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Listing all articles in the Opinion Editorials category
New York Daily News : Our real national divide: Local America vs. National America
It goes without saying: Ours is a divided nation. But the real boundary doesn’t run between Blue or Red states, liberal and conservative ideologies, or urban versus rural regions. No, the real divide in America is one of scale. Richard Florida and Mick Cornett belong to different political parties, and differ sharply on a number of policy views. But they share a core belief that our country’s future lies in Local America.
The Globe and Mail : Solving Canada’s startup dilemma
Canada, we increasingly hear, is becoming a global leader in high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Report after report has ranked Toronto, Waterloo and Vancouver among the world’s most up-and-coming tech hubs. Toronto placed fourth in a ranking of North American tech talent this past summer, behind only the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, and in 2017 its metro area added more tech jobs than those other three city-regions combined.
El Pais : ¿Puede ser la creatividad la base de la prosperidad en América Latina?
Can creativity be the basis of prosperity in Latin America? Richard Florida calls for a bet on Latin ingenuity to fight against inequality in the region.
Wall Street Journal : Can the U.S. Keep Its High-Tech Edge?
While recent headlines have blared about the Trump administration’s multi-front trade war with Canadian dairy farmers, Chinese manufacturers and the European Union’s steel, aluminum and automotive industries, a much larger economic threat has gone virtually unnoticed. The high-tech startups that have provided the U.S. with a powerful edge in fields such as computers, software, mobile devices, biotech, the internet and an array of digital platforms now face rapidly increasing pressures from foreign competition. This looming crisis of American innovation could undermine the nation’s long-running global advantage in bringing to market the next new technology, the next new industry, the next big thing. It may well be the gravest challenge yet to America’s century-plus hold on global economic hegemony.
The Globe and Mail : How Toronto can curb gun violence
A shadow hangs over Toronto after Sunday’s shooting on the Danforth. The recent killing spree follows on the heels of a vehicle attack on Yonge Street this spring and a raft of shootings, including one with small children in the crossfire last month. The city’s international reputation as a multicultural success story seems at risk, as Torontonians fear they are succumbing to the twin threats of gun violence and terrorism vexing other global cities.
Medium : Toronto’s Deadly Car Crisis
Torontonians like to sound off on Americans’ inability to deal with guns and gun deaths. But Toronto’ s inability to deal with the car creates its own killing fields. Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities.
The Globe and Mail : The economic price of electing Doug Ford
Ontario’s recent economic success is the product of longer-run investments in universities, arts and culture; advanced research in key fields like artificial intelligence; openness to immigrants; and a growing commitment to place-making and city-building. This economic advantage will be significantly diminished if Doug Ford becomes premier of Ontario. Comparisons are already being made between Mr. Ford and Mr. Trump, as well as between Mr. Trump and Mr. Ford’s late younger brother, Rob, the original North American populist. All three positioned themselves as advocates for the “little guy,” slashing taxes and cutting back government. Like Mr. Trump, Doug Ford has even hired actors for campaign events.
The Toronto Star : How airports drive economic growth
Airports have a stronger connection to regional growth than high-tech industry and about the same impact as high-skill talent, writes Richard Florida. “The key lies in the way that global hub airports connect global cities.”
Toronto Star : Canada should be winning even more Olympic gold
With the help of his colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, Patrick Adler and Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida ranked Canada’s, and each nation’s Olympic medal performance relative to their population, size of their economy and number of athletes on their Olympic teams. So, how does Canada’s performance measure up on metrics like these?
Boston Review : Cities on a Hill
Runaway gentrification. Concentrated poverty. Racial and economic segregation. Cities in the United States today are struggling with some of their biggest challenges since the darkest days of the 1960s and 1970s, when “white flight,” deindustrialization, and crime were at their peaks. Together, these concerns add up to what I have dubbed the New Urban Crisis.
