The Journey to "Deeply Disturbed"
Richard Florida is well-known as an American urban theorist, focusing much of his writing on social and economic theory. He is currently a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the University of Toronto. His book Rise of the Creative Class (2002) and two follow-up volumes maintained that the creative class in cities were in the process of ushering in a new era of urban renewal and prosperity.Events of the last decade, however, and a wide array of new research has revealed some troubling new realities – concerns he writes about in his new book, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It. There are some important lessons to be learned here from a researcher humbled by events and willing to adjust to new data. Below are some excerpts from The New Urban Crisis:
"I entered into a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation, of which this book is the result. I began to see the back-to-the-city movement as something that conferred a disproportionate share of its benefits on a small group of places and people.“I found myself confronting the dark side of the urban revival I had once championed and celebrated. Our divides were causing greater inequality both within cities and metro areas, and between them. As I pored over the data, I could see that only a limited number of cities and metro areas, maybe a couple of dozen, were really making it in the knowledge economy; many more were failing to keep pace or falling further behind. And virtually all our cities suffer from growing economic divides.As the middle class and its neighborhoods fade, our geography is splintering into small areas of affluence and concentrated advantage, and much larger areas of poverty and concentrated disadvantage."“The implications were deeply disturbing to me. The greatest driver of innovation, economic growth, and urban prosperity—the clustering of talent and other economic assets in cities—conferred the lion’s share of its benefits on the already privileged, leaving a staggering 66 percent of the population behind."