In keeping with the spirit of this holiday weekend, here’s a fun list of how Canada’s metros stack up on our Trick-or-Treater Index. While of course all the metros are likely to have great neighborhoods for trick-or-treating, the original index we did for the United States generated so much interest that my MPI colleagues and I decided to do a similar one for Canada.
It’s based on five key criteria, all similar to the ones we used for the U.S. index.
This week, Calgary elected a new mayor. His name is Naheed Nenshi. I met him almost a decade ago when he was a participant in a forum on building the creative economy I helped catalyze with CEOs for Cities, Carol Coletta. Here’s one of his first interviews since being elected.
Here’s his recent TEDxCalgary talk:
Calgary has become the first major city in North America with more than one million people to elect a Muslim mayor. A reader writes:
I was reading the Toronto Star this morning about how Calgary elected a young intellectual Muslim, the author of the article said that Calgary has the intelligence and the courage. Why is it that the most multicultural city in Canada (or the world) who you identified as part of a megacity, can’t produce fresh blood, who truly cares about revitalization, about stopping urban sprawl and improving public transportation, like the newly elected mayor of Alberta? I live in London, Ontario, and the choices here are even more dismal.
That’s the question all of us in Toronto and in major cities across North America should be asking.
This video by CNN’s Richard Quest looks at the ongoing transformation and remaking of L.A. as a post-sprawl mega-city (via Planetizen). He profiles the revitalization of downtown and efforts to increase density and create a more livable metropolis.
Check out this video (via Urbanophile) on New York City’s wide-ranging efforts to improve quality of place. It’s shifting from a car city to a “city for people” – expanding bike lanes into a networked cycling infrastructure and upgrading its bus system. The environment benefits, it’s easier to get around, streets are safer, and neighborhoods are quieter - all of which make the city a more desirable place to live, work, and play.
This is the longer, unedited version of my column in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope and cost than the revitalization of our inner cities.
What a dramatic shift. Just a couple of decades ago, the suburbs were the locus of the American Dream. More than their sprawling, large-lot homes and big wide lawns, their shopping malls, industrial parks, and office campuses accounted for a growing percentage of the nation’s economic output. A good many of them formed into Edge Cities—satellite centers where people could live, work, and shop without ever having to set foot in the center city.
With millions of homes underwater or in foreclosure, our suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible hits from the great recession. In a stunning reversal, big cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle have become talent magnets at the same time, drawing ambitious people, empty-nesters, young-families, and even a growing number of offices back to their downtown cores. As inner city neighborhoods are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities, according to a Brookings study. And suburban poverty populations are growing at five times the rate of those in cities.
Everyone interested in urban and regional economic development must check out this new MPI study, ”Knowledge in Cities.” Using data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network database – O*NET – it identifies 11 key types of regions by the knowledge, skill, and work they do. Here are some examples of the regional types it defines.
The study also finds that three types of regions – Engineering, Enterprising, and Building Regions – have higher levels of productivity and earnings per capita, while Teaching, Understanding, Working, and Comforting Regions have lower levels of economic development.
Video of Richard Florida’s talk at yesterday’s The Economist Ideas Economy event in NYC.
My research team at the Martin Prosperity Institute just released a new report on Toronto in the Creative Age. Several things really stand out.
First, Toronto is still coming into its own as a major North American metro. U.S. metros in the Northeast and Midwest had significant expansion a whole lot earlier, but Toronto has seen substantial growth since the 1950s, sort of like a Sunbelt metro. Since then, it has transformed from a sleepy metro into a large and rapidly growing one, fueled by massive immigration and growing across almost every knowledge and creative industry.
On Sunday, August 29, Richard Florida was interviewed on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. They discussed The Great Reset and how cities will change as Americans adapt to a world after the recession. Click the image below to watch the interview.
