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Richard Florida Columns

Profiles and InterviewsRichard Florida Columns

Reflecting on the future of the ”creative class” in regional development

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.

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August 23, 2022
Richard Florida Columns

Bloomberg CityLab: Why Downtown Won’t Die

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.

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August 23, 2022
Richard Florida Columns

Bloomberg Citylab: As Tech Titans Go to Austin and Miami, Will Tech Workers Follow?

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.

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October 19, 2021
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Independent: 15-minute cities’ are now all the rage, but are they ultimately limiting?

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.

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October 19, 2021
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Wall Street Journal: How Remote Work Is Reshaping America’s Urban Geography

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.

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April 16, 2021
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Bloomberg CityLab: How Suburbs Swung the 2020 Election

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.

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November 23, 2020
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.

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November 23, 2020
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : COVID-19 has shut down our cities. Here’s how we bring them back to life

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.

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April 3, 2020
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Life: Sidewalk Labs is the future of urban tech

A dozen or so years ago, I was recruited to Toronto to establish the Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank focused on urban, regional and national competitiveness. My wife and I have grown to love this city we call home. But Toronto needs to compete with the best of the best, and that’s why I support Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project.

Toronto has made it into the ranks of global cities. It tends to place highly in rankings of quality of life. It has strong banks and a world-class real estate market. But despite the hype about high-tech in Toronto, we lag significantly behind the world’s leading cities.

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September 16, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRana Florida - In the NewsRana Florida ColumnsRichard Florida Columns

The Star: The border problem at Pearson airport

Canada prides itself on its reputation as an open, tolerant and caring place. Especially at our border, where the image of Justin Trudeau greeting refugees turned away from the United States was seen around the world. But, over the dozen years that we have lived in Toronto, we have regularly encountered problems when coming back home to Canada at Pearson Airport.

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July 17, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail: Sidewalk Labs could make Toronto a world leader in urban tech

Sidewalk Labs released its long-awaited plan on Monday, providing a detailed look at what it has in store for the city’s waterfront. To date, the controversy over the project has revolved around critical issues of privacy and the nature of its waterfront development. But there is another dimension to the initiative, one that has been largely missing from the conversation: the role of Sidewalk Labs’ project in Toronto and Canada’s future high-tech development.

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July 8, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Star: Is Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project right for Toronto?

Urbanists and privacy experts across the city have raised important concerns about the Sidewalk Labs’ project on Toronto’s waterfront. But something important remains missing from the conversation. We are failing to consider what Sidewalk Labs can do for our economic future. This is a project that holds the promise of vaulting Toronto to world leadership in one of the most important fields of high-tech industry.

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July 8, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Harvard Business Review: How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing

We’re used to thinking of high-tech innovation and startups as generated and clustered predominantly in fertile U.S. ecosystems, such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York. But as with so many aspects of American economic ingenuity, high-tech startups have now truly gone global. The past decade or so has seen the dramatic growth of startup ecosystems around the world, from Shanghai and Beijing, to Mumbai and Bangalore, to London, Berlin, Stockholm, Toronto and Tel Aviv. A number of U.S. cities continue to dominate the global landscape, including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, but the rest of the world is gaining ground rapidly.

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April 11, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Star: A blueprint to help Mayor Tory get Toronto unstuck

Toronto Mayor John Tory’s resounding victory last month gave him an “historic mandate,” as he put it. He’ll need it, because the city he is leading is badly stuck, unable to address the deep challenges it faces. Indeed, the mayor must use his hard-won political capital to make headway on four key fronts.

First and foremost is affordable housing. Tory has said he will make housing and housing affordability a priority of his second term, declaring that “we must do more to speed up the increase in supply of affordable housing.”

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April 11, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Washington Post: The U.S. has lost its entrepreneurial advantage

lobalization strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship.

For decades, promoting start-up firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, if at all.

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April 11, 2019
International publicationsOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

endi: Tribuna Invitada, El potencial creativo de América Latina

En estos tiempos, la clave para el desarrollo económico de América Latina ya no solamente incluye sus materias primas y sus manufacturas, sino también un recurso ilimitado aunque ignorado por muchos: el inmenso potencial creativo de la región. La creatividad forma indiscutiblemente parte del ADN de las sociedades, ciudades y barrios latinoamericanos,

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April 11, 2019
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Wall Street Journal : Can the U.S. Keep Its High-Tech Edge?

