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You know magical thinking about cities is fading when one of the gurus says stuff like this:
“My optimism has been tempered and I’ve become more of a realist.”
That’s Richard Florida, the guy who inspired a (mostly unsuccessful) stampede to hipness 15 years ago with the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life.
Pretty soon we’ll have something like a decade of experience in losing our innocence about housing affordability. Isn’t it about time we got over it?
For a good part of the last century, we trained generations of housing consumers and housing enablers to buy and sell into what Chuck Marohn calls a “growth Ponzi scheme.” It was fun while it lasted, allowing a lot of us to postpone paying the tab for our delusions to some unspecified date in an imaginary future. Then we got to the real future.
I’m a freak magnet.
For reasons unknown, the more, err, colorful characters of the public realm seem to find my personal space especially attractive.
If I go to a midday matinée and another patron — let’s say an agitated mumbler in a trench coat with shoes crudely fashioned out of car wash sponges — joins me in an otherwise empty theater, that person will sit in the seat directly behind mine. Which he’ll then begin kicking.
Last Friday, I attended an inspiring Richard Florida luncheon put on by the Winnipeg Chamber, and can’t resist sharing the high points with you.
Technology, talent and tolerance are essential to fostering creative cultures. When we talk about the creative class, we aren’t talking about some rarified, exclusive group of people. Every human is creative. Creative cultures stoke that fire.
I’m a freak magnet.
For reasons unknown, the more, err, colorful characters of the public realm seem to find my personal space especially attractive.
If I go to a midday matinée and another patron — let’s say an agitated mumbler in a trench coat with shoes crudely fashioned out of car wash sponges — joins me in an otherwise empty theater, that person will sit in the seat directly behind mine. Which he’ll then begin kicking.
Jobs come up in every community-building conversation these days. It’s making me go back to the start, to think it through. What created jobs in the first place?
Division of Labor. Access to natural resources. Human settlement patterns: cross roads, rivers, oceans, eventually railroads and highways.
In the last few decades, many cities have been racing to the economic bottom trying to incentivize jobs. It’s led to jobs being all about giving away resources, and not so much about the value of connections.