The Wall Street Journal : Mayors, Say No to Amazon
City leaders should pledge to compete on merits, not incentives.
CNN : The disturbing part about Amazon's HQ2 competition
Amazon's short list of contenders for its much ballyhooed HQ2 reads like a who's who of the most economically vibrant and dynamic cities in North America. There's one part of Amazon's HQ2 competition that is deeply disturbing -- pitting city against city in a wasteful and economically unproductive bidding war for tax and other incentives. As one of the world's most valuable companies, Amazon does not need -- and should not be going after -- taxpayer dollars that could be better used on schools, parks, transit, housing or other much needed public goods.
The Wall Street Journal : A Retrofit for America's Dying Malls
Communities are finding innovative ways to transform their abandoned malls and big-box stores into more useful spaces.
The Financial Times : The downside of the race to be Amazon’s second home
The bids to host Amazon’s much ballyhooed second headquarters are in from dozens of cities across the US and Canada. With its promise of 50,000-plus jobs and billions in investment, it has been hailed as one of the biggest urban development opportunities in recent memory. However, things are not working out exactly as the ecommerce group may have hoped. Resentment among city leaders is growing at what looks like a big, well-capitalised company taking advantage of cities and their taxpayers.
Nature : Comment: Where the streets are paved with ideas
Most of the world's research and entrepreneurship is concentrated in a few megacities.Innovation is geographically uneven. The world's 40 richest mega-regions — expansive conurbations such as the Boston–New York–Washington DC corridor, Greater London, or the passage that runs from Shanghai to Beijing — account for more than 85% of the world's patents, and 83% of the most-cited scientists. And yet, only 18% of the world's population lives in them.
The Globe and Mail : The Trump effect: It’s Canada’s moment to win the global race for talent
Google's Sidewalk Labs subsidiary has apparently chosen the Toronto waterfront as the place it will create a veritable city of the future, developing and prototyping new technology-enabled ways of working, living and getting around. And Toronto is placed at or near the top of many short lists for Amazon's new second headquarters, over which more than 50 communities across North America are competing.Why have Toronto, and Canada more broadly, suddenly become so attractive to major U.S. tech companies? The election of Donald Trump may be the veritable tipping point, but Canada's ability to compete for top global talent has been growing for a while.
Politico : Trump Is Making Canada Great Again
While America closes its borders, its northern neighbor is poaching some of the best tech talent in the world.
Crains New York Business : How to grow New York and other cities—while reducing inequality
As the world’s most economically powerful financial center and a budding hub for high-tech industry, New York City has grown increasingly segregated and unequal—particularly in areas surrounding new development. Now more than ever, the city has become a contested ground for space, spurring a local backlash among community members who can no longer afford to live where they are. With the current presidential administration and Republican majority on Capitol Hill unlikely to lend their support, New York must now turn to its local leaders, communities, and anchor institutions—universities, medical centers, real estate developers and large corporations—to mitigate this new urban crisis.
Toronto Star : Toronto’s car-first policies create a war on the people
Toronto is a great city with many amazing things going for it. It’s time we make our streets safer for our people, especially the elderly and children who are at the highest risk.
Toronto Star: Building six million good jobs in Canada
Today, more than six million Canadians — 40 per cent of Canada’s workers — toil in low-paying routine service jobs, preparing and serving our food, waiting on us in stores and retail shops, doing office work, and providing a wide range of personal and health care service, from cutting our hair and giving us massages, to taking care of our kids and aging parents.
Last June, Aetna announced that it was moving its headquarters from Hartford, Conn., where it has been located since 1853, to the Meatpacking District in New York City. New York, Aetna’s CEO Mark Bertolini told The New York Times, offers “the ecosystem of having people in the knowledge economy, working in a town they want to be living in, and we want to attract those folks, and we want to have them on our team. It’s very hard to recruit people like that to Hartford.”
