LocoReader

From a Newsweek interview with Richard Florida, author of "Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life":Cities have always drawn talented people. Is the increase you're talking about unprecedented?We don't have enough historical information to say. But certainly over the past three decades that we can track this, yes, it looks like a pronounced trend. The world is getting smaller, so more places can play in the world economy, but the number of places that play is fewer. If you think about what happened to the car industry or the electronics industry over the past 20 years, there used to be a car company or three companies in every country, and then there was globalization in that industry. Now GM and Ford and Nissan and Toyota are battling it out, while many companies fell by the wayside. I think the same thing is happening with urban areas. Every country used to have a dozen or two dozen great cities. Now people are saying, "It's a global world. I'm mobile and I can go to New York, London or Beijing, or Bangalore." We're picking from a smaller set of cities, not just nationally but globally. So the biggest cities in the world are getting bigger and more expensive...

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And what are those implications for policymakers?We're becoming so divided that these propulsive centers of our economy are generating fear, anxiety, and resentment. People say, "The cities are where the yuppies, trendoids, and gays live. We have to move back to family values." And our public policy actually punishes cities, as we transfer wealth from them to our hinterlands. It's in the culture wars, the Red and Blue states—the spiky centers are all bright blue, while the places being left behind are deep red. Barack Obama appeals to people in the spiky centers, Hillary Clinton appeals to the people in Ohio being left behind, and John McCain appeals to people who are outside and resentful of this kind of change. Sooner or later in our world economy, we're going to need leaders willing address this, but until then it's just going to get worse and worse, more and more concentrated. I think the real leaders with their heads screwed on right are the mayors. Regardless of party, a lot of mayors are focused on building thriving economies and increasing the quality of life in their towns.I've been hearing about this study and this guy for a while now. It seems a fascinating topic, and an interesting one for an odd little city like Charleston, which is seen one way by the gentry, another way by the tourists, and yet another way by the people who make the city go, many of whom came here from somewhere else.