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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.