This article is the first in a three-part review of Richard Florida’s book, “The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It?”(The new urban crisis: gentrification, housing bubbles, inequality growth and what we can do about it. )
Anyone who has read my Twitter account in recent weeks will have seen statistics after statistics from Richard Florida’s book, The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It?I’ve never heard of Florida or its work before, but I must say that I find its subject infinitely fascinating and its writing style very transparent and engaging.
- It is a book about cities.
- Gentrification [1] and poverty and is a true treasure trove of statistics and information.
- He speaks mainly of the United States.
- But makes references to the United Kingdom throughout the book (in fact.
- My copy has a preface to the British edition.
- ).
Richard Florida wants us to understand the cities. He wants us to understand that global change is happening before our eyes and that many of us (who don’t live in these places) don’t know how tectonic it is, so, for example, Florida informs us from the beginning:
“London is moving away from the rest of the UK and the rest of the world. It’s almost a country in itself. Do Londoners have more in common with wealthy, connected citizens of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong than with people from other parts of the UK?
We’ll go back to that thought later. But what we have in this book is an American who clearly sees that the Brexit vote and the unrest in the UK a few years ago are a sign of the