Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class wrote an in-depth story for the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic regarding How the Crash will Reshape America. The piece insists that we need to adapt a more concentrated geography for the United States to recover and prepare for its next wave of growth.
“We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography. It will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.”
This thorough exploration of the shifting economic geography of the United States looks at the need for better and more concentrated use of space, and suggests that we need to allow dying cities to die. He also maintains that we need a country of renters that are more nimble and able and willing to travel where the jobs are.
Read this feature online here.
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Florida obviously doesn’t spend enough time away from Silicon Valley and Boston. His conceit is that everyone in the US is creative by nature and just needs greater mingling and flexibility to monetize their creativity. One reason creative types tend to congregate in a few big cities is to get AWAY from the rest of the US – which doesn’t, on a day-to-day basis, appreciate creativity.