Richard Florida, author of The Rise of The Creative Class, and most recently, Who’s Your City?, wrote an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly on How the Crash Will Reshape America.
Florida argues that the the economic downturn has and will damage some places more than others. The economic landscape of the U.S. will look different. As a result, the physical landscape of the U.S. may change, with major impacts on suburbs and mega-cities. The Atlantic asks: “Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?”
Florida writes the downturn may end up being positive for New York City by helping to bring back greater professional diversity to the city: “The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant. In this sense, the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city’s economy in some unhealthy ways.”
Florida also argues that cities that succesfully build ‘talent-clusters’ may weather the downturn better: “Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,” according to a pioneering theory of urban evolution developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute. The rate at which living things convert food into energy—their metabolic rate—tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.”
Lastly, Florida says suburbanization is intimately tied to the housing bubble and economic crisis, and a new ‘spatial model’ is needed to ensure future growth: “If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.”
Also, see Florida’s interactive map plotting patents per capita in the U.S.
Update: With a different perspective on infrastructure, Metropolis magazine recently ran a piece on Timo Stammberger’s photos of subway infrastructure from around the world, seen in various states of decay and renewal. The photos demonstrate that “infrastructure is being revealed, in the sense that it’s attracting more attention than it has in decades. But that attention is divided between repair and renewal, despair and hope.”