While recent headlines have blared about the Trump administration’s multi-front trade war with Canadian dairy farmers, Chinese manufacturers and the European Union’s steel, aluminum and automotive industries, a much larger economic threat has gone virtually unnoticed. The high-tech startups that have provided the U.S. with a powerful edge in fields such as computers, software, mobile devices, biotech, the internet and an array of digital platforms now face rapidly increasing pressures from foreign competition. This looming crisis of American innovation could undermine the nation’s long-running global advantage in bringing to market the next new technology, the next new industry, the next big thing. It may well be the gravest challenge yet to America’s century-plus hold on global economic hegemony.

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November 16, 2018
CanadaOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Solving Canada’s startup dilemma

Canada, we increasingly hear, is becoming a global leader in high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Report after report has ranked Toronto, Waterloo and Vancouver among the world’s most up-and-coming tech hubs. Toronto placed fourth in a ranking of North American tech talent this past summer, behind only the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, and in 2017 its metro area added more tech jobs than those other three city-regions combined.

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November 16, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

New York Daily News : Our real national divide: Local America vs. National America

It goes without saying: Ours is a divided nation. But the real boundary doesn’t run between Blue or Red states, liberal and conservative ideologies, or urban versus rural regions. No, the real divide in America is one of scale. Richard Florida and Mick Cornett belong to different political parties, and differ sharply on a number of policy views. But they share a core belief that our country’s future lies in Local America.

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November 16, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : How Toronto can curb gun violence

A shadow hangs over Toronto after Sunday’s shooting on the Danforth. The recent killing spree follows on the heels of a vehicle attack on Yonge Street this spring and a raft of shootings, including one with small children in the crossfire last month. The city’s international reputation as a multicultural success story seems at risk, as Torontonians fear they are succumbing to the twin threats of gun violence and terrorism vexing other global cities.

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November 15, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Medium : Toronto’s Deadly Car Crisis

Torontonians like to sound off on Americans’ inability to deal with guns and gun deaths. But Toronto’ s inability to deal with the car creates its own killing fields. Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities.

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November 15, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : The economic price of electing Doug Ford

Ontario’s recent economic success is the product of longer-run investments in universities, arts and culture; advanced research in key fields like artificial intelligence; openness to immigrants; and a growing commitment to place-making and city-building. This economic advantage will be significantly diminished if Doug Ford becomes premier of Ontario. Comparisons are already being made between Mr. Ford and Mr. Trump, as well as between Mr. Trump and Mr. Ford’s late younger brother, Rob, the original North American populist. All three positioned themselves as advocates for the “little guy,” slashing taxes and cutting back government. Like Mr. Trump, Doug Ford has even hired actors for campaign events.

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November 15, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Star : Canada should be winning even more Olympic gold

With the help of his colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, Patrick Adler and Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida ranked Canada’s, and each nation’s Olympic medal performance relative to their population, size of their economy and number of athletes on their Olympic teams. So, how does Canada’s performance measure up on metrics like these?

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November 15, 2018
CitiesOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

CNN : The disturbing part about Amazon’s HQ2 competition

Amazon’s short list of contenders for its much ballyhooed HQ2 reads like a who’s who of the most economically vibrant and dynamic cities in North America. There’s one part of Amazon’s HQ2 competition that is deeply disturbing — pitting city against city in a wasteful and economically unproductive bidding war for tax and other incentives. As one of the world’s most valuable companies, Amazon does not need — and should not be going after — taxpayer dollars that could be better used on schools, parks, transit, housing or other much needed public goods.

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February 6, 2018
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Financial Times : The downside of the race to be Amazon’s second home

The bids to host Amazon’s much ballyhooed second headquarters are in from dozens of cities across the US and Canada. With its promise of 50,000-plus jobs and billions in investment, it has been hailed as one of the biggest urban development opportunities in recent memory. However, things are not working out exactly as the ecommerce group may have hoped. Resentment among city leaders is growing at what looks like a big, well-capitalised company taking advantage of cities and their taxpayers.

