...vividly exposes how gentrification, followed by rising housing costs, concentrated affluence and glaring inequality, has pushed the displaced into deteriorating suburbs far from mass transit, employment, services and decent schools ... The New Urban Crisis is nuanced and proposes solutions, including more clustering in suburbs to spark innovation, the creation of 'refugee cities' for the displaced and international development policies that prioritize strategic investments in urban schools and neighborhoods. However, some may view Florida’s fresh round of prescriptions with skepticism, given his prominent role in promoting many of the policies that created the very crisis cities now face.
Florida’s latest brings some new data into a competent synthesis of contemporary thinking on cities and inequality. As you might expect from a book that aims to diagnose and solve the problems of global urbanization in a little more than 200 pages (with 100 more of appendices and endnotes), its content falls short of its ambition. Florida devotes just 18 pages to the megacities of the developing world ... heavy on studies from sociologists and economists, but addresses history only in short anecdotes, and politics hardly at all. This blindness to the perversity of American politics (which Florida otherwise follows closely) weighs heavily on the book ... a disjointed finish to a book that otherwise stresses that rental affordability, segregation, infrastructure, and inequality are in fact national problems. Despite it all, Florida remains cheerful. But he has elucidated the very bleak paradox of American urban policy.
The New Urban Crisis bracingly confronts this tension between big-city elites and the urban underclass ... The strongest part of The New Urban Crisis is the author’s discussion of how to combat such segregation, particularly by building more middle-class housing. His excoriation of NIMBYs—the exponents of a 'Not In My Back Yard' anticonstruction ideology—is delightful ... Mr. Florida is right that there are really twin crises: inequality and segregation. But only segregation truly qualifies as a particular urban crisis. Rising inequality is a nationwide phenomenon, driven by globalization and technological change.
Florida focuses on what the creative class’s emergence, and the decline of the middle class, have done to cities. Florida uses the category ‘creative class’ to distinguish the one-third of the American work force who employ their brains rather than their bodies … ‘Creative class’ is not an accurate term, but it is sexy … Florida states blithely that ‘Uber and Airbnb hope to actually make some aspects of cities work more efficiently.’ Sure, and BP hopes to end climate change … Several of Florida’s solutions are sound — although they, too, would benefit from a closer look at individual cities. He suggests more mass transit, including bringing rail to suburbs that have reached the limits of moving people efficiently by car. He suggests more rental housing construction, a good idea for New York, but not so much for shrunken cities that have too much housing.
He deserves credit for critically revisiting his widely absorbed past work, clearly acknowledging that much of his earlier ideas may have been 'overly optimistic,' at least if viewed as policy prescriptions to be easily followed ... While this reviewer rarely finds a datapoint he does not find informative, Mr. Florida’s amalgam is often discordant. Each graph or figure feels squeezed into the expansive narrative and deserves more exposition to dissect ... Mr. Florida continues to address the most vexing problems we face as a society: politics and poverty, sociology and segregation, innovation and growth, zoning, education, workforce training, gentrification, zoning, taxes and regulation, just to begin. But he has few peers as a communicator.
Florida draws subtle, thoughtful inferences from his research, and he writes in slick, approachable prose overly studded with phrases that aspire to be intellectual buzzwords (the title is repeated frequently). Throughout, the author remains an idealistic, perceptive observer of cities’ transformations. A sobering account of inequality and spatial conflict rising against a cultural backdrop of urban change.
...[a] timely, data-rich, and accessible work ... [Florida's] prescriptions are all sound but—in the current political climate—particularly difficult to achieve.
