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16 Oct 09

The Rise of the Mega-Region - WSJ.com

QUOTE
"While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation."
UNQUOTE
Interesting idea: that mega-regions are actually more significant as drivers than nation-states when discussing economic competitiveness.

online.wsj.com/...SB120796112300309601.html - Preview

richard_florida mega_regions cities nation_states economies

04 Mar 09

Economic Impact: The City as a Social Portfolio « The Captured Perspective

Great 'Captured Perspective' blog post by Peter Boumgarden, who comments on Richard Florida's Atlantic Monthly piece:
QUOTE
"...cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
UNQUOTE

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captured_perspective peter_boumgarden richard_florida social_capital cities diversity economics

What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.

What you have in a city like Detroit (or unfortunately, many mid-major Midwestern cities, St. Louis included) is a poor social portfolio- resulting from a significant lack of industry diversity, and a lack of concentrated interaction among any diversity. Taken together, these cities are both at higher risk of collapse given the right conditions, and a lower ‘risk’ of growth and innovation.
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- What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
  
  What you have in a city like Detroit (or unfortunately, many mid-major Midwestern cities, St. Louis included) is a poor social portfolio- resulting from a significant lack of industry diversity, and a lack of concentrated interaction among any diversity. Taken together, these cities are both at higher risk of collapse given the right conditions, and a lower ‘risk’ of growth and innovation.

26 Feb 09

Toward a New Housing System - Creative Class » Blog Archive »

QUOTE:
The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live - in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.
UNQUOTE

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housing mortgage_crisis richard_florida economy spatial_fix

The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live - in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.

24 Feb 09

The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida

Richard Florida on how the financial crash will affect specific geographical locales and cities in the US / in North America. On NYC, he notes that its diversified economy - even though it's home to Wall Street, which may well be moribund if not dead already - will see the city through the worst of it.

www.theatlantic.com/...meltdown-geography - Preview

richard_florida economy economics cities

The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.
In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent. He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating.
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- In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn’t quite right, and doesn’t accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years.
  
  In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more.
- Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver
- The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.
- University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth
- Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.
- Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,” according to a pioneering theory of urban evolution developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the SantaFe Institute. The rate at which living things convert food into energy—their metabolic rate—tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve “super-linear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” Places like New York with finance and media, Los Angeles with film and music, and Silicon Valley with hightech are all examples of high-metabolism places.
- While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth.
- In November, nationwide unemployment in manufacturing and production occupations was already 9.4 percent. Compare that with the professional occupations, where it was just a little over 3 percent. According to an analysis done by Michael Mandel, the chief economist at BusinessWeek, jobs in the “tangible” sector—that is, production, construction, extraction, and transport—declined by nearly 1.8 million between December 2007 and November 2008, while those in the intangible sector—what I call the “creative class” of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals—increased by more than 500,000. Both sorts of jobs are regionally concentrated. Paul Krugman has noted that the worst of the crisis, so far at least, can be seen in a “Slump Belt,” heavy with manufacturing centers, running from the industrial Midwest down into the Carolinas. Large swaths of the Northeast, with its professional and creative centers, have been better insulated.
- Still, as its population density dips further, the city’s struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever-emptier landscape will only intensify.
  
  That’s the challenge that many Rust Belt cities share: managing population decline without becoming blighted. The task is doubly difficult because as the manufacturing industry has shrunk, the local high-end services—finance, law, consulting—that it once supported have diminished as well, absorbed by bigger regional hubs and globally connected cities. In Chicago, for instance, the country’s 50 biggest law firms grew by 2,130 lawyers from 1984 to 2006, according to William Henderson and Arthur Alderson of Indiana University. Throughout the rest of the Midwest, these firms added a total of just 169 attorneys. Jones Day, founded in 1893 and today one of the country’s largest law firms, no longer considers its Cleveland office “headquarters”—that’s in Washington, D.C.—but rather its “founding office.”
  