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October 25, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Nature : Comment: Where the streets are paved with ideas

Most of the world’s research and entrepreneurship is concentrated in a few megacities.Innovation is geographically uneven. The world’s 40 richest mega-regions — expansive conurbations such as the Boston–New York–Washington DC corridor, Greater London, or the passage that runs from Shanghai to Beijing — account for more than 85% of the world’s patents, and 83% of the most-cited scientists. And yet, only 18% of the world’s population lives in them.

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October 19, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : The Trump effect: It’s Canada’s moment to win the global race for talent

Google’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary has apparently chosen the Toronto waterfront as the place it will create a veritable city of the future, developing and prototyping new technology-enabled ways of working, living and getting around. And Toronto is placed at or near the top of many short lists for Amazon’s new second headquarters, over which more than 50 communities across North America are competing.Why have Toronto, and Canada more broadly, suddenly become so attractive to major U.S. tech companies? The election of Donald Trump may be the veritable tipping point, but Canada’s ability to compete for top global talent has been growing for a while.

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October 10, 2017
CitiesOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida ColumnsThe New Urban Crisis Press

Crains New York Business : How to grow New York and other cities—while reducing inequality

As the world’s most economically powerful financial center and a budding hub for high-tech industry, New York City has grown increasingly segregated and unequal—particularly in areas surrounding new development. Now more than ever, the city has become a contested ground for space, spurring a local backlash among community members who can no longer afford to live where they are. With the current presidential administration and Republican majority on Capitol Hill unlikely to lend their support, New York must now turn to its local leaders, communities, and anchor institutions—universities, medical centers, real estate developers and large corporations—to mitigate this new urban crisis.

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September 26, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRana Florida Columns: WorkRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Star: Building six million good jobs in Canada

Today, more than six million Canadians — 40 per cent of Canada’s workers — toil in low-paying routine service jobs, preparing and serving our food, waiting on us in stores and retail shops, doing office work, and providing a wide range of personal and health care service, from cutting our hair and giving us massages, to taking care of our kids and aging parents.

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September 20, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

New York Daily News: Stop giving away the store, N.Y.: Aetna shouldn’t get big tax breaks to come to Manhattan

Last June, Aetna announced that it was moving its headquarters from Hartford, Conn., where it has been located since 1853, to the Meatpacking District in New York City. New York, Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini told The New York Times, offers “the ecosystem of having people in the knowledge economy, working in a town they want to be living in, and we want to attract those folks, and we want to have them on our team. It’s very hard to recruit people like that to Hartford.”

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September 20, 2017
Richard Florida Columns

Houston Chronical: Florida, Rose: Post-Harvey, the city must reset its development trajectory

There is little doubt that the Greater Houston area will rebound and rebuild after Harvey. This has long been one of the world’s fastest-growing and most vibrant regions, with a population fast approaching 7 million and projected to pass 11 million by 2050. With an economic output of nearly $500 billion, Houston’s economy would place it among the 25 wealthiest nations in the world. It’s a center of high-tech energy production and medical research.

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September 8, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The New York Times : The Urban Revival Is Over

For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out.

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September 1, 2017
Richard Florida Columns

Harvard Business Review: What Inclusive Urban Development Can Look Like

Inclusive prosperity is the idea that the opportunity and benefits of economic growth should be widely shared by all segments of society. Most cities fall well short of that ideal. While urban areas continue to afford new opportunities to employees and businesses from all walks of life, they are increasingly split between wealthy, high-skill knowledge workers and low-paid service workers.

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July 11, 2017
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

Evonomics: Richard Florida: It’s Not (Just) the Working Class. It’s the Service Class.

The Service Class, not the Working Class, is the key to the Democrats’ future. Members of the blue-collar Working Class are largely white men, working in declining industries like manufacturing, as well as construction, transportation, and other manual trades. Members of the Service Class work in rapidly growing industries like food service, clerical and office work, retail stores, hospitality, personal assistance, and the caring industries. The Service Class has more than double the members of the Working Class – 65 million versus 30 million members, and is made up disproportionately of women and members of ethnic and racial minorities.

