USA: @Richard_Florida: #NewUrbanCrisis. #Trumpism is a backlash against an urban-powered growth model
City Nation Place: “Richard Florida on Trump and Cities: The City Nation Place keynote preview
You mention in your new book, The New Urban Crisis, that Trumpism is a backlash against an urban-powered growth model. How so?
I saw it first with Rob Ford in Toronto and I said if it could happen in as progressive and diverse a city as that, more and worse would follow. And it did. First Brexit, then Trump, now the surge in populist sentiment across Europe. This is a direct byproduct of the New Urban Crisis. In fact, you can’t understand Trump and the populist backlash if you don’t understand the New Urban Crisis. That backlash is the political reaction to winner-take-all urbanism—the growing gap between superstar cities and their advantaged residents, and everywhere and everyone else.
So Trump is a backlash against falling behind by non-city residents?
Our nation has sorted itself along class and racial lines. Trumpism is a backlash against the urban cosmopolitan creative class and its values of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, meritocracy and globalism. It comes from parts of the country that are falling behind economically, that are whiter, less diverse, and which feel threatened by the rise of diverse, global urban places and the people who live in them. And this is the case in the U.S. and around the world. So, the populist mind sets sees cities not as centers of innovation and growth but as the places that are undermining traditional family values. … .”