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Urban theorist Richard Florida is the author of the controversial book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which argues that creative people living in densely populated regions are the driving force for 21st century economic development.
More recently, he’s written about “How the Crash Will Reshape America” in the The Atlantic monthly. Florida says the U.S. economy will flourish if we allow it to “reset,” and encourage policies that would concentrate a highly mobile American population in compact cities.

With Detroit home prices at record lows, is this the end of a great American city or its best chance for a revival? How will the crash reshape America? That is the title question of Richard Florida’s piece in the Atlantic this month.

How the collapse of the Big Three automakers might actually turn out to be a good thing for Detroit.

New Normal: Is the American Dream dead?

Now more than ever, companies need unconventional thinking to work within the new rules set by the economic recession. Richard Florida has persuasively demonstrated how artists, scientists, engineers, writers, musicians and more can revitalize an entire city from urban decay. With today’s companies in a similar situation, what can members of the Creative Class do for businesses? Discussion of where new hires might come from and the impact they can make.

Michael Lind argues New York and London are in for the biggest fall… Not so fast.

The economic crisis appears to be causing a slight but noticeable shift from the suburbs to the cities, according to an analysis of recent Census data by Brookings demographer William Frey, reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Writing in The Atlantic, I argued that the economic crisis was reshaping America’s economic geography, with big city centers and mega-region hubs like New York City, talent-rich regions like greater D.C., and college towns weathering the storm relatively well, while Rustbelt cities and shallow-rooted Sunbelt economies being much harder hit.

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.

The concentration of bohemians and gays consistently have a staggering impact on housing values.