At the risk of flogging a dead horse, it's noteworthy that Richard Florida's new book, "The New Urban Crisis", by and large, falsifies his earlier pronouncements on the "creative class" and his recipes for urban renewal.
It's another sign how dead "left-wing neoliberalism" (aka diversity, tolerance, globalization, culture are good and can be advanced through individual freedom and the market) really is. Florida's proposed solution: public housing and local self-governance..... While it's hard not to feel a certain glee about this mea culpa, I wonder how long it takes until this trickles down into a further slashing of cultural funding.... https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richard-florida <...> "After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich. In 1979, Pierre Bourdieu wrote that the consumption and production of art gave the upper middle classes a “dream of social flying,” a feeling that their tastes and beliefs were somehow untethered from their objective class positions. The creative classes of major western cities were better at this than anyone. Over the last decade, Florida has been beating a retreat away from some of his early optimism. As early as 2005 he described the “externalities” of the rise of the creative classes — namely, they brought dizzying levels of income inequality into every city that they’ve inhabited. As his work evolved, the “creative economy” has ceased to be a goal and instead become an unstoppable force, something that governments need to be tame rather than encourage. His latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes. Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. <...> Florida’s offered solutions are modest. They range from the specific — more affordable housing, more investment in infrastructure, and higher pay for service jobs — to the vague — “engage in a global effort to build stronger, more prosperous cities in rapidly urbanizing parts of the world” and “empower communities and enable local leaders to strengthen their own economies.”" <....> -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
