Richard Florida´s The New Urban Crisis. Book review.
By: Alberto Morales Morales
Tags: Inequality, Cities, Segregation, New Urban Crisis, Economic Growth

In the New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida addresses the growing issues of the contemporary urbanism; increasing inequality, deepening segregation, failing the middle class, among others, which are more tangible in the cities, but which are, as he suggests, also a crisis of the suburbs; “a crisis of urbanization itself, and of contemporary capitalism writ large”.

Richard Florida is, as described in his book, University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto´s Rotman School of Management and a Distinguished Fellow at New York University´s Schack Institute of Real Estate. He is Senior editor at The Atlantic, cofounder and editor at large for The Atlantic´s CityLab, and founder of the Creative Class Group. But more surprisingly I would say, he is the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, a book in which years ago he used to praise the revival of the American cities, something somewhat contradictory to his new approach in the first place.

At the Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida introduced us to the fact that the cities were becoming more prosperous and the centers of innovation, driven by the influx of the knowledge workers, techies, artists, and other cultural creatives, who were critical to fuel economic growth, making the most successful cities the ones which were the most capable of attract and retain this talent.

But in the New Urban Crisis, Florida warns us that these very same prosperous and innovative places called cities, are also becoming the engines of economic inequality and economic segregation.

Richard Florida introduces us to the concept of the New Urban Crisis, by bringing back the old urban crises of the 1970s and 1980s; the exodus of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs, defined by “the economic abandonment of cities and their loss of economic function”. The so-called “hole-in-the-donut” was characterized by a hollowing out of the city center, as they became “deindustrialized sites of growing and persistent poverty”.

With the context of the old urban crisis in mind, Richard Florida elaborates about what the New Urban Crisis is, introducing us to what he calls its five key dimensions:

1) The deep and growing economic gap between what he calls superstar cities and other cities across the world.

2) The high and increasingly unaffordable housing prices and staggering levels of inequality at the very same superstar cities.

3) The growing inequality, segregation and sorting taking place within every city, whether it is a superstar city or not.

4) The crisis of the suburbs, where poverty, insecurity and crime are mounting.

5) The crisis of the urbanization in the developing world.

With intriguing new terms and concepts of his own like “winner-take-all-urbanism”, “plutocratization”, “NIMBYism”, “urbanized knowledge capitalism”, “patchwork metropolis”, “urbanism for all” and the so, Richard Florida addresses the issues of the New Urban Crisis in a very clear, structured and empirical way. His chapters are full of amazing data and graphics aimed to prove his argumentation which excels to keep the reader interested with some eyeopener facts, sometimes crucial for the de-mythification of some biased commonly held ideas, like the scope and effects of gentrification.

Richard Florida throughout the book explains how it is the clustering of talent which foster the economic development of cities in the actual knowledge economy, a process which make some “superstar cities” like New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Paris, and some knowledge hubs like the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, Boston and Seattle, gain a “disproportionate share of the world´s leading high-value industries” over the rest of the cities of the world, a process which he calls the winner-take-all-urbanism. This notably relates to Saskia Sassen´s outcome on the global city; “the most powerful rich, and digitized economic actors needed central places” (Sassen, 2016).

This process, he argues, is the principle behind the increasing inequality taking place between cities:

“Thanks to the clustering force, the most important and innovative industries and the most talented, ambitious, and wealthiest people are converging as never before in a relative handful of leading superstar cities and knowledge hubs. This small group of elite places forges ever forward, while many -if not most- other struggle, stagnate, or fall behind”.

Another big implication that he notes about this process is the effect on housing prices that this wealthier converging people produce within this winner cities. By clustering, there is an increased competition for the scarce space, which consequently rises prices. As Barr (2018) proposes, for many people, residing in the central city or close to transportation hubs, jobs, and urban amenities is important. This ultimately affects the remaining population of these cities, pushing them out in some extreme cases.

Richard Florida devotes a complete chapter to gentrification. By using different sets of data, he concludes that gentrification, “shaped by large scale public and private investments” was “positively correlated with the size and density of a metro; its wealth and affluence, the concentration of high-tech industry; and the share of science and technology workers…”. He states also that gentrification is more an “emotional issue” as it is an economic one, and that it had mainly occurred only in a relatively small number of cities. Quoting the work of Lance Freeman, Florida exposes that gentrification actually displaces far fewer people than is commonly thought. But at the same time in the end of the chapter he argues that even gentrification has not been a big problem in the past, it may become one in superstar cities as housing prices rise.

With some great statistics Richard Florida addresses how different cities of the developed world are from those of the so-called global south. Imports of food and goods cheaper than the locally produced in the developing world cities (an example of the planetary phenomenon described by Brenner and Schmid, 2014) is driving the “urbanization without growth”, leading to a path of reduced upward mobility. Florida warns that if this lack of growth remains, “many as a billion of more new urbanites will remain trapped in slums, squalor, and chronic poverty”. The United Nations, (2018) within the framework of the sustainable development goals, already reported an increase in the urban population living in informal settlements worldwide, from 23.5 to 24%.

Stating that the solution is “more, not less urbanism”, in his last chapter, Richard Florida addresses some options we have to overcome the New Urban Crisis:

1) Make clustering work for us and not against us. For this point we can recall Jacobs (1994) on her approach of making spaces more efficient with “districts and its internal parts serving more than one primary function”.

2) Invest in the infrastructure for density and growth

3) Build more affordable rental housing

4) Turn low-wage service jobs into middle-class work

5) Tackle poverty by investing in people and places

6) Lead a global effort to build prosperous cities

7) Empower cities and communities

Despite the growing inequality, division and consequently backlash represented by the election of Rob Ford in Toronto, the Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Florida argues that he remains optimistic that we can solve this crisis, for the basic reason that cities remain the best vehicle for identifying and solving our deepest social and economic problems.

References:

Barr, J. (2018) The high life? On the psychological impacts of highrise living. Building the skyline. Retrieved from https://buildingtheskyline.org/highrise-living/#

Brenner, N. and C. Schmid (2014) The “urban age” in question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 38.3, 731–55.

Jacobs, J. (1992 [1961]) The death and life of great American cities. Vintage Books, New York.

Sassen, S. (2016) The global city: Enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs. City and Community. 16.2, 139–44

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018) The sustainable development goals report 2018. New York, NY: United Nations.