“Urbanism for All”—Achieving a More Inclusive Prosperity through Cities

USA: @Richard_Florida sees American city as a battleground for class conflict. Solution: “urbanism for all.” @reinventnet (1h 8 min)

Reinvent: Richard Florida, CityLab-Co-Founder and editor at large, sees the contemporary American city as a battleground for class conflict, and believes that the solution is more urbanism—specifically, what Florida terms “urbanism for all.”

Florida’s recently published book, The #NewUrbanCrisis, reexamines many of the ideas laid out in his bestselling 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class. According to Florida, the old urban crisis was based around the city center. As jobs and people moved to the suburbs, Florida says, the hole essentially fell out of the donut. The new urban crisis is one of inequality, and one that’s partly caused by success. “If the old urban crisis was the decline of the middle class in cities,” says Florida, “the new urban crisis is the decline of the middle class across the board.” According to Florida, a “winner-take-all” urbanism flourished in the first decade of the 21st century, one that exacerbated geographic inequality between high-performing cities and the rest of the country, and also fostered inequality within cities themselves. Florida views this geographic inequality as a large part of the reason Trump won the 2016 election, and sees Trump supporters as a broad “restoration” coalition of people reacting against what they view as urban values. Florida refers to urbanization as the “grandest of all the grand challenges” and argues that making our cities work better is the key to solving other seminal 21st century challenges, including inequality and climate change. … .”

http://reinvent.net/events/event/urbanism-for-all-envisioning-a-more-inclusive-prosperity-through-cities/