Houston Chronical: Florida, Rose: Post-Harvey, the city must reset its development trajectory
There is little doubt that the Greater Houston area will rebound and rebuild after Harvey. This has long been one of the world's fastest-growing and most vibrant regions, with a population fast approaching 7 million and projected to pass 11 million by 2050. With an economic output of nearly $500 billion, Houston's economy would place it among the 25 wealthiest nations in the world. It's a center of high-tech energy production and medical research.
The New York Times : The Urban Revival Is Over
For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out.
Harvard Business Review: What Inclusive Urban Development Can Look Like
Inclusive prosperity is the idea that the opportunity and benefits of economic growth should be widely shared by all segments of society. Most cities fall well short of that ideal. While urban areas continue to afford new opportunities to employees and businesses from all walks of life, they are increasingly split between wealthy, high-skill knowledge workers and low-paid service workers.
Does the looming special counsel investigation into potential collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and the Kremlin presage a less-than-four-year incumbency for this President? One can always hope. Certainly, resignation, impeachment or a 25th Amendment solution seem much more likely today than they did a year ago, when the very idea of a Trump presidency strained credulity.
Politico: A Declaration of Urban Independence
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.
Evonomics: Richard Florida: It’s Not (Just) the Working Class. It’s the Service Class.
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.
Wired: Tech Made Cities Too Expensive. Here’s How to Fix It
IN 2013 PROTESTS broke out in Oakland, California, directed against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from pricey homes in the city’s gentrifying areas to jobs in Silicon Valley. “You live your comfortable lives,” read a flyer that protesters handed out to passengers, “surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.”
The Globe and Mail: Lost in housing hysteria, middle-class neighbourhoods have gone extinct
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. The very same forces that power the growth of our great cities have generated a crisis of gentrification, rising inequality and increasingly unaffordable urban housing.
The Week: 6 books for understanding how cities work
Urbanist Richard Florida is the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, the book that taught cities to focus on attracting people in the creative professions. Below, he shares his favorite books on urban capitalism, innovation, and inequality:
Los Angeles Times: L.A. and New York are expensive, but they're not about to become creative deserts
“If the 1 percent stifles New York’s creative talent, I’m out of here,” musician David Byrne threatened several years ago. New York City’s incredible economic success, he wrote, would be its cultural undoing. “Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich,” he continued. “Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.”
The Atlantic: Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer
They are not just the places where the most ambitious and talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be.
The Daily Beast: To Reunite America, Liberate Cities to Govern Themselves [creativeclass.com]
Even setting the dysfunction of our national government, the fact is that no top-down, one-size-fits-all set of policies can address the very different conditions that prevail among communities.
Toronto Star: Combating the winner-take-all ‘New Urban Crisis’
Richard Florida outlines the steps that must be taken to if Toronto and other superstar cities are to make cities more livable and equitable for the middle and lower classes.
Bloomberg: Urban Inequality Is a Crisis, But Don't Blame Techies for It
As technology companies and the techies who work for them have headed to cities, they have increasingly been blamed for the deepening problems of housing affordability and urban inequality.
NY Daily News: The new urban crisis is upon us: Success squeezing out the middle class
I was born in Newark in 1957, and witnessed the riots that tipped that city into its long-running decline. As a college student in the 1970s, when New York City was still teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, I observed the first tender shoots of revival that were visible in SoHo, Tribeca and other parts of lower Manhattan, as artists began to colonize its abandoned industrial spaces.
OurWindsor.ca : Richard Florida & Greg Spencer: The future of the knowledge economy is local
The best growth strategy for Ontario is to deepen the innovation and knowledge component of all industries, not just newer ones.
Toronto Star : What kind of city produces Olympians?
Toronto may be the nation’s largest metro and the main driver of its economy, but it barely punches its own weight when it comes to the members of Canada’s Olympic team. The real standouts of this Olympic Games are smaller metros like Kingston, London, Windsor, and Guelph, which are home to far greater concentrations of Olympians than one might expect given their size.