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June 14, 2017
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Star : How well is Canada really doing in the Rio Games?

In total medal count, Canada is faring fairly well. But by other, more meaningful measures not so much.With the help of colleagues at the University of Toronto Martin Prosperity Institute Charlotta Mellander and Patrick Adler, Richard Florida ranked each nation’s overall medal performance by their population, size of their economy, and the number of athletes on their Olympic teams.

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August 16, 2016
Opinion EditorialsRichard Florida Columns

The Boston Globe : Congress could ensure tax money is put to better use

Perhaps it’s finally time for Congress to step in and stop the incentive arms race among states by invoking its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In the meantime, GE could always do the right thing and give taxpayers back their money. For a company that wants to be seen as both cutting edge and a good corporate citizen, such a move would set an important precedent.

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January 31, 2016
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Life : The Best (And Worst) Places to Live

A ranking of Toronto’s 140 neighborhoods—a definitive document that separates the great from the good, the average from the awful. We teamed up with the urbanists, economists, sociologists and information scientists at the Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank at U of T’s Rotman School of Management. They crunched every stat they could drum up: census data, community health profiles, the Fraser Institute’s school report cards, the Toronto Police Service crime figures and independent studies.

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September 29, 2015
CanadaOpinion EditorialsRichard Florida ColumnsTalent, Technology and Tolerance

The Globe and Mail : Still lacking technology and talent, Canada’s tolerance offers creative edge

Canada ranks fourth in the world in a new ranking of the world’s most creative and economically competitive countries. The survey, put together by my research team at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, places Canada behind only first-place Australia, the United States and New Zealand. This is the third version of these rankings we’ve done, and Canada is up from its seventh-place finish in 2011.

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August 5, 2015
Richard Florida Columns

Forbes : How The Suburbs Highlight The Divide Between America’s Haves And Have-Nots

America’s great divide is not between poor cities and affluent suburbs; its great metropolitan areas are patchworks of concentrated advantage and concentrated disadvantage that stretch across both. Some of its suburbs are thriving; others are in a steep decline. In this new, fractured and divvied metropolitan geography, the traditional juxtaposition between “urban” and suburban” has lost much of its meaning.

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December 17, 2014
Profiles and InterviewsRana Florida ColumnsRana Florida Columns: CityRana Florida Columns: LifeRana Florida ProfilesRana Florida Upgrade Features, Reviews and NewsRichard Florida Columns

Horizons : Floridas on Miami, Florida

During your Caribbean Cruise, you may dream of living in paradise, of packing it all up and escaping to the islands. While that’s a great fantasy, the reality of trying to make a living makes it less attractive. But there’s always Miami. No, really, Miami. It’s a great place to live. Just ask Richard and Rana Florida, the power couple behind the Creative Class Group.

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November 14, 2014
CitiesRichard Florida ColumnsTalent, Technology and Tolerance

Knight Foundation Knight Blog : Richard Florida on driving success in cities

Knight Cities Challenge offers applicants a chance to share in $5 million by focusing on the question: “What’s your best idea to make cities more successful?” The contest will test the most innovative ideas in talent, opportunity and engagement in one or more of 26 Knight Foundation communities. Richard Florida writes about talent as a driver of city success.

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September 23, 2014
Richard Florida Columns

LA Times : Want to deplete your tax base? Give ‘job creators’ what they want

Virtually all of the published research on the subject shows that most economic development incentives are a senseless waste of taxpayer money. My own analysis found no connection between incentive dollars spent per capita and such measures of economic success as wages, incomes, human capital levels or unemployment.It’s time to put an end to incentive madness once and for all.

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September 16, 2014
CitiesEventsRichard Florida Columns

The Huffington Post : A Message to the City Builders of Tomorrow

Richard Florida had the honor of returning to his undergraduate alma mater, Rutgers University, to address the newly minted graduates of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, who will be some of the leaders of this epochal undertaking. He shared a few of his stories about Rutgers with them, and about the importance of finding your passion and forging your own course through life. He’d like to share them with you as well.

