Economy

With its March 2009 issue, The Atlantic is targeting metro areas with separate covers specifically tailored to their newsstands. The issue features a cover story by urban studies Richard Florida, best known for his work about the “creative class.” The story is titled, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” and while it points to declines in the suburbs and the Sun Belt, it also reports good news about certain metro areas.

Might the crisis roiling the economy reshape the American landscape? Is it a turning point in the country’s social geography? As the economy mends and growth begins anew, what cities or regions will be best-suited to take advantage of the change? Urban theorist Richard Florida has some interesting thoughts on those questions in a major piece in The Atlantic, and his answers are encouraging for Portland and the Northwest.

In Richard Florida’s recent The Atlantic essay, he proposes that what is bad for financial services firms may be good for artists and psychiatrists.

Richard Florida’s piece in The Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America” suggests that the current economic crisis has the potential to remake the country’s economic geography in the same way that the crash of 1873 and the Great Depression did.

Richard Florida writes a cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic called, “How the Crash Will Reshape America.” His theory is that the recession will accelerate the rise and fall of specific places within the United States, speeding up the fates of some cities and reversing the fortunes of others. Interestingly, he lumps Portland and Seattle with the cities that will fare better than most.

Florida, who is a scholar and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has become semi-famous in recent years for arguing that the U.S. economy is now based on the development and exchange of ideas, and that the best places for that to happen are those that attract and coddle creative, educated people. Places, in other words, like New York.
Florida’s Atlantic piece devotes special attention to New York.

The Plank’s take on Richard Florida’s article, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” in the Atlantic Monthly.

Excerpts from Richard Florida’s article in The Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America”.

Richard Florida’s cover story in the Atlantic is on how the recession will change the geography of America. The winners? “Mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings like the Boston–New York–Washington Corridor”.