Creative Class

A new report from our Martin Prosperity Institute team charts the geography of class in Toronto. The map below shows the deep underlying economic – class - divisions of the city and can also help us understand the current polarized mayor’s race.

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The Philips Livable Cities Award is now accepting entries!

This award is a global initiative designed to encourage individuals, businesses, and community and non-governmental groups to develop practical, achievable ideas for improving the health and well-being of people living in cities – ideas which can then be translated into reality.

The award is being overseen by a supervisory panel of independent experts in three award categories: Well-Being Outdoors; Independent Living; and Healthy Lifestyle at Work and Home. The overall winning idea from any of these three categories and an idea from each of the two remaining categories will receive grants.

Submission deadline is October 28, 2010. Further information on the award criteria and categories plus an entry form can be found here.

Philips have also established a new featured group on LinkedIn – called “Creating Healthy, Livable Cities” – to facilitate an issues-driven discussion among people interested in making cities more healthy and livable places. Join the discussion here.

The most powerful factor in economic growth is human capital – the level and concentration of skilled, energetic, and productive people. Charting the human capital levels of nations and regions is all the rage today, but Adam Smith long ago argued that human capital constitutes a critical fourth factor of production alongside land, labor, and capital.  Human capital is the key factor in both national and regional growth, according to careful empirical studies.

Most regional economic analyses measure human capital across metropolitan regions. But metro regions – which are made up of central cities and their surrounding suburbs – come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Some have densely concentrated central cities, like Manhattan in the greater New York region; others are more continuously sprawling like Los Angeles. A while back, a reporter called to ask me about the role of human capital in Milwaukee. He wanted to know whether it made any difference that human capital levels were low in the central city compared to the region as a whole. I responded that I thought it did. Following Jane Jacobs, my hunch was that regions with more concentrated human capital would have some advantage over others where the distribution was flatter or more similar across the metro. When his article came out, a number of prominent economists more or less said the same thing. But we all added that we couldn’t be sure; most studies focus on human capital at the metro level and few, if any, have looked at the distribution of human capital within metros – that is, between the urban center and its suburbs.

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America is awash in generica – from generic stores and generic malls to generic food and chain-restaurants. Anthony Bourdain, the culinary adventurer of No Reservations searches the globe for the authentic, the unique, the real. America’s older industrial cities have one great advantage on their side, he says – their urban authenticity.

“What went wrong here?” is an unpopular question with the type of city fathers and civic boosters for whom convention centers and pedestrian malls are the answers to all society’s ills but Harvey [Pekar] captured and chronicled every day what was–and will always be–beautiful about Cleveland: the still majestic gorgeousness of what once was–the uniquely quirky charm of what remains, the delightfully offbeat attitude of those who struggle to go on in a city they love and would never dream of leaving … A place so incongruously and uniquely…seductive that I often fantasize about making my home there. Though I’ve made television all over the world, often in faraway and “exotic” places, it’s the Cleveland episode that is my favorite–and one about which I am most proud …

As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they can–and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to disappoint them–go on, try as best as possible to do right by the people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be “good” people.

Long-established trends in the growth and decline of  America’s cities appear to be shifting according to new Census data released Tuesday. The data cover population trends for cities – that is, incorporated areas – from 2000 to 2009, and also for the immediate post-economic crisis period spanning July 2008 to July 2009.

Some major cities, which had long seen population decline, registered population gains. Chicago, for example, saw its population increase by 0.8 percent, its fastest pace of the decade, while New York expanded 0.5 percent, continuing gains in recent years. Other cities, notably many Sunbelt cities that had long seen rapid growth, saw their gains slow considerably for the first time in modern memory.

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Tyler Cowen asks: “Which are the least bohemian cities?”

“In the United States, I would name San Antonio as the most non-bohemian major city, or maybe El Paso, with Atlanta as a runner-up. Might there be somewhere very non-Bohemian in northern Florida? Does Richard Florida have an index for this somewhere?”

As luck would have it, I do – at least for the United States and Canada that is.

We keep an updated Bohemian Index handy here at the Martin Prosperity Institute. The index charts the concentration of working artists, musicians, writers, designers, and entertainers across metropolitan areas. We measure it as a location quotient, which basically compares regional employment to the national norm, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau and StatsCan. The table below shows the 10 most and 10 least bohemian large metros – those with more than one million people – in the U.S and Canada.

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The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

The eighth and final installment in The Florida Report is titled “The Burden of Home Ownership.” Richard argues that Americans need to get over their obsession with home ownership.

To view the other videos in this series, please click here.

The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

The seventh installment in The Florida Report is titled “Why Detroit Needs to Go Back to Its Roots.” Richard argues that planned shrinkage isn’t the best way to save Motown.

To view the other videos in this series, please click here.

Here’s an update of our Top 25 Cities for College Graduates which ran earlier this week at The Daily Beast. Since my MPI team did the analysis for all 350-plus U.S. metros, we decided to break out the rankings by metro size. Below you’ll find the top 25 rankings for metros in three size groups – large metros (1 million and above), medium-size metros (between 250,000 and 1 million people), and small metros (those with under 250,000 people).

As we’ve said before, this is a data-driven analysis and small shifts in the weighting can make a significant difference in the final rankings. So treat these rankings as a broad guide to interesting places and try not get too bogged down by the specific ranks.

And do have a look at our Place-Finder tool to help find the place that’s best for you. Enjoy!

Large Metros (over 1 million people)

1. Austin-Round Rock, TX

2. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV

3. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH

4. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA

5. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA

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The Florida Report is an eight-part video series from The Atlantic featuring Richard Florida.

The sixth installment in The Florida Report is titled “Will Phoenix Rise from the Flames?” Richard reflects on whether or not the Sunbelt can make a comeback.