  Many second-tier midwestern cities have tried to reinvent themselves in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Pittsburgh, for instance, has sought to reimagine itself as a high-tech center, and has met with more success than just about anywhere else. Still, its population has declined from a high of almost 700,000 in the mid-20th century to roughly 300,000 today. There will be fewer manufacturing jobs on the other side of the crisis, and the U.S. economic landscape will be more uneven—“spikier”—as a result. Many of the old industrial centers will be further diminished, perhaps permanently so.
- But in the heady days of the housing bubble, some Sun Belt cities—Phoenix and Las Vegas are the best examples—developed economies centered largely on real estate and construction. With sunny weather and plenty of flat, empty land, they got caught in a classic boom cycle. Although these places drew tourists, retirees, and some industry—firms seeking bigger footprints at lower costs—much of the cities’ development came from, well, development itself. At a minimum, these places will take a long, long time to regain the ground they’ve recently lost in local wealth and housing values. It’s not unthinkable that some of them could be in for an extended period of further decline.
- To an uncommon degree, the economic boom in these cities was propelled by housing appreciation: as prices rose, more people moved in, seeking inexpensive lifestyles and the opportunity to get in on the real-estate market where it was rising, but still affordable. Local homeowners pumped more and more capital out of their houses as well, taking out home-equity loans and injecting money into the local economy in the form of home improvements and demand for retail goods and low-level services. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending continued, more people arrived. Yet the boom itself neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.
- From October 2007 through October 2008, the Phoenix area registered the largest decline in housing values in the country: 32.7 percent. (Las Vegas was just a whisker behind, at 31.7 percent. Housing in the New York region, by contrast, fell by just 7.5 percent over the same period.) Overstretched and overbuilt, the region is now experiencing a fiscal double whammy, as its many retirees—some 21 percent of its residents are older than 55—have seen their retirement savings decimated. Mortgages Limited, the state’s largest private commercial lender, filed for bankruptcy last summer. The city is running a $200 million budget deficit, which is only expected to grow. Last fall, the city government petitioned for federal funds to help it deal with the financial crisis. “We had a big bubble here, and it burst,” Anthony Sanders, a professor of economics and finance at ASU, told USA Today in December. “We’ve taken Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams and now it’s Field of Screams. If you build it, nobody comes.”
- Will people wash out of these places as fast as they washed in, leaving empty sprawl and all the ills that accompany it? Will these cities gradually attract more businesses and industries, allowing them to build more-diverse and more-resilient economies? Or will they subsist on tourism—which may be meager for quite some time—and on the Social Security checks of their retirees? No matter what, their character and atmosphere are likely to change radically.
- Every phase or epoch of capitalism has its own distinct geography, or what economic geographers call the “spatial fix” for the era. The physical character of the economy—the way land is used, the location of homes and businesses, the physical infrastructure that ties everything together—shapes consumption, production, and innovation. As the economy grows and evolves, so too must the landscape.
- Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.
- Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age—the geographic expression of mass production and the early credit economy.
- Demand for houses was symbiotic with demand for cars, and both were helped along by federal highway construction, among other infrastructure projects that subsidized a new suburban lifestyle and in turn fueled demand for all manner of household goods. More recently, innovations in finance like adjustable-rate mortgages and securitized subprime loans expanded homeownership further and kept demand high. By 2004, a record 69.2 percent of American families owned their home.
- The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
- The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy.
- The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.
- in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.
- we need to encourage growth in the regions and cities that are best positioned to compete in the coming decades: the great mega-regions that already power the economy, and the smaller, talent-attracting innovation centers inside them—places like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Austin, and the North Carolina Research Triangle.
- we need to make elite cities and key mega-regions more attractive and affordable for all of America’s classes, not just the upper crust. High housing costs in these cities and in the more convenient suburbs around them, along with congested sprawl farther afield, have conspired to drive lower-income Americans away from these places over the past 30 years. This is profoundly unhealthy for our society.
- If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.
- Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.

23 Jan 09

"Where Do Cities Come From?" (Richard Florida - Creative Class)

Florida points to an article that smacks down cities (it claims that historically they've been "death traps") and asks for reader feedback. I left a long comment.

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cities richard_florida industrial_revolution urbanism comments

18 Nov 08

Beyond the Bailout - New Thinking Required - Creative Class » Blog Archive »

Richard Florida makes the argument that Fordism -- or Fordist thinking -- lies behind some of our economic woes at present, and that we have to get past that paradigm. I left a comment re. this article ( http://www.wsoctv.com/automotive/17945476/detail.html#- ), "Falling Gas Prices Jump-Start GM SUV Sales; Automaker Puts Texas Plant On Overtime Amid Other Closures," published a week ago (11/10/08). The automobile industry shouldn't be bailed out without significant guarantees from the industry that it will embrace environmentally progressive goals.

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bailout richard_florida creative_class comments automobile financial_crisis fordism

02 Nov 08

"Class Politics" Richard Florida, Creative Class Blog

Fascinating (possibly scary?) piece by Florida on how Obama's win could still fan the flames of an ugly backlash from the right that may be more convulsive and destructive than the current economic / financial meltdown. Florida factors in some data around demographic changes due to the creative economy (linked to democratic/ Obama politics), to paint a picture of a potentially very divided country.

