Last week, the San Jose City Council voted to start negotiations with Google to sell the company 23 acres of city owned land near the Diridon Caltrain Station. The purchase is part of Google’s plan to build a massive transit oriented village that would include six to eight million square feet of office and retail space and bring up to 20,000 Google employees to the city. Community activists are concerned about pressures the development may exert on wages and housing prices and the overall impact it may have on San Jose’s culture. In this hour, we’ll learn about Google’s possible San Jose campus and we want to hear from you — if your town is home to a large company — what are the benefits and drawbacks?
What policy priorities are needed for global cities to drive more sustainable and inclusive prosperity? How does today’s technology revolution affect how cities build a strong, enduring, middle class? How are cities providing access to the skills and training needed for city youth to fill the jobs of tomorrow? Can global cities grow a thriving creative class without a new urban crisis perpetuating small areas of affluence aside much larger areas of disadvantage?
When Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines told an audience in London she was “ashamed” that President Bush came from Texas, she had no reason to think her words would cause country music stations in parts of the United States to boycott the trio’s latest album and their best-selling hit single, “Travelin’ Soldier.”
Richard Florida became famous among people who think about cities 15 years ago with “The Rise of the Creative Class.” He predicted that postindustrial cities would succeed by focusing on the three Ts: technology, talent and tolerance. People in the “creative class” benefit from density, he said, and would move to places where laws are kind to tech entrepreneurs, where museums provide an evening out and where gay people are comfortable. Indeed, New York recovered its private-sector jobs nearly four years faster than the nation after the Great Recession.
The unaffordable urban paradise. Richard Florida says that startups are now tearing cities apart.
On Monday, November 7, 2016, I made what I thought were the final edits to the manuscript of my latest book, The New Urban Crisis, and sent it off to my publisher. The next day, my wife and I invited our American friends to come to our house in Toronto to celebrate what we were all but certain would be Hillary Clinton’s election. We pulled out all the stops. We hung up red, white and blue bunting, and dressed our baby and our puppy to match. My wife’s sisters supplied us with life-sized cutouts of Clinton and Donald Trump, which they had literally “muled” over the border from the Detroit suburbs. At 6 p.m., when the polls began to close, we turned on the TV to watch the early returns. By 8:30, the party had come to a crashing stop. I spent the rest of the night glued to Twitter; I hardly even noticed when the last of our guests departed.
Richard Florida, urban studies professor at the University of Toronto and author of “The New Urban Crisis” joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle to discuss how cities are increasing inequality and how pockets of concentrated wealth and poverty are squeezing out the middle class.
Tech startups helped turn a handful of metro areas into megastars. Now they’re tearing those cities apart.
Observations by Andrew M Manshel about what makes great Downtowns and Public Spaces.The website of PLACE MASTER PROJECTS providing practical advisory services for the implementation of downtown revitalization and the operation of public spaces.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV Canada’s Amanda Lang, author and professor Richard Florida speaks about the evolution of the urban revival and the super crisis of success that’s coming to Canada with Donald Trump as President of the U.S. (Source: Bloomberg)
University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida spoke with USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee’s David Plazas and Lipscomb University’s Kristine LaLonde about his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” We explored whether Nashville is in an urban crisis and what to do about it.
The Service Class, not the Working Class, is the key to the Democrats’ future. Members of the blue-collar Working Class are largely white men, working in declining industries like manufacturing, as well as construction, transportation, and other manual trades. Members of the Service Class work in rapidly growing industries like food service, clerical and office work, retail stores, hospitality, personal assistance, and the caring industries. The Service Class has more than double the members of the Working Class – 65 million versus 30 million members, and is made up disproportionately of women and members of ethnic and racial minorities.
This is an addendum to a previously published broadcast recorded on May 19, 2017. I explored with University of Toronto Professor and Richard Florida some of his proposed solutions he outlines in his latest book “The New Urban Crisis.” These include how to transform low wage service work into middle-class family-supporting work and how to update the tax code to make it less regressive and more fair. Dr. Florida also shared his blunt observations on how to empower local communities and address the divide in America between urban, rural and suburban communities.
Every time I have visited London over the past several years, I invariably hear the same story from my taxi driver. As we drive past Hyde Park on the way to or from the airport, he will say, “You see that building?” nodding towards a modern glass tower next to the Mandarin Oriental hotel. “Some of the apartments cost £50 million or more. And no one lives there—it’s always dark.”
Richard Florida became synonymous with urbanism a decade-and-a-half ago when he wrote a largely upbeat book, “Rise of the Creative Class,” about the renaissance taking place in major cities across the globe.
In his latest literary work, Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a global research professor at New York University, has taken a more sobering look at some of the challenges facing urbanism.
The US City of developer Richard Florida woke fifteen years ago cities around the world to detect the “creative class” in terms of the opportunities provided by economic success. In his latest work pessimistic Florida to declare the message of the new urban crisis that concerns the inner urban segregation. An interesting question is which indicators this crisis can be accessed and find solutions.
On a recent Saturday morning 30 Nashville residents spent two hours participating in a book discussion on how to solve the city’s growth challenges.
There is no pleasing some people. During the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthy fled the west’s big cities to escape crime and urban blight. In the US it was known as “white flight”. Cities such as New York and London were in headlong fiscal decline.
EDENS partnered with the Urban Land Institute, the Economic Innovation Group and CityLab to bring together nearly four hundred D.C. thought leaders and community advocates. “Discussing inclusive prosperity in an open forum helps us come together and appreciate our communities’ rich diversity,” EDENS CEO Jodie W. McLean said. “EDENS’ purpose has always been about enriching community, and engaging with community leaders, urbanists, neighborhood activists and businesses. It is essential in DC and throughout the country that we all work together to create opportunities for all.”
Dr. Richard Florida, author of ”The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It”, and University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto joined the program to discuss the correlation between gentrification and health inequities.
Fri, Jun 2: Toronto continues to grow as a city, but our middle class is shrinking. How do we fix big city problems? Farah Nasser caught up with Richard Florida, one of the world’s foremost experts in urban livability.
In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.
Governments around the world are trying to create business clusters to grow their economies.
We all know about Silicon Valley, Hollywood and even the Barossa Valley, but there are lesser known hubs as well, such as Schwenningen on the edge of the Black Forest that produces a huge percentage of the world’s surgical instruments.
Alison speaks to urban theorist and author Richard Florida about importance of cities globally and the importance of dealing with deepening inequalities within them.
Rodrigo Tavares, author of “Paradiplomacy – Cities and States as Global Players”, speaks about the role cities and other sub-national governments can play in the area of foreign affairs.
In 2002, Florida’s best-selling book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” focused on a demographic shift happening around the world — an urban revival sparked by young, creative, tech-savvy professionals. Now, 15 years later, Florida has written a far more sobering book, “The New Urban Crisis.” It explores a darker side of the urban renaissance, something he calls “winner-take-all urbanism.” Florida sees deepening inequality in our cities, growing segregation and poverty, and the disappearance of the middle class. Florida will discuss his new book, the dimensions of the challenge facing not only cities but suburbs, and what can be done about it.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”—this is a quote that appears before the introduction section of Richard Florida’s new book. Florida is concerned that cities are failing from been inclusive. The benefits of cities are not reaching everyone.
Richard Florida may be the most widely read author on the subject of cities these days, and probably has been since the turn of the millennium. He first became known for cheerleading the idea that if cities attracted what he called “the creative class” — professionals in the arts, in the media, in tech — they would prosper. And so they did — with a vengeance.