Richard Florida Explores the Underside of the ‘Creative Class’

Richard Florida is veering unusually close to pessimism. The typically upbeat University of Toronto urbanist, who made his name and built a lucrative consultancy 15 years ago by identifying the “creative class” as the solution to urban decay, has just published a follow-up that plumbs the dark side.

The New Urban Crisis (Basic Books) looks at how the very forces that have made metro areas like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and London hubs of “technology, talent, and tolerance” have also deepened economic and cultural divisions and gut-punched the middle class. Meanwhile, Rust Belt cities suffer from continued neglect, and urbanization in the developing world is happening so fast that it can no longer be counted on to bring with it a better standard of living.

The book was all set to go to press when Donald Trump was elected president. Stunned, Florida had to rewrite large portions over a weekend, abandoning what now looks to him like a pipe dream for a new federal urban policy. Even so, in two conversations with The Chronicle Review, he remained resolute: He still believes in the power of cities. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Tell me how your thinking evolved.

I was very exuberant: Oh, my God, the city is coming back, and the reason is not stadiums and convention centers, it’s because of all these small little things happening in neighborhoods, and open-minded urbanites! It really is between 2000 and 2010 that it goes hog-wild, and you really see the affluent, the educated come back to this subset of cities we identified, and these new divides emerge. At the same time, we have what I now call “winner-take-all urbanism.” Even though the divides between the Pittsburghs and the San Franciscos, or the Detroits and the New Yorks, were obvious in 2000, they have become much more magnified. The clustering has become much more severe.

The old urban crisis was a crisis of disinvestment and deindustrialization. The new urban crisis is in part — and those words “in part” are important — a crisis of success, because the cities where we see it most visibly are attracting a disproportionate share of investments of these high-flying industries like finance, media, entertainment, the culture and creative industries, the tech industries. You layer onto that the role of these places as investment locations for the global superrich, and they really are becoming a world apart.

It’s not only something that occurs across cities and metro areas; it also occurs within them. So within winner-take-all urbanism, there are winner neighborhoods. Even the winners fall victim to the same process that has made them winners.

In other places, there is still a crisis of urban decay and disinvestment. That involves suburbs as well as cities — the divides we used to see of rich people in the suburbs, poor people in the city, no longer hold up. If the old urban crisis was about the flight of the middle class to the suburbs, the new urban crisis is about the evisceration of middle-class neighborhoods.

We have these small areas of concentrated advantage, near the subway stops, near the research institutions, in the college towns, around the beautiful places to live, and much larger swaths of disadvantage in big parts of the country and big parts of metro areas. Just by virtue of the fact that they’re growing their economies, they’re increasing polarization. What we haven’t done is to think about what tools would make that development process more equitable, more inclusive, less polarizing.

Q. You say that would require a coming together of “urban optimists” and “urban pessimists.”

The urban optimists — economists like Ed Glaeser and Nate Baum-Snow or people like Bruce Katz, at Brookings, or Ben Barber — are doing the cutting-edge work in urbanism. They are doing the most rigorous and the most scientific work. I do think the urban pessimists, the work out of critical urbanism and critical geography, is a bit knee-jerk. It’s a bit ideological, a bit non-data-driven, and everything is bad. A charter school is the neoliberal decline of our society; a park is a tool of gentrification; everything is part of this targeted way of exploiting the masses.

That said, very smart critics like Mike Davis or David Harvey are illuminating important contradictions, things that the optimists using the models might miss. The urban pessimists are generally not translating in the public-policy environment — they’re too intellectual, perhaps too critical. And they might consider that this is because there’s a neoliberal discourse that they don’t want to be part of.

But in that vacuum, what passes for urban policy today tends to be the empowerment of market mechanisms. And simply deregulating land use is not going to solve the problem of housing affordability. One of the things that I really worry about is that we get the narcissism of small differences in urbanism. At the very time that we need progressive, left-leaning, or center-left solutions to our urban problems, those voices have been muted. It’s time for the urban community to come together and say, We have a bigger agenda. Let’s talk to one another.

Q. In an earlier version of your book, you proposed a presidential Council of Cities as part of a national commitment to urban renewal. Now you say the onus is on mayors.

Ben Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World [Yale University Press, 2013] was a big aha moment for me. [After the election] I came to this view that the devolution of power to local areas is not just the right thing to do economically, but politically it might be the only thing that saves America.

Very good economists, like Alice Rivlin, at Brookings, have shown that more local control is more economically efficient, and political scientists like Jenna Bednar argue that it’s more democratic and more politically effective.

When I meet a mayor, I can’t tell if they’re Democrat or Republican, right or left. Mayors are forced to deal with real problems — they’re not ideological. Don’t get me wrong: Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto and he was kind of a Trump character, but in general people elect mayors based on what they can do to make their city better, not based on their position on this, that, or the other hot-button political issue.

The other thing is that it’s strange bedfellows: Ben Barber, Bruce Katz, but also Yuval Levin, a conservative, are calling for more devolution. So I think we have a unique time. Building a movement that would empower the local, and doing that together with ideological strange bedfellows, to me makes the most sense. That has become what I’m going to devote the next phase of my career to.

Q. Barber suggested that cities could resist the Trump agenda by withholding their federal taxes.

Many of my colleagues are saying cities are the place that’s going to raise the flag and do battle with Trump. True, but we have to realize that we’re two countries, and if we’re going to get over this not-so-silent civil war, we’re going to have to have mutual respect. If I want to live in a “cosmopolitan” — and I’m making air quotes there — liberal, diverse, urban center, I can, and if you want to live in more of a red area, with different norms and different values, you can. Is that optimal for either left or right? No. But there’s no other way we can coexist.

[Before the election] I don’t think anyone quite sensed the level of anger in this country and in the world, against the clustered, “affluent and advantaged” creative-class places. To my eyes, that’s the bigger reason for the devolution to the local. If people feel like their place reflects their interests, and someone else, the “other,” is not going to impose their values, maybe we could get along.

Q. But doesn’t that risk leaving some people stranded, without protection of their basic human rights?

I would certainly like to see a society in which we all share the same basic rights. It may be that these more progressive ideals will win in the long run. But in the short run, given the structure of our Electoral College, given the basic winner-take-all urbanism where these groups of people have packed themselves in a dozen cities, we’re losing on the national front. Right now the best we can possibly hope for is this two-worlds, mutual-coexistence strategy.

Jennifer Ruark is a deputy managing editor at The Chronicle.