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.
