Florida's "creative class" ideas have had a broad impact on cities across North America, encouraging civic and business leaders to institute policies that encouraged diverse, educated and upwardly-mobile creatives to move to town and help drive economic growth. The low density of the suburbs, he argued, couldn't create the interactions necessary to spark that creative and economic fire. But after a recent move to the suburbs of Toronto, Florida has thrown out his own theory and ripped up the contract for his next book.
"It's a total oversimplification. You can't dictate the form of an urban economy with a bunch of dancers and graphic designers. Talk about a bubble that's ready to burst," says Florida. "That's why the suburbs make so much sense from an economic perspective: the only people trying to dictate anything are road builders and housing developers. If that ain't what people want, why would they keep building it?"
He says the numbers are hard to ignore – both in terms of people living in suburbs and the amount of wealth being generated.
"There are construction workers in Arizona who have four-car garages," Florida says. "That's what I call economic prosperity."
Comments
April fool?
I hope this is just Planetizen's idea of an April fool's joke. If not, then Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin both need a lesson in economics, if not basic human decency. How the Hell can they justify the fact that suburbanites make up half the U.S. population, but require 10 times the infrastructure spending that urbanites do? At the end of the day, it's unjust to make the half---and growing---of Americans who are urbanites pay for all that wasteful infrastructure spending. Add the half trillion a year oil war and such spending is even more unjust.
D'oh!
I guess it was just an April Fool's Day joke. Thank Gawd.