

admin
November 23, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

PEEG: Cities in a Post-COVID World

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.

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September 23, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Harvard Business Review: The Uncertain Future of Corporate HQs

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.

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September 21, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

USA TODAY: COVID crisis – We need all hands on deck to save America’s arts and culture economy

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.

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September 11, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Brookings: Lost art: Measuring COVID-19’s devastating impact on America’s creative economy

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.

admin
August 27, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent NewsUncategorized

Innovating Canada: Resilient Cities with Richard Florida

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.

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July 13, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Wiley Online Library: Mega Regions and Pandemics

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.

admin
July 2, 2020
Covid CitiesProfiles and InterviewsRecent News

Financial Times : Which towns and cities will be post-pandemic winners?

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.

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June 25, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Ciudades Sostenibles: Post-Covid Response and Recovery for Latin American and Caribbean Cities

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.

admin
June 3, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

The Globe and Mail: Canada’s new normal begins in our cities

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.

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June 3, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Foreign Policy: Don’t Touch Your Face: Our Cities May Never Be the Same Again

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?

admin
June 3, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Sam Suomi Magazine: Technology and the Urban–Rural Divide in America

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.

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May 27, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

World Economic Forum: COVID-19 will hit the developing world’s cities hardest. Here’s why

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.

admin
May 27, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

InsideHook: How Will COVID-19 Affect Colleges and Universities in Cities?

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.

admin
May 15, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

gen medium: The Harsh Future of American 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.

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May 14, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Fast Company: Urban tech is a $65 billion industry. Here’s how COVID-19 could upend it

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.

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April 22, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Citylab: The Coronavirus Class Divide in Cities

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.

admin
April 7, 2020
Covid Cities

Committee for Sydney: Richard Florida on how cities can bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic

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.

admin
April 6, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Citylab: The Geography of Coronavirus

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.

admin
April 3, 2020
Covid CitiesRana Florida ColumnsRana Florida Columns: WorkRecent News

Miami Herald : Opinion: How retailers and other small businesses can survive coronavirus pandemic

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?

admin
March 30, 2020
Covid CitiesRecent News

Citylab: We’ll Need To Reopen Our Cities. But Not Without Making Changes First

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.

admin
March 27, 2020