The New Urban Crisis

How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class - and What We Can Do About It

By: Richard Florida

Narrated by: Traber Burns

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, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. 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 the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. Our winner-take-all cities are just one manifestation of a profound crisis in today's urbanized knowledge economy.

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2017 Richard Florida (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Lacking in equity analysis

The author elucidates powerful concepts like the gap between "super star cities" and other cities and "winner take all urbanism." He acknowledges the issue of concentrated poverty and suburban poverty, but his treatment of these issues isn't as thorough as his treatment of broader concepts related to the power of cities and the need to increase density or city living. One leaves with a great observation but no blueprint for addressing it besides the usual kinds of policy prescriptions. It's valuable for understanding urban development but the analysis for addressing race, class and equity is lacking.

Important Issue

This is a well researched and thought out book that discusses a very important issue of our time. However, it felt a lot like a textbook and was difficult to stick with at times.

Moderately interesting - but nothing new

The book presents well researched and factually accurate information. I bought it after reading a review in London Review of Books, which to be fair did state that the impact of the work was minimal, nothing compared to the first book. I would have to agree. I listened, and absorbed - and there are a few nuggets, but overall, I was not enthralled, and the information provided did not revolutionize my world view of urban development.

Good story but

I always find it distracting to have numbers read aloud to me, the important statistics seemed to get lost in the audible version. Don't know if that's just a personal thing or if others have the same problem

Information

The book was informative, it gave me some information that I didn't have previously.

I agree with his assessment 70%, the 30% I see differently. But overall the book is good.