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May 22, 2014
International publicationsRichard Florida Columns

Kaleidoscope City: Reflections on Planning and London : A Divided City in a Divided World

London has emerged from nearly a century of British decline to take its place at the very apex of global capitalism cannot be denied. In an era in which cities have become the principle organizing units of the global economy, London stands head and
shoulders above all but a handful of its urban peers.3 New investments have turned East London’s Tech City into a centre of start-up and venture capital activity. Talent has the most expensive places on the planet to live.

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February 10, 2014
CitiesRichard Florida Columns

New York Times : ‘Federations of Neighborhoods’

For most of history, people lived in the same locations from birth until death; their lives revolved around their large extended families. Nowadays, Americans are much less likely to stay put for life – just as it’s less likely that they will have one job for life. In Jane Jacobs’s words, they are “federations of neighborhoods,” where virtually everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, religion, level of education, sexual orientation or income, can find a niche where they feel welcome and comfortable.

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December 4, 2013
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Toronto’s problem has grown beyond its mayor

Rob Ford will soon be gone. But even more important than who replaces him will be how soon and how thoroughly we can remake the office of the mayor. Canada’s strictly regulated banks have shown the world that government has a key role to play in the new economy. With a new city charter and a growth model for the 21st century, Toronto can set a new standard for municipal governance.

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November 13, 2013
EducationEmploymentRichard Florida Columns

Washington Monthly : The Living-in-the-Basement Generation

According to new research by the Social Science Research Council’s Measure of America project, for our nation’s 5.8 million “disconnected youth”—the one in seven Americans between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who are neither working nor enrolled in school. This cohort, whose numbers were stable for a decade, surged by 800,000 after the Great Recession and includes not only children from poor and minority families but significant numbers of white, middle-class youth as well.

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October 29, 2013
CitiesCreativityRichard Florida Columns

The New York Times : Cities Are the Fonts of Creativity

Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. As anyone who has ever spent any time with children knows, every single human being is born creative; every human being is innately endowed with the ability to combine and recombine data, perceptions, materials and ideas, and devise new ways of thinking and doing. Cities are the true fonts of creativity.

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September 17, 2013
CitiesCreative ClassEconomyEventsRichard Florida Columns

Pittsburgh Quarterly : Visions of Pittsburgh’s future

Twenty-five years ago, Pittsburgh hosted the Remaking Cities Conference, an international gathering of architects, visionaries and dignitaries, including England’s Prince Charles, the honorary co-host and keynote speaker. This year, Oct. 15-–18, 2013, Carnegie Mellon University will host the Remaking Cities Congress, with 300 invited urbanists and thought leaders who will again focus on the post-industrial city in North America and Europe. In that context, they have asked 10 thought leaders to assess the Pittsburgh region’s strengths and weaknesses and to consider what they would like to see in the Pittsburgh of the future. The package begins with a foreword from noted urbanist Richard Florida.

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September 5, 2013
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Beyond the Rob Ford embarrassment is a broken Toronto

Long the epitome of a humane, prosperous, diverse, caring city, Toronto has at long last captured the world’s attention – but not in the way that anyone would want. Mayor Rob Ford’s latest scandal has drawn headlines in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair, making him the butt of jokes on talk shows like Real Time with Bill Maher, and even on the sports network ESPN.

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May 20, 2013
EconomyRichard Florida Columns

The Toronto Star : Richard Florida: Saving capitalism from itself

You don’t have to be a Marxist to wonder if capitalism has run its course. Though the stock market is soaring the economic recovery is jobless, millions remain un- or underemployed, and the economies of the world are mired in slow growth. At the same time, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider that it’s been in more than a century.Before we can treat capitalism’s symptoms, we have to understand its disease. We are in the midst of the greatest, most thorough economic transformation in all of history.

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May 17, 2013
Creative ClassRichard Florida ColumnsTechonology

The Chronicle of Higher Education : Robots Aren’t the Problem: It’s Us

The dustbin of history is littered with dire predictions about the effects of technology. They frequently come to the fore in periods in which economies and societies are in the throes of sweeping transformation­—like today.The key to a broadly shared prosperity lies in new social and economic arrangements that more fully engage, not ignore and waste, the creative talents of all of our people.