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politics obama class_theory usa republican democrat class_war richard_florida creative_class

When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.
I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.
Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class have grown to 40 million - nearly a third of the work force. That group has become powerful in American politics, and it is squarely behind Mr. Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high technology.
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- Republican strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever-prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968.
  The rise of the creative economy generated a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized. Diversity and self-expression became necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function.
  As it grew and became more concentrated in locations such as San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. - what we now know as blue America - the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization shipped jobs overseas, while institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions - were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of former Bush political strategist Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans and to use it to his political organizational advantage.
- This class divide is overlaid on America’s economic and political geography, with the U.S. economy being driven by centers of innovation such as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.; finance, entertainment, and media cities such as New York and Los Angeles; and university-anchored tech centers such as Austin, Tex., Boulder, Colo., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
- These class divides will only deepen. Fear and anxiety will probably get worse. And a strange kind of reactive populism, much worse than anything we have seen before, could be on the rise. Unless Mr. Obama can fashion a broad, inclusive appeal that extends the benefits of the creative economy to working and service economies, the bitterness he himself acknowledged, in a moment of candor, will grow deeper.

19 Oct 08

Creative Class » Blog Archive » The Nature of This Crisis Matters - Creative Class

A sobering assessment of current bail-out strategies and why they could well fail, by Martin Kenney.

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creative_class richard_florida financial_crisis economy martin_kenney

when the Treasury/Fed say they will bail out banks, they only mean a few key banks and leave the rest to their own devices (there is evidence for this suspicion as the large regional banks such as Sun Trust and Zion did not participate in the huge rally on Monday). So, which banks will be bailed out? My guess is Goldman Sachs (Paulson and Robert Rubin’s ex-employer), Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and a few others (did Wells Fargo buy Wachovia so that it could enter this charmed circle?). P.S. - We now have confirmation of which firms are being bailed out: JPMorgan, Goldman, Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street Bank [thank you Barney Frank], Bank of NY Mellon [thank you Hillary and Schumer].
The forces of globalization are still underway and, as many of have been saying, they are putting downward pressure on incomes in the developed nations, which, of course, are the consumers of the products of the developing nations. A small telltale of this, IBM announced dramatically increased profits on only slightly higher sales. My guess is that these profits were made by substituting low-cost developing world service providers for their high-cost developing nation employees. This dynamic will continue putting pressure on wages in the developed nations and contributing to a deflationary dynamic.
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- Income inequality has increased globally and, as a result, the vast majority find themselves less and less capable to consume.
- The technological revolution of digitization has changed the central source of value creation from the assembly line to the designer/engineer.

06 Oct 08

"I Purchase, Therefore I Am," by Richard Florida - Creative Class blog

Great entry by Richard Florida, which underscores the connection between suburbanization, reliance on cheap gasoline, consumption, and using housing/ real estate as a "piggy bank" that one could always raid to get money to buy more stuff. See entry, and annotations/ highlights.

I added a comment, in response to an existing comment by Wendy Waters, and then a second one in response to Kwende Kefentse.

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creative_class economy financial_crisis mortgage_crisis richard_florida suburbs

Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.
Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”
Where did this financial mess come from? And what does it mean?
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- The easy answer is to blame the housing market.
- Banks and financial institutions, so the story goes, are clogged with this bad debt, now dubbed toxic waste. This is the kind of thinking behind the U.S. financial bailout: Remove the toxicity and all will magically be well again.
- The real reason is that the roots of the current crisis are tied to the fundamental nature of the postwar model of economic development called “Fordism.” That model drew a tight connection between assembly-line mass production and mass consumption - ultimately fueled by massive suburbanization.
- Fordism emerged as a full-blown economic and social model during the 1930s, marked by president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and flourished after the Second World War, when government policies brought about the rise of longer-term mortgages and a new system organized under the now infamous Fannie Mae to purchase those mortgages and thus lubricate the system.
  Add to that massive tax breaks for homeownership and gargantuan subsidies for highway construction and infrastructure, and a whole new model of suburban-fueled mass consumption was born - family after family purchased new homes, filling them with TVs, appliances and all manner of furnishings, while also purchasing record numbers of cars to get to and from work.
  - I also blogged this, here: http://tinyurl.com/52hr33 - on 2008-10-06
  - To underscore the validity of what Florida is saying here, watch the video of SoCal news, "What the meltdown looks like" (on trash-outs): http://tinyurl.com/3jryu9 - on 2008-10-06
  Add Sticky Note
- While Fordism looks stable on the surface, it suffers from a fatal flaw: It’s impossible for consumption to keep up with the ever-growing pace and efficiency of production. This is particularly true of recent times, when a great deal of production has been sent to China, India and other places where labour is cheaper. It’s hard for the working and middle classes to consume more when their wages are essentially stagnant. Low-wage workers in emerging economies do not have the income to fill the gap. And while the ranks of the rich have grown, the wealthy are a relatively small group that can buy only so many luxury cars, designer products, homes and yachts.
  That’s where credit comes in. Those new fancy mortgage instruments were meant to turn homes into veritable “piggy banks” that could be used to finance bigger and better cars and homes and toys.
- Almost a century ago, Austrian economist Rudolf Hilferding identified this basic contradiction of modern capitalism in his monumental work Finance Capital. Capitalist economic development stands on a shaky foundation, he argued - workers always produce more than they can consume, more even than society as a whole can consume.
  - - we always produce more than we can consume: so, can we get around to producing the "right" things, or is that impossible? - on 2008-10-06
  Add Sticky Note
- As one leading blogger, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, recently put it: “Since consumption has come to depend on growth in indebtedness, a reversal, however painful, is necessary. Our excesses have been so great that there is no way out of this that does not lead to a general fall in living standards.”
  There you have it. The financial crisis is in reality a much deeper crisis of our underlying economic model and our way of life. It’s a crisis of the way we have come to define ourselves.
- Regardless of how or when the financial markets are restored, credit will be much harder to get - the age of the house as piggy bank is long gone.

06 Aug 08

Be Nice to the 'Creative Class'! :: Views :: thetyee.ca

Why does one too often get the impression that publications like The Tyee are fighting a rear-guard and even anachronistic battle? That somehow, somewhere different patterns are emerging, which its journalists just don't see, preferring instead the familiar world of what they knew "back in the day"?

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thetyee richard_florida creative_class vancouver socialcritique

15 Apr 08

Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange: Mega Debate

This is one of a series of posts by Florida in response to an article by Paul Krugman, who is sceptical of Florida's theories around mega-regions powering the world's economic engines. Lots of interesting ideas here.

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mega_regions richard_florida paul_krugman regionality urbanism

It is also increasingly clear that urbanization, in general, is an important component of productivity. Careful studies of US-Canadian regional productivity and competitiveness by my colleague Roger Martin and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity show that urbanization is a key component of the difference. Anyway you slice it urbanization is important to economic growth.
agent-based models which show how clusters, then cities, then metros and then mega-regions form based on these human capital externalities.
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- The Santa Fe Institute PNAS paper on urban scaling also shows how urban metabolic rates essentially speed up to offset "negative spillovers" like traffic congestion which Krugman mentions.
- But let me get to the nub of the matter. Nations are political jurisdictions. Metros are constructed from data on commuting patterns and the like. Mega-regions, as we define them, reflect an observable physical reality. If an alien were to descend from space into the earth's atmosphere what would he see? He would not be able to discern the world's 191 or so nation-states, nor would he be able to easily pick up metros (which blur into megas). He would see mountains and oceans in the daytime, and mega-regions at night. Mega-regions of all man-made geographic phenomena are a readily observable unit.

02 Mar 08

Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange: Real Education

Richard Florida quotes from a WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html) that describes how successful Finnish high schoolers are compared to other students in other countries. I left a very long comment on this entry, as it's a topic obviously close to my area of concerns.

Click through to read Florida's post, and the numerous comments this one generated.

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education finland finnish_schooling kids oecd oecd_pisa richard_florida

High-school students here rarely get more than a
half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor
societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the
gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over
college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers
are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores
by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens
finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on
more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S.
counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love
sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're
way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns
among the world's most productive ...
Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as
they shape students to national standards. "In most countries,
education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the
entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which
began the international student test in 2000 ...
- Taylorization in public (and private) education hasn't allowed students to leap into post-factory economies. The factory model of education deserves to get the boot. - on 2008-03-02
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- I have at least 3 friends who are former teachers. They all said they left because "I loved the kids and teaching. I hated the union, the mandatory testing, the bureaucracy."
  
  My wife's sister and her husband taught at a rural California school. They're avid birders and every year as part of science would take middle schoolers to the Klamath refuge to look at migrating waterfowl, bald eagles, etc. The kids loved it. But when No Child Left Behind came along they were told to stay in the classroom and teach to the tests.
  
