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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.

Richard Florida has extended his series that began with publication of “The Rise of the Creative Class” in 2002. Pittsburgh is far from unfamiliar with the author. Some may be shocked to realize it has been 12 years since the former Carnegie Mellon University professor departed. He is currently based at the University of Toronto. He has repeatedly referenced his home for two decades, and Pittsburgh continues to impact Mr. Florida’s views on all things city.

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.

The reality is that incentives play little if any role in companies’ location decisions, which are based on more fundamental factors like labor costs, the quality of the workforce, proximity to markets and access to suppliers.

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.

Richard Florida gives the commencement speech at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.

The Globe and Mail asks Richard Florida to pinpoint the most crucial principles for building a better city.

Florida: With 8 million New Yorkers increasingly divided between haves and have-nots, the next mayor must ward off destructive class warfare.

As high-paying manufacturing work has declined over the past couple of decades, America’s economy has literally split in two. The large and rapidly growing mass of low-wage, low-skill service jobs in fields like food preparation, retail sales and personal care are much the same across the country and these workers have become largely stuck in place.

Richard Florida calls Pittsburgh his “base case” for the transition of a formerly industrial city to the creative economy.