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March 25, 2013
Richard Florida ColumnsTechonologyUrban

National Journal : 5 Strategies to Increase Diversity in Urban Tech Scenes

Entrepreneurial high-tech start-ups have taken an urban turn. Nowhere is this shift more apparent than New York City, which has emerged as the nation’s second-largest center of venture capital-financed high-tech start-ups, thanks to Google’s significant presence in the old Port Authority building in Chelsea and companies ranging from Foursquare to burgeoning tech-fashion players like Rent the Runway, Warby Parker, and Gilt Groupe.

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December 19, 2012
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Richard Florida: Toronto needs a muscular mayor

Rob Ford’s downfall is stunning – and it opens up a bigger can of worms for Toronto’s future than even his contentious mayoralty did. In the short term, there are some daunting questions: Will he leave office in two weeks as ordered for violating conflict-of-interest rules? His lawyers have filed a request for a stay pending an appeal. If Mr. Ford does step down, will city council appoint his successor or will there be a by-election? If there’s an election, will Mr. Ford’s name be “the first one on the ballot”?

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December 4, 2012
CitiesRichard Florida Columns

NY Daily News : A stronger, smarter New York

As one of the world’s richest cities, New York has an obligation not just to rebuild but to show the world how to rebuild the right way — smarter, greener, more resilient than ever. New York is the very definition of resilience. It has absorbed several body blows in the past decade and bounced right back — the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the financial collapse of 2008 and now Hurricane Sandy.

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November 7, 2012
CreativityRichard Florida Columns

Urban Land Magazine : What Draws Creative People? Quality of Place

Richard Florida explores why people—especially talented Creative Class people, who have lots of choices—opt to locate in certain places? What draws them to some places and not to others? Economists and social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to the location decisions of companies, but they have virtually ignored how people, especially creative people, make the same choices.

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November 2, 2012
CitiesCreative ClassCreativityRichard Florida ColumnsRise of the Creative Class Revisted Features and Reviews

The Huffington Post : The Creative Compact

Excerpted with permission from The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited: 10th Anniversary Edition, by Richard Florida. The tectonic upheavals our economy is enduring are the result not just of financial shenanigans by the global One Percent, but of a deeper and more fundamental shift — the passing of the old industrial order as it gives way to the emerging Creative Economy. If we wish to build lasting prosperity we cannot rely on market forces and the Invisible Hand alone to guide us. The grand challenge of our time is to invent new institutional structures that will guide the emergence of a new economic order, while channeling its energies in ways that benefit society as a whole.

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July 12, 2012
CitiesCreative ClassEconomyRichard Florida Columns

New York Daily News : Wanted: Working class jobs

Richard Florida on how to help lower-income New Yorkers climb the city’s increasingly slippery economic ladder. Behind New York’s encouraging news is a troubling trend: Huge numbers of middle and especially lower income
people continue to struggle. To complete its transition, New York must develop strategies that enable many more of its workers to benefit from the ongoing transformation of its economy.

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July 10, 2012
Creative ClassRichard Florida ColumnsRise of the Creative Class Revisted News Articles

Salon : Class decides everything

This article was adapted from Richard Florida’s new book “The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited” from Basic Books. His nitial research over a decade ago identified the rise of the creative class as a key factor in America’s cities and economy overall. What has struck him since is that the effects of class are not just limited to cities, jobs and the economy. Class increasingly structures virtually every aspect of our society, culture and daily lives — from our politics and religion to where we live and how we get to work, from the kind of education we can provide for our children to our very health and happiness.

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June 25, 2012
CanadaRichard Florida Columns

Toronto Star : Toronto Raptors fail once again to have a player in the NBA all-star game

Richard Florida discusses how Toronto’s experience in basketball simply does not match up to the city’s growing size, wealth and stature. The outflow of basketball stars is no longer a metaphor for any larger talent drain, but an increasingly isolated and unique problem. Toronto’s sports franchises, need to start doing more of what it takes to compete on a global scale.

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March 1, 2012
Richard Florida Columns

Barcelona in the Great Reset

Barcelona has always been as commercial as it is creative. The city of Gaudi and Miro and the young Picasso is also a center of textile, chemical, pharmaceutical, and automotive manufacturing, publishing, finance, telecommunications and information technology, of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s this combination that the city and region can build on to survive and prosper through the economic crisis and Great Reset.