  Combining the Finnish model with the City as Classroom ideas of the Remixing cities would probably do more to reform education than another decade of blue ribbon studies.
  
  Posted by:
  Michael Wells |
  February 29, 2008 at 01:11 PM
- Further, it's interesting to think about your excellent ideas around spikiness, Richard, and consider them in relation to the PISA study and to American education. I would argue that right now the American system is *very* spiky, with some kids performing way beyond the average, while others languish at the bottom. If you graphed the Finnish system and its population, I bet their world would look "flatter."
  
  But just as cities -- to reference Richard Sennett's citation of Aristotle -- need all sorts of different citizens, I'd say that childhood needs to have its differences respected, and even nurtured. At present, we're telling too many kids that with enough effort, they too can be tall spikes -- and in this way we're perhaps flattening out their world. But the real beauty might be in letting them come into it when they're ready -- and then watch spikiness take off as a kind of synergy between the different talents.
  
  Posted by:
  Yule Heibel |
  March 01, 2008 at 04:55 PM

18 Feb 08

Place Wars - Seattle vs. Silicon Valley (Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange)

Florida points to two techologists, one SV-based (Michael Arrington), the other now once again Seattle-based (Glenn Kelman), having a bit of a dust-up over whether one region/ city is better than the other. Robert Scoble also weighs in, as do several others. Of particular interest is that Crosscut today also published Margaret Pugh O'Mara's article on the Seattle - Silicon Valley comparison. I commented here (and in Crosscut).

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"Yikes" - Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange

Florida quotes from a NYT review of Susan Jacoby's book, "The Age of American Unreason," which describes the spectacularly stupid Kellie Pickler, who claimed on television that she had never heard of Hungary, didn't know what country Budapest is the capital of, and believed that Europe was "a country." Her performance has earned her a wildly popular view rank on YouTube. But you have to wonder, as I did in my comment to Richard's entry, whether it wasn't a purposeful exercise on Pickler's part. If you can't win prizes for being smart, what better way to ensure your 15 minutes of YouTube fame than by being the absolute stupidest of the moment? I'm sure it's a growing trend and we'll see plenty more people competing in this ..."category."

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american_stupidity fame_seeking narcissism purposeful_ignorance richard_florida youtube

15 Feb 08

U.S. News and World Report on Who's Your City? (Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange)

"Choosing a Place to Live - Why it's as important as picking a spouse" (interview by Bret Schulte with Richard Florida, published in U.S. News and World Report); excerpts: "You have to understand that economic activity isn't spread out. So there's a trade-off we have to make between furthering our career and finding a lifestyle that fits us. (...) If you find a place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a place that gives them excitement and energy."

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creative_cities flatness interview richard_florida spikiness

The world is not flat, says Richard Florida, contrary to the bestselling book by New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. Florida, author of his own bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class,
and a professor of business and creativity at the University of
Toronto, argues that while Friedman is correct in saying that
technology has reshaped the world, it has not created a level playing
field. With newly accumulated data to back him up, Florida argues in
his upcoming book Who's Your City? that the world is, in many
ways, spiky—with population, opportunity, innovation, and money
increasingly coalescing in metropolitan areas worldwide. That means
pursuing a career and staying close to family and friends are often at
odds. Deciding what makes you happy, he argues, must go hand in hand
with deciding where you want to live.
So, in a sense, as you go up the ladder, the world
got more and more concentrated. Then this idea came to me that the
world is not flat. It's spiky.
4 more annotations...
- The most important
  dimensions of the world's economy continue to concentrate.
- As our cities grow they get faster and
  faster, better and better, more and more innovative. Some don't, and
  they die. That's why economic activity spikes, because of these
  conglomerations of energy and talent.
- You go so far as to call the spiky world "tricky and even treacherous."
  
  Right. We can see it in this election. It's really giving rise to class
  conflict. We are starting to see a backlash against cities, and a
  backlash against people who live in them. Urban conglomerations are the
  single most important thing to our competitiveness, yet people won't
  talk about it. And the second thing that worries me is we're unable to
  talk about those being left behind. We're stuck in a stalemate. I would
  like to see everyone live better.
- Do people realize their happiness is closely linked to place?
  
  Absolutely not. People don't even think about it. But when you ask them
  you begin to discover their place is a critical contributor to their
  happiness. Generally speaking, place tends to the positive side of the
  happiness ledger. That was surprising to us. When we asked people about
  the source of stress in their life, place came in last. If you find a
  place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been
  attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you
  like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically
  important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled
  in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a
  place that gives them excitement and energy.

