Richard Florida

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.

Ten years ago, Richard Florida published a path-breaking book about the forces that were reshaping our economy, our geography, our work, and our whole way of life. He traced a theme through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity. In this newly revised and expanded edition, Florida has brought all of its statistics up to date (and provided a host of new ones); refined his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class; incorporated a decade’s worth of his own research; and addressed his major critics.

This is an engaging and sweeping examination of previous economic epochs, or “resets.” He distills the deep forces that have altered physical and social landscapes and eventually reshaped economies and societies. Florida identifies the patterns that will drive the next Great Reset and transform virtually every aspect of our lives—from how and where we live, to how we work, and infrastructure, to how we shape our cities and regions. These forces, when combined, will spur a fresh era of growth and prosperity, define a new geography of progress, and create surprising opportunities for all of us.