The New Urban Crisis How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class--And What We Can Do About It

Description

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power urban growth also generate cities’ vexing challenges, such as gentrification, segregation, inequality, and unaffordable housing. Middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing as our cities and suburbs are carved into small areas of privilege surrounded by vast swaths of poverty and disadvantage. The rise of a winner-take-all urbanism represents a profound crisis of today’s urbanized knowledge economy that threatens our economic future.

But if this crisis is urban, so is its solution. Cities remain the most powerful economic engines the world has ever seen. The only way forward is to devise a new model of urbanism-for-all that encourages innovation and wealth creation while generating good jobs, rising living standards, and a better way of life for everyone. We must rebuild cities and suburbs for the middle class by investing in infrastructure, reforming zoning and tax laws, building more affordable housing, and further empowering cities to address their own unique challenges.

A bracingly original work of research and analysis, The New Urban Crisis offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all.