Miami Herald : Initiative aims to make Greater Miami an even greater city
Opinion Editorial by FIU President Mark Rosenberg and CCG Founder, Richard Florida. To get a clearer understanding of the Miami region’s opportunities and challenges, Florida International University and the Creative Class Group launched the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative. The first major report of that project, released today, enumerates the region’s challenges and opportunities, while identifying several key areas that will help ensure a broader shared prosperity for Greater Miami.
The Boston Globe : Congress could ensure tax money is put to better use
Perhaps it’s finally time for Congress to step in and stop the incentive arms race among states by invoking its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In the meantime, GE could always do the right thing and give taxpayers back their money. For a company that wants to be seen as both cutting edge and a good corporate citizen, such a move would set an important precedent.
PENN Institute for Urban Research : Expert Voices 2016: Urban Policy and the Presidential Election
With all eyes focused on the presidential race, now is the time to discuss the great challenges that our nation faces. The candidates have a unique opportunity to address the issues that affect the lives of their fellow Americans, but what are those issues and how should they think about them? What major urban policy issues should the candidates address? They posed this question to our Penn IUR Faculty Fellows and Scholars.
The Globe and Mail : It’s time for a ‘ministry of cities’
To demonstrate its commitment to all these interwoven urban issues, it’s time for the government to create a new body – a “ministry of cities,” which would spearhead these interwoven initiatives while signalling to the world that this country is ready to lead the ongoing century of cities.
Crain's : The keys to keeping NYC competitive
The city's growth will require innovation, creativity and investment to be sustainable.
The Globe and Mail : Still lacking technology and talent, Canada’s tolerance offers creative edge
Canada ranks fourth in the world in a new ranking of the world’s most creative and economically competitive countries. The survey, put together by my research team at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, places Canada behind only first-place Australia, the United States and New Zealand. This is the third version of these rankings we’ve done, and Canada is up from its seventh-place finish in 2011.
The New York Times : Is Life Better in America’s Red States?
In this op-ed Richard Florida examines the significant economic division between conservative “red states” and liberal “blue states.”
The Dallas Morning News : Richard Florida and James Spaniolo: North Texas is stronger together
North Texas will be more competitive and its economic future stronger byworking together.The University of Texas at Arlington and the Creative Class Group have been leading aneffort involving regional stakeholders including major chambers of commerce; local elected officials; Vision North Texas; community and civic groups; and UTA faculty, staff and students to help to inform a broad conversation about the path toward a sustainable, shared prosperity.
A Search for Jobs in Some of the Wrong Places
By Richard Florida - Feb 2006
A Dire Global Imbalance in Creativity
By Richard Florida - July 2005
By Richard Florida and Jesse Elliott - June 2005
By Richard Florida, Philadelphia Inquirer - May 2005
Cities are not declining -- many are even coming back. The past decade has witnessed an unforeseen rebirth in urban America, according to the newly released figures from the 2000 Census.
By Richard Florida, Information Week - April 2001
E-Inclusion: It's Not A Choice
By Richard Florida, Information Week - March 2001
We Can Import the Irish Miracle
By Richard Florida, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - March 2001
Silver IT Lining In Dark Clouds
By Richard Florida, Information Week - Dec 2000
Technology, Talent, And Tolerance
By Richard Florida, Information Week - Nov 2000
Pittsburgh's Prosperity Depends on Diversity
By Richard Florida, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Oct 2000
Companies Must Fight The Backlash
By Richard Florida, Information Week - Sept 2000
Pittsburgh, Let's Wake Up and Play
By Richard Florida, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - June 2000
What Start Ups Don't Need Is Money
By Richard Florida, Inc. Magazine - April 1994
Universities Should Not Become Research Units of Corporations
By Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, Chronicle of Higher Education - July 1991
Harvard Business Review: Are the Super-Rich Really Ruining the World’s Great Cities?
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.”