31 Jan 08

Research Groups Boom in Washington - New York Times

Think tanks are apparently a booming industry, as Elizabeth Bumiller's article shows. Richard Florida ("Tanked," see http://tinyurl.com/35apn9) observes: "A DC insider once told me these so-called think tanks don't so much create new intellectual capital as repackage and recycle it - or as he put it, they run it down. Candidly, I was shockingly disappointed during my time in DC by the inability of most think tanks to tackle big questions in an open-minded, globally-oriented (that is not American-centric) way. And while there always are individual exceptions, I was also dismayed by the quality of much of the work. My hunch is the increased giving is being fueled by partisan agendas - actually, I have been told many time this is the way think tanks increasingly are funded - as political actors seek to lend credibility and legitimacy to desired actions." Bumiller closes her article with this: "'Institutions like this don’t possess power,' said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. 'You’re one of many voices in the political marketplace. It’s up to those in the marketplace who possess power — congressmen, people in the executive branch — to run with one of your ideas.'” That's something to think about for everyone in every local context, too.

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elizabeth_bumiller nyt politics research richard_florida think_tanks washington_dc

29 Jan 08

Creating better McJobs gives food for thought (Toronto Star)

Suggestion by Richard Florida: that we need to figure out how to make "McJobs" have dignity (and wages that one can live on); for several reasons: service is biggest job growth sector; service allows flexibility for "creatives" to work in one industry (for pay) while pursuing their vocation (where pay is unstable or minimal). In other words, if service sector jobs have more dignity and better wages and more respect, and are seen as a viable alternative (short-term, long-term) for employment, they can contribute to a climate of creativity, too.

www.thestar.com/...297807 - Preview

employment mcjobs richard_florida service_sector service_summit toronto

Appearing before the city's economic development committee to discuss its Agenda for Prosperity, released earlier this month, Florida challenged the common thinking that counter work in franchise outlets is somehow worthless.
Florida – director of the Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management – said this city could become a leader in rethinking the role of jobs in the hospitality, food and business services sectors.
In fact, he said, government, business, labour and academic leaders should consider holding a "service summit" to map just such a plan.
"The service economy has to be a centrepiece of our strategy going forward," he said, because so many service jobs are being created.
"Why not say, from a research and development standpoint, from an innovation standpoint, from a job security standpoint, from a flexible work environment standpoint: How do we make our service sector thrive?
"Why can't we do for those jobs what we did for my father's job in a factory?" he asked. "Why can't we make those service jobs good, high-paying, secure jobs?
2 more annotations...
- "I think digging into the service economy – figuring out how to bolster it, make it more secure, make it more innovative, make it more creative, would be a huge thing that we could do."
- Florida said one advantage of service jobs is flexibility. At their best, they can allow workers to make an adequate living while pursuing other interests.

14 Nov 07

$120 million for culture is money well spent

www.canada.com/...story.html - Preview

canada cities creative_cities cultural_support cultural_tourism municipal_funding richard_florida

If culture really is a driving force behind the economic development of Montreal, as Premier Jean Charest claimed yesterday, it is about time the city, province and federal government put real money into it.
The news that Montreal's Quartier des spectacles is to receive $120 million from the three levels of government should be applauded.
Montreal has been diligently trying to fashion a cultural identity that will set it apart on the world stage. Such an ambitious plan cannot be accomplished without help from outside.
4 more annotations...
- Montreal is hardly alone in seeking to make the most of its cultural attractions and sense of creativity. Cities around the world are in brisk competition with each other for the kind of well-heeled tourist who travels for cultural experiences, whether art, sculpture, music or architecture.
- Investment in culture can reap enormous dividends for a city. Bilbao was largely unknown outside northern Spain until the Guggenheim Museum built its extraordinary stone, glass and titanium museum in the Basque city. Within three years of its 1997 inauguration, the museum had prompted a 54-per-cent growth in tourism.
- Similarly, the Eden Project, an environmental complex in Cornwall in Britain, has added more than $1.5 billion to the local economy and attracted more than 7.5 million tourists in five years of operation.
- For a city's own residents, investment in culture offers what are often considered intangible benefits, a heightened sense of pride and the feeling of living in a stimulating environment. A city that enjoys the support and esteem of its residents and politicians becomes a place able to attract investment and boost employment. Success engenders success and in the end there is nothing intangible about additional investment and more jobs.