Richard Florida is one of the brightest guests of the Moscow Urban Forum. In 2002, he wrote the landmark bestseller Creative Class: People Who Change the World (translated into Russian in 2007), where he came to the inspiring conclusion that economic development depends not on resources or technology, but on talented people. Florida noticed that large companies were moving to places where there is a concentration of creative people, and not vice versa. And creative people, as it turned out, live in cities, but not any. “Creative people have always gravitated towards certain types of communities, such as the left bank of the Seine in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York. These communities provide the creative incentives, diversity and rich experience that are the source of creativity. Nowadays we need this kind of environment more and more”. Its components are three "T": technology, talents, tolerance. Florida, by the way, noticed that the list of popular cities in the high-tech industry matches the Gay Index and the Bohemian Index. Obviously, the quality of life is associated with the presence of a breeding ground, a large number of opportunities and a tolerance for differences. What seemed to be the scourge of our time - the volatility and uncertainty of life - in Florida has become more the norm, if not an advantage.
The first Florida book depicts the image of a highly paid "professional without a tie", in piercings and with dreadlocks (artist, writer, musician, journalist, IT specialist, startup) - a balm for the soul of a Russian intellectual. Such a person needs a free schedule to be productive, he “plays at work and works from home” because he needs time to concentrate in order to be productive. A representative of the creative class can change jobs quite often. In the foreword to the Russian edition, Florida estimated the number of the creative class in Russia at 13 million (the second absolute number after the United States). Such people need good cities, and there was a boom in urbanism all over the world, which by 2011 reached Moscow, and is now spreading throughout Russia.
It is surprising that the role of geography has suddenly grown contrary to forecasts. For example, the architect, theorist and philosopher Peter Eisenman insisted that in the modern digital world hatopia rules, places are no longer important, classical cities no longer exist - and cited the example of Los Angeles stretched out in space (P. Giorra. Peter Eisenman Bauten und Projekte Stuttgart 1995). Florida has proven the opposite: we need cities as environments for communication, diversity, and tolerance for difference. In addition, the townspeople turned out to be one of the main sources of replenishment of the treasury as taxpayers. All this moved the economy forward. But it was not there.
In the 2018 book A New Crisis in Cities, which Florida will present at the FFM, the researcher speaks of frustration. Beautiful urban oases with pedestrianized public spaces, bike paths, parks filled with people playing sports, dancing and visiting galleries have proven to be a source of new social and geographic inequalities. Social inequality arises because housing prices in such cities rise and housing becomes unaffordable. Normally, housing should be worth 2.6 annual income. In New York, London, Paris and Moscow, this is a minimum of 8 annual income, and with a mortgage of 16 or more. Housing rents are also high, accounting for up to 65% of the monthly salary. In such a situation, artists and musicians, as well as teachers, nurses and firefighters, restaurant workers - people without whom the city cannot function - are forced to leave for the suburbs. And in the well-equipped city centers, according to Florida, only the rich intelligentsia (!) Can afford to live, which sounds exotic to the Russian ear - the intelligentsia here has never been particularly rich.
In addition, inequalities arise between cities: capitals or technology hubs flourish, and former industrial cities do not develop and perish (Florida calls this “winner-take-all urbanism”). Within the urban “winners”, the districts are also unevenly developed: the historical centers have attractive environments and infrastructure, and the suburbs suffer from a lack of good schools and clinics, crime and poor ecology (the situation is better in Russia, the mixed population of residential districts inherited from Soviet times does not allow them to become in the ghetto, the researcher notes). Florida associates the decline of urbanism with political events: Trump's rise to power and Britain's Brexit. The ideology of conservatives flourished, seeing in cities breeding grounds for depravity and vices. Nevertheless, the economist believes that the new urban crisis can be overcome with the help of the same urbanism. Richard Florida contrasts winner-take-all urbanism with urbanism for all. At the end of Chapter 10, there are seven principles of "healing" cities. It:
1. Make clustering work for us, not against us.
Florida's recipe is very interesting here. Urban land is scarce where it is needed most. But you can use it more efficiently. Removing bans on high-rise construction does not solve the problem. “The most innovative in the world are not the skyscraper quarters, as in Hong Kong and Singapore, but the former industrial districts of London, Amsterdam, Berlin and New York, built up with medium-rise buildings whose streets are conducive to mixed use. "Red October", "Bolshevik" and other redevelopment of industrial zones). Florida proposes to maximize land tax if nothing is being built on it or a narrow tower is being built, and to decrease it if the building footprint increases. In this way, owners can be encouraged to build high-density, medium-height neighborhoods, similar to the historical ones.
2. Invest in infrastructure to increase population density and population.
3. Build more affordable rental housing.
It is curious here that in the UK they are going to build 200,000 houses a year in order to reduce the rise in house prices and get out of the crisis. Russia with its plans to build 100 million m2 a year announced by the president is not alone.
4. Transform low-paying service jobs into middle-class jobs.
5. Investing in people and urban areas can end poverty.
6. Build prosperous cities around the world.
7. Give more power to cities and communities.
I will not comment on every principle. The book "New Crisis of Cities" is written in a light and bright language. Sometimes it even seems that this is a speech of the future mayor before the voters, but supported by numerous studies, tables, index calculations and diagrams, concentrated in an extensive application.
The book can be bought and signed from the author at the presentation on July 18 at 17:00 in the Shchusev hall.
Register here
Excerpt from the book by Richard Florida"New Crisis of Cities"
Chapter 10: Urbanization for All
“Ask yourself this question: when was the last time you heard that a state leader - not a mayor, but a prime minister or president - really understood what he was talking about if
are we talking about cities and urbanization? Or more than that: when did he do them? The short answer is never. First of all, this applies to America, where Donald Trump considers cities only as
hotbeds of crime and pathology. But this issue is no less acute in the UK and throughout Europe.
The contradiction between the vital economic role of cities and the total disdain for them by the government is painful and deeply troubling. As this book has shown, our ability to innovate and grow depends on the clustering of talent, companies, and other economic assets in cities. Cities and metropolitan areas are our main platforms for technological innovation, wealth and social progress, to support new, progressive values and political freedoms. This is where new strategies are developed and tested to foster innovation, create high-paying jobs and improve living standards.
But this book also showed that our cities and metropolitan areas face very serious challenges that threaten our entire way of life. The very clustering that generates
economic and social progress divides us more and more demographically, culturally and politically. Winner-take-all urbanization means fewer
Some winning cities capture a disproportionate share of the profits from innovation and economic growth, while others remain stagnant or lagging behind. As more and more middle-class areas disappear from such agglomerations, they, their suburbs and even entire countries turn into a motley mixture.
concentrated advantages and disadvantages.
The new urban crisis is not a self-existing crisis of supercities and technology centers, but a centralized crisis of modern urban cognitive capitalism.
The impact of this crisis is being felt around the world, from London, Paris and New York and leading knowledge hubs such as San Francisco and Tel Aviv, to regions undergoing de-industrialization and areas of developing countries in rapid recovery.
On the one hand, the crisis is felt most acutely exactly where we expected - in the largest cities and leading technological centers of America: Los Angeles is the leader among large agglomerates.
measures, New York is second, San Francisco is third. Technology centers in San Diego, Boston and Austin are also among the top 10 most severely affected by the crisis.
agglomerations. (My broader statistical analysis confirms this basic pattern.) The New Urban Crisis Index is undoubtedly highly correlated with the size of the city.
agglomerations and their density, with the concentration of high-tech industrial facilities, the shares of creative workers and college graduates, production volumes, income levels and wages. It is also closely related to the political division of America - it is directly dependent on the share of votes cast for Clinton in 2016, and inversely - on the data for Trump. Once again, we see the new urban crisis as a fundamental feature of larger, denser, wealthier, liberal, educated, high-tech, and more creative-class urban agglomerations.
On the other hand, the crisis is felt in many other places throughout America: in Chicago, Miami and Memphis, which are in the top ten of the index of the new urban crisis, in the agglomerations of the "Sun Belt" - Dallas, Houston, Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando and Nashville, whose rating is slightly lower; in Rust Belt metropolitan areas such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Detroit, which are also highly ranked, and many smaller campuses. The Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan area, located near New York City, is the top New Urban Crisis metropolitan area of any metropolitan area in the United States.