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October 13, 2010
CitiesRichard Florida Columns

Suburban Renewal

Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.

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October 11, 2010
Richard Florida Columns

The New Republic : The Roadmap to a High-Speed Recovery

The fiscal and monetary fixes that have helped mature industrial economies like the United States get back on their feet since the Great Depression are not going to make the difference this time. Mortgage interest tax credits and massive highway investments are artifacts of our outmoded industrial age; in fact, our whole housing-auto complex is superannuated.

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August 12, 2010
Richard Florida Columns

USA Today : A search for jobs in some of the wrong places

Richard Florida examines how in a broader creative sector, the United States will add 10 million jobs over the next decade. While the U.S. economy will add more than one million computer and engineering jobs, health care and education are expected to generate more than three times as many jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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May 10, 2010
Richard Florida Columns

Korea 2020 : South Korea: Moving into the Creative Age

South Korea has clawed its way out of poverty by becoming a manufacturing powerhouse. But to stay a world-class economy will require the country to draw on a different set of skills. In the future, it will be the ability to create—as distinct from the ability to produce—that will foster innovation, and with it, sustainable economic growth. Whether it is new ideas, new business models, new cultural forms, new technologies, or new industries, it is creative capital that will drive the world economy. The ability to harness creativity will be the biggest challenge, as well as the biggest opportunity, for South Korea.

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February 23, 2010
Richard Florida Columns

McKinsey Quarterly : What Matters: Talentopolis

Today a highly significant demographic realignment is at work: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid people to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and corresponding exodus of traditional lower- and middle-class people from those same places.

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July 20, 2009
Richard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : A really new deal would stimulate the economy of the future, not the past

Less than a month after taking office, the Obama administration unveiled its massive stimulus package aimed at recharging the lagging American economy – a staggering three-quarters of a trillion dollars. As the Harper administration rushes to dole out a $40-billion stimulus of its own, it’s high time to ask a simple question: Are we stimulating the right things?

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March 1, 2009
Creative Class CommunitiesEconomyRichard Florida ColumnsThe Great Reset News Articles

The Atlantic : How the Crash Will Reshape America

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

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February 11, 2009
Richard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Where a recession will hurt the most

Richard Florida and James Milay explore the the effects if a recession hits Canada suggesting that the continuing shift in Canada’s economy from traditional blue-collar, working-class jobs to creative and service jobs will dampen the effects of job losses over all, but those in the working class will feel the pain much more.

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November 24, 2008
Creative ClassRegionsRichard Florida Columns

The Ronanoke Times : Trying to attract the ‘creative class’

A popular economic development guru believes that a region’s tolerance and diversity, its quality of life and its support for what he describes as the “creative class” pave the way for economic and population growth. According to Richard Florida: “The distinguishing characteristic of the creative class is that its members engage in work whose function is to ‘create meaningful new forms.’ “

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July 14, 2008
Richard Florida Columns

The days of urban sprawl are over …

… but not for the reasons you think. One of the few things increasing as fast as the price of oil lately has been the amount of commentary linking higher energy costs to the death of suburbia. Clearly, higher gas prices have affected where people want – or can afford – to live. Just as the demand for SUVs plummets and consumers have finally begun to see the point of hybrids, people are turning away from sprawling exurbs toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs.

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July 12, 2008
Richard Florida ColumnsWho's Your City News Articles

Boston Sunday Globe : A Singles Map of The United States of America

WHICH OF THESE two decisions do you think has a bigger impact on someone’s life: finding the right job, or finding the right significant other? No one’s going to argue with the notion that where you live affects your employment prospects. But the place you call home has a lot to do with your chances of finding the right partner as well. Having an enticing “mating market” matters as much or more than a vibrant labor market.

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April 9, 2008
Richard Florida Columns

The Globe and Mail : Time to break the town-and-gown barrier

The old model of a university pumping out research results and educated students, or even commercial innovations and start-ups, are no longer sufficient. Business and political leadership have taken technology seriously; now, they must do the same with talent and tolerance. The places that don’t will find that the discoveries and talent they produce will continue to migrate away.

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February 9, 2008