Richard Florida Week 4 Follow-Up Cohort 3

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En provenance du cours de University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

47 notes

University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

47 notes

Welcome to The City and You: Find Your Best Place. I'm excited to have you in the class and look forward to your contributions to the other learners in our community. This free course will provide the knowledge and the tools needed to understand what cities do, why they matter, the forces shaping the greatest wave of urbanization in history, and how to pick the right place for you. The course will also help you develop critical thinking skills. We'll accomplish this by providing evidence of the importance of cities, and why and how they matter to you. Then we’ll ask you to apply what you’ve learned in an exercise which will help you assess your own community and find your best place. This course is accessible and open to anyone who is interested in learning more about cities and the ways they affect our lives. It is organized around five key modules: (1) Why Cities Matter, (2) A World of Cities, (3) The Creative City, (4) The Divided City and the New Urban Crisis, and (5) How to Find the Best Place for You. After completing the course, you will be able to: (1) Identify why cities are the drivers of economic prosperity; (2) Explain the drivers and implications of fast-growing urbanization worldwide; (3) Outline the key characteristics of a creative and innovative city; (4) Describe the social divides and challenges facing cities and the solutions cities are using to address them; and (5) Recognize the trade-offs of staying in your current city versus moving, and identify the best place for you and your family to live. Good luck as you get started, and I hope you enjoy the course!

À partir de la leçon

The New Urban Crisis

This session will help you better understand the New Urban Crisis and the growing economic divides that challenge cities today. In the second half of the 20th century, society was divided between poorer cities and richer suburbs. But, over the past decade or so, affluent and educated people have flocked back to urban centers pushing poverty out to the suburbs. Today, middle-class neighborhoods are in decline and our societies are defined by small areas of concentrated advantaged surrounded by much larger areas of concentrated disadvantage spanning the city and its suburb alike.

The New Urban Crisis (Instructor Video)10:40

Gentrification and the Divided City (Instructor Video: includes discussion of the exercise for this module)4:29

Richard Florida Week 4 Follow-Up- Cohort 17:51

Richard Florida Week 4 Follow-Up Cohort 211:05

Richard Florida Week 4 Follow-Up Cohort 35:01

Richard Florida Week 4 Follow-up - U of T Alumni Edition8:04

Rencontrer les enseignants

Richard Florida
University Professor and Director of Cities, University of Toronto
Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management

Hey, gang, Rich Florida, here.

We're now in week five of our course.

And well, you've learned about why cities are important,

and why they matter,

how and why we live in a world of cities

with billions upon billions of people streaming into cities.

You've learned about why cities are these cradles of innovation and creativity.

And in the past week,

you've covered this issue of the new urban crisis,

the subject of my most recent book published this year.

The idea that as our cities have come back,

become these places of innovation, of economic growth,

attracted people back, experiences urban revival,

they've generated new and vexing problems of urban success.

They've become increasingly unequal,

people become separated into neighborhoods of the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

Some of that in cities, some of that in suburbs.

And many have become increasingly unaffordable, in some cases,

in big cities like London or New York or Toronto or Stockholm or many others,

become unaffordable to anyone but the super rich.

And next week, you'll be in the final week of the course,

and then learn how to apply all of this,

trying to pick or choose.

Then even if you like the place you live,

to thinking about this in a structured way,

why it's important to think about,

and choose the place that's best for you,

and best fits you and your family.

We had a bunch of interesting questions this week,

but one seemed particularly useful to me,

and I have it here on my handy-dandy handheld computer.

And this learner says, it's Lisa.

Lisa says, "Ironically, what some people call gentrification, others call revitalization.

Most people would consider lower crime,

a cleaner neighborhood, more business in restaurants, a good thing.

But the flip side of

this urban revival or improvement means that rents and home prices rise,

and residents, perhaps even long-term residents, get priced out."

It's a tricky problem.

And what can we do about it?

Well, one of the things we talk about in the videos of the course in my book,

in the readings, is that gentrification itself is a really emotionally-laden term.

It's actually quite uncommon.

People call a lot of attention to it, but actually,

according to the best estimates we have,

maybe 5-10% of urban neighborhoods have been gentrified.

That is, they've been a relatively low income neighborhood where

wealthier people have come in and pushed out people.

The second thing we know is that while a lot of people

talk about getting displaced by gentrification,

that is also quite uncommon.

What typically happens is neighborhoods that

gentrify are either older industrial neighborhoods where no one lived,

there were factories and warehouses,

or they're typically more,

and when I say more affluent, relatively affluent,

white, working class neighborhoods,

where people own their homes and can sell them and make a profit and move.

While we hear these stories,

and it's certainly true that in some neighborhoods in cities like New York or London,

lower income people have been displaced,

that's the exception to the rule.

And gentrification within bounds can be a good thing.

When income comes into a neighborhood,

when businesses are upgraded,

when neighborhoods conditions improve,

when schools are better.

The problem is when people are kicked out.

One leading scholar said recently,

"We always want to encourage people to move to better neighborhoods,

but what if we made their neighborhoods better."

Problem is when we make their neighborhoods better,

some people do get kicked out.

So I think the real issue is how do we create public policy measures,

particularly at the local level in our great cities,

that enable people who may be getting displaced by gentrification or might more likely

are being displaced by higher housing prices generally,

to stay in those cities.

And I think that's the case we want to make,

not the staunched gentrification,

but really to create more affordable housing and more workforce housing,

and that's really the agenda.

How do we make all neighborhoods more affordable for people with less means?

The ways to do that are to provide basic income support,

to provide rental supplements or housing vouchers.

So there are all the things we can do to make neighborhoods more affordable,

and I think that's really the question,

not how you keep the gentrifies out,

which may be the emotional response.

How do you make housing affordable for all different kinds of people from

all different kinds of socio-economic strata to live in a place they want to leave?

So thank you for that question.

Keep writing in your questions,

and keep contributing to the course,

and especially, keep up the conversations on those discussion forums.

It's great being with you again this week.

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