Richard Florida's New Groove

Richard Florida - love him or hate him there's no denying he is a mainstay of urban theory. After his bestselling book "The Rise of the Creative Class" drove a new era of innovation and commercial redevelopment - some say to a fault - we find ourselves in cities that are suddenly pricing out entire segments of their population as the gap between lower and upper class only increases across the US.

In this episode we discuss his new book "The New Urban Crisis" (and the speaking series that goes with it) in an effort to unpack the issues of inequality, agency, and neoliberal policies that have shaped our current situation. What does Florida think we should do? Is this a repackaging of his old concepts? And does he do enough to think outside of the box and bring in the kind of radical - and ethical - futurism that our cities need?

As always, you can keep up with our thoughts and send us your comments on Twitter or Instagram:

Katrina can be found at @think_katrina

Kristen can be found at @blackurbanist

And if you like these conversations and advocating for human-scale cities, you can donate to our efforts on our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/thirdwaveurbanism. Thank you all for listening!

Here are the references in this episode:

City Lab article: “Two takes on the fate of future cities”

https://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/04/two-takes-on-the-fate-of-future-cities/521907/?utm_source=nl__link3_042117

Washington Post: “This guy convinced cities to cater to tech-savvy millennials. Now he’s reconsidering”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2017/04/17/as-the-creative-class-divides-america-its-inventor-richard-florida-reconsiders/?utm_campaign=6c045158c6-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_20&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Editorial%20and%20Events&utm_term=.86428f27dd8e

CityLab article: "Cities can’t fix the new urban crisis"

https://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/04/the-case-for-regionalism/524013/?utm_source=nl__link3_042417

Scholarly critique: “Doing a Florida thing: the creative class thesis and cultural policy” http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10286630902763281

And his original creative class thesis: http://creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/4%20Cities%20and%20the%20Creative%20Class.pdf

Philadelphia’s office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy: http://creativephl.org/

Intro and closing music is "Urban Life" by Gustavs Strazdin used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode