Hi, everybody. Rich Florida here with an update on week four of the course. So, you've learned about why cities are important and what they do. We've talked about a world of cities and how people are migrating from rural areas in the countryside into cities all across the world, and especially, in the developing nations in the most rapidly urbanizing parts of the world. We've talked about how cities are creative and centers of innovative activity. And now, we're talking about what I've come to call the new urban crisis. The fact that in contrast to the old urban crisis of cities like Detroit or Washington, D.C. or Newark, New Jersey, where I'm from, or even New York City, where business and industry in the middle class moved out of cities to the suburbs. Now we see that was a crisis of almost urban-economic failure or dysfunction. The new urban crisis is a crisis of success, where so many of these cities, Toronto and Vancouver, New York and San Francisco, Hong Kong and Sydney, and Melbourne, and so many more, Boston and Seattle, are becoming so expensive and so unaffordable, and in many ways, the divide between rich and poor is getting so large that they have a new kind of urban crisis of success. So that's what we've been exploring. And we have, I mean, as usual, you guys have been great. You all have been great in providing spectacular comments and great questions, but we have three great comments or questions to think about and that I want to respond to. The first one says, cities like Vancouver are falling short of their potential because certain groups of people can't afford to live there anymore. It's become too expensive. As these segments of the population decline, innovators, creators, people of all sorts, as Jane Jacobs said, cities prosper because they're a diverse groups of people, the city's culture of creativity will suffer. The loss of that variety and creative atmosphere will ultimately make cities like Vancouver, or Toronto, or San Francisco, or Boston, less attractive, and maybe, over time, erode their economic competence. Well, this is a question I asked the great Jane Jacobs when she was still alive, and her and I became friends and I visited her in Toronto, and I asked her, what would happen to a place like Soho in New York City or great neighborhoods of Toronto or creative districts in Vancouver, and she said to me, "Richard, that's easy. When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave." So I think this undermining of creativity and innovation as cities become too expensive, now, the good thing is we're not there yet. And in my book, The New Urban Crisis, I document the fact that what's happened so far is it's been certain neighborhoods, certain parts of New York, certain parts of Vancouver, certain parts of Toronto, certain parts of London that have been dead and then dollified. But up until this point, great cities like New York, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Toronto, or Vancouver, have not lost their creative vibe. But there's no telling if this continues and these cities continue to become more expensive and less affordable, pricing out this diverse group of people and creative people. It could happen. The second question builds on this, and it's fantastic how these comments build on one another. Is this new urban crisis, this crisis of creativity, this divide between rich and poor, could it be the explanation for the rise of smaller cities like Detroit or Hamilton, Ontario, or Buffalo? As people have to move out to find more affordable housing, do creative types start to move to new locations and cluster new kinds of neighborhoods? Could this eventually lead to the rise of smaller cities and even the decline of the big superstar cities? I think it's already happening, but it's not happening everywhere. What's happening is you can see it with Hamilton. It's close to Toronto. People can commute. Yes, the traffic's long, but they can make it to Toronto. You see it in the areas surrounding New York City, not just suburban areas. You see it in Philadelphia. I mean Philadelphia may be the best example of this, a city that was down on its knees that has become sort of a creative and innovative center because people have moved there from New York. You see it in rural areas like the Hudson Valley towns outside of New York City. And you do see it in Detroit. But remember, Detroit is a big metropolitan area. It has more than five million people, it has great universities including universities like the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in Michigan State and East Lansing, and has a great global gateway airport, where people can get to Detroit from all over the world. So I think it benefits some subset of second and third tier cities but not all of them. And the ones that benefit are the ones that are relatively large, the ones that have great universities, and the ones that are reasonably close to existing superstar places. So I think that, yes, it is happening but we still end up with an environment that is somewhat spiky, and somewhat uneven, and somewhat concentrated. And then the final comment is, as middle class artists are priced out of great interesting creative neighborhoods like New York City, Soho, well, what do we as a society define as creative work? And this is really interesting because this person says, it's not just musicians and artists that are creative, entrepreneurs and innovators are creative too. I think that's one of the points of my work on the creative class. It's that we shouldn't make distinctions between different kinds of creative work. Artists, and musicians, and designers, and innovators, and entrepreneurs, and researchers, and scientists, and technologists, we all work with our minds. Our mental labor has become the means of production. Our human creativity is the fact of economic growth and innovation. So, in that way, I think what I'm talking about is a community values all types of creative work. And I say that in the new urban crisis. People talk about artists and musicians being priced out, yes, and it's true. In some of the priciest neighborhoods like Soho or Tribeca are some of the priciest parts of Toronto or London. But when I looked at the numbers, even artists and musicians were doing much better. Now they might not have been making as much money as techies, or scientists, or venture capitalists, or entrepreneurs, but there are a lot more left over after paying for their housing, the people who work routine service jobs and blue collar jobs and work with their physical labor, who do really precarious and contingent work for very low wages. So I think in many ways the creative class is a class. Yes, technologists do better and, yes, business managers do better, but the creative class is a class. And what we've found is that those less well-paid elements of the creative class, the artisan, musicians, may have to move to Brooklyn, or they may have to move to another neighborhood in Toronto, or they may get pushed into another community in London, but they still have enough to make it. I think the real thing that's happening in our society is that the third of us, who have the great good fortune to use our creativity at work, we are the ones who are prospering at a relatively advantage. It's the two-thirds of society who do blue collar work and manual work in factories or work in low-wage service industries that are bearing the brunt of this new urban crisis, that are bearing the brunt of rising inequality, that are bearing the brunt of increasing housing prices. So, I think that's really what we have to think about. How do we build a more unified economy which values every human being's talents and capabilities and values every community for what they can contribute? Again, thanks for taking part in the course, thanks for contributing these great comments, thanks for being part of the discussion forums, and look forward to seeing you again at least one more time next week.
