Brookings’ Robert Puentes has a new report on the four major forces affecting cities in the US and worldwide. It synthesizes the growing body of evidence on America’s spatial sorting and its effects on cities.

1. Resurgence of urban downtowns: notably Chicago, lower Manhattan, San Francisco and Seattle, driven by young couples and empty-nesters.

2. City growth is uneven:  While some cities are thriving, others are not. The ability to attract immigrants is a key differentiator here, especially among smaller cities.

3. Diversity:  While many urban downtowns are more diverse racially and ethnically than two decades ago, the locus of immigration is shifting to the suburbs. Nearly half (48 percent) of immigrants live in suburbs.

4. New geography of poverty: Thirty percent of the poor live in cities, compared to 31 percent in large metro suburbs, 20 percent in smaller towns and 19 percent in rural areas. Poverty rates have declined somewhat in central cities over the past decade, while increasing in suburbs, the trend for high-poverty rates is even more pronounced. Cities are losing their middle class and becoming more polarized economically.

Openness to immigration has long been the core competitive advantage of the United States. Now a new study provides new data on just how much immigrant entrepreneurs have added to America’s high-tech edge.  Sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association, it found that immigrants started 25 percent of the new venture-backed companies in
the U.S. over the past 15 years,  with a market capitalization
of more than $500 billion, and nearly half (47 percent) of venture-backed companies. Two-thirds of the immigrant founders surveyed said that
current U.S. immigration policy hinders the ability of future
foreign-born entrepreneurs to start American companies.

A story on CNN.com quoted Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, who came to
this country from Taiwan at the age of ten, as saying: "Yahoo would not be an American company today
if the United States had not welcomed my family and me almost 30 years
ago. We must do all that we can to
ensure that the door is open for the next generation of top
entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists from around the world to come
to the U.S. and thrive."

Read the full report here.

Lot’s of great stuff over at planetizen:

Gays and gentrification: "Once a force of gentrification themselves, gays and lesbians are
increasingly being displaced from once queer urban enclaves that have
become popular and upscale." The full article is here.

Artist displacement: "From Soho to the Lower East Side to Williamsburg, the story has been more or less the same – artists move in, eventually helping to cause the neighborhood to go through sweeping changes, which results in hardship for local families and businesses — as well as for the artists
themselves." More here.

And a lively debate over Joel Kotkin: "Pay no mind to Kotkin…All he is attempting to do is to bash liberal, socially-conscious planners, many of whom congregate on the coasts. By contrast, he is attempting to shine a supposed bright light on all the "hard-working" Americans who have fled those coastal urban environs for cheaper real estate in places like California’s Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley and the Rocky Mountain states. Keep in mind, those are the very same places which are experiencing the highest rates of bankruptcy and foreclosure given the current real estate decline. … Mr. Kotkin, in his defense of suburban sprawl and decentralization of urbanized areas, is serving as nothing more than an advocate of "white flight" to intensely conservative, and racially/ethnically homogeneous places such as Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Reno. And Kotkin intentionally does not acknowledge the political and economic forces at play which have historically segregated our cities and led to suburban flight in the first place, such as redlining, low interest FHA
mortgages, and the interstate highway system…. His is not an intelligent critique of urban spatial patterns in the United States any more than it is a reflection of his own intensely partisan and conservative think tank political ideology. " See the rest here.

Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution makes a compelling argument that new policies are needed globally and nationally for a spiky world centered around city-regions. "Before the international Urban Age conference in Berlin, Bruce Katz argued that if cities are the organizing units of the new global order, then a
broad range of policies and practices at the city, national, and supra-national levels need to be reevaluated and overhauled around new spatial realities and paradigms." A PDF of the entire speech is here.

I typically despise on-line quizzes but when I saw this one Virgina Postrel’s dynamist blog, I had to give it a try. It’s been more than 20 years since I lived in the New York-New Jersey area, certainly my accent had to change. Much to my chagrin, my results turned out like this:

Give it a try, here.

