In his 2002 book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Florida both anticipated and helped promote the trends that would come to define the U.S. urban revival in the decade that followed. The basic premise was that by creating a good environment for knowledge workers -- both the science and engineering types and the creative artistic types -- cities could attract the human capital that would bring in businesses and ultimately re-invigorate their economies.
The strategy worked. New tech clusters like Austin, Texas, and aging post-industrial cities like Pittsburgh were able to use the Florida strategy to good effect. Urban economist Enrico Moretti has documented the dramatic economic and social outperformance of U.S. cities and regions that have managed to attract knowledge workers.
Now Florida thinks the strategy might have worked a bit too well. In a new book titled “The New Urban Crisis,” Florida reverses much of his earlier optimism about the potential of knowledge-hub cities. These metropolises, he contends, have now become engines of inequality and exclusion.
... it looks like other countries are doing something different.
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