The magnitude of the new urban crisis makes it possible to understand why concern about the current state of the economy is growing so much. In the UK, Europe and the United States, the middle class has been gutted by the collapse of the suburban infrastructure that was once considered the road to a better life. The standard of living of the poor and disadvantaged is falling lower and lower compared to the rest of society. But even the economically prosperous part of society no longer feels as prosperous as before - now its representatives live in not cheap cities like London or New York, where it is becoming more and more difficult to ensure a prosperous future for children.
The new urban crisis is one of the main reasons why the economies of developed countries cannot fully recover from economic failure and are plunging into the so-called “secular
stagnation . The term was originally used to describe the hardships of the Great Depression, when the economy was unable to generate the innovation, economic growth and jobs needed to improve living standards. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers believes we are stuck in a new era of stagnation, the economic recovery is slower than it could, and unable to create enough well-paid jobs to rebuild the middle class. Summers, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and many others, believe that the best way out of these difficulties is massive government infrastructure spending. His idea is obviously based on historical precedents - in the 19th century. canals and railways have connected and expanded industrialized countries, fostering economic growth and innovation.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. a new impetus for the development of cities and the growth of their population was given by trams and underground transport. In the middle of the XX century. massive investment in road construction and generous subsidies for homeowners have resulted in a skyrocketing suburban population and a prolonged era of economic development. But today the high costs of building roads and bridges will only cause a short-term economic recovery and will not ensure its sustainable growth. We need not a bunch of projects ready for implementation, but strategic investments in infrastructure, which will become the basis for the purposeful development of urban clusters. To bolster the economy again, infrastructure must be part of a broader urban cluster development strategy.
But this is an expensive option - of course, compared to previous periods of easier and cheaper urban expansion. The increase in housing density required for the urban cluster
It will be much more expensive to build public transport and other development infrastructure, rebuild housing estates to increase population flows, and provide adequate affordable housing than simply building wider roads and single-family homes in the suburbs. According to the UK government, over the next five years, it is necessary to build about 200 thousand new houses annually in order to reduce the growth rate of house prices from 2.7% to a more acceptable 1.8%, but even this goal is not enough for us today.
stizhima - the government acknowledged that over the past 30 years "construction ordered by local authorities has actually stopped and has not been resumed by housing associations."
In addition to being very costly, such urban restructuring runs counter to deeply rooted anti-urban sentiments prevalent in both the UK and
and in the United States - a kind of nostalgia for life in the countryside and a bias against the urban lifestyle is inherent not only in our mentality, but also in many government
structures. These sentiments are exacerbated by the strong conviction of conservatives that cities are inherently elite, are breeding grounds for waste, depravity, vices, licentiousness.
and crimes, i.e. integral part of our social and economic decay - and they resonated with Trump and those around him. It will not be easy to mobilize political forces in the face of a new urban crisis, especially since in the era of Trumpism and Brexit, populism is gaining power in most of the advanced European countries.
So what can we do to overcome the new urban crisis and get the economy and society back on track? I am far from the first to try to find solutions to the problems facing our cities. But we do not have a complete understanding of the new crisis, so the strategies and solutions offered from time to time are too limited and too temporary to cope with the depth and scale of the problem. Many believe that it is necessary to overcome the rigid policies of NIMBY, or as I prefer to call them, the new urban Luddites holding back the increasing density and clustering of cities needed for innovation and economic progress. Of course, the time has come to reform the overly strict building and urban zoning regulations that limit the density of cities. City mayors certainly need more authority. But, no matter how many powers, they will not be enough. Complete solution to all
the challenges of the new urban crisis will require more.
To emerge from a deep systemic crisis and achieve a flourishing economy, we must put cities and urbanization at the very center of our agenda. As I noted at the beginning of this book, since the new crisis is urban in nature, so should its resolution. If we are to return to shared sustainable prosperity, we must become a fully urbanized society. The scale of the investment required is daunting, but this has already happened in our history. The good news is that we can make significant progress using the resources we already have. At the same time, a new strategy for a more productive and inclusive urbanization should be formed on the basis of seven fundamental principles. Below I will talk about each of them."
Florida R. New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Expensive Real Estate, Growing Inequality and What We Do About It / Richard Florida: Per. from English - M.: Publishing group "Tochka", 2018. - 368 p.