That’s the title of Virgina Postrel’s new Atlantic column
(link good for three days), which “defends the virtues of chain stores and
restaurants against critics who complain that ‘every place looks the
same.’”

Hmmmm….What do you think?

"Whether or not you subscribe to Richard Florida’s “creative class” theory, where the gays go eventually so do higher property values, less crime, better schools, ethnic diversity and growth.  …GayGhettos.com in partnership with GayRealEstate.com, the leading resource for gay-friendly real estate transactions, has announced its inaugural list of the nation’s top up-and-coming “gay ghettos.”   

Hell’s Kitchen, NYC

Near Northeast, Syracuse

New London, CT
South End, Boston
Canton/Highlandtown, Baltimore

New Hope, PA

Rehoboth Beach, DE

Shaw, Washington, DC
Washington Square West, Philadelphia

Midtown, Atlanta

NODA—North Davidson Street, Charlotte, NC

Oakcliff, Dallas
Uptown,Tampa Bay

Andersonville, Chicago
East Side, Madison, WI

Third Ward/South Second, Milwaukee

Wicker Park, Chicago

Hilltop, Tacoma, WA

Northeast Broadway,Portland, OR

Oakland, CA

Stapleton, Denver

The full list (hat tip: Jesse Elliott) is here.

What do you think–any others you’d add?

I was Google searching for something this morning and came across this interesting paper by Thomas Davenport. BTW, I strongly recommend checking out tomdavenport.com if you haven’t already.

Why Office Design Matters

by Thomas H. Davenport

One factor that affects knowledge worker performance that isn’t well
understood is the physical work environment—the offices, cubicles,
buildings, and mobile workplaces in which knowledge workers do their
jobs. There is a good deal said about this topic, but not much known
about it. Even more unfortunately, most decisions about the knowledge
work environment are made without seriously considering their
implications for performance.

In 2002 I and my then-colleagues at Accenture Bob Thomas and Sue Cantrell undertook a study of this issue.1
We interviewed forty-one companies that had some initiative under way
intended to improve the performance of high-end knowledge workers, or
those with particularly high levels of expertise and experience, who
were critical to the organization’s mission. We were interested in all
the factors that affected knowledge work performance, but the topic
most commonly addressed by the companies was the physical work
environment (the other common ones were information technology and
management). […]

The introduction of a new workspace was
most often the catalyst for a broad redesign of the knowledge work
environment in our study. Because it is so tangible, a new or
alternative office can be both the symbol and a key part of the reality
of new ways of working. For example, Pharmacia recently built a new
pharmaceutical research building outside of Chicago that was
intentionally designed to encourage more interaction among its R&D
staff. The new workspace was intended not only to attract top research
scientists to the company, but also to promote a more collaborative
culture. Particular designs can encourage certain types of behavior,
although they will never guarantee it. Of course, office space is also
expensive, and savings resulting from decreased or alternative space
often serves as a rationale for change.

Workspace design is
a somewhat faddish phenomenon, in part because no one knows exactly
what factors affect knowledge worker performance, and how those factors
interrelate. In the absence of knowledge, vendors of office
environments, architects, and developers are free to make all kinds of
claims about what works. But we do know some things from the limited
amount of research on this topic, and in the next section I’ll provide
a list of what is generally agreed to be true with regard to the
physical work environment. Then I’ll describe a framework that will
help managers think about the physical environments for knowledge work
in their own organizations.

What have your experiences been with your office space?

Or maybe the decade….. My ideas have always generated heated debate and criticism, but this takes the proverbial cake. From the folks over  at "Bitch/Lab.com" ("where lefties and feminists have dirty minds too"), we have ..."5 minutes Bitch Hate for Richard" … "piny is probably pretty irritated with my outburst about Richard Florida’s work on ‘the creative economy.’ Let me take a stab at an explanation…."  You have to read the whole thing here.

Over at Abstract Nonsense, Alon Levy has interesting posts on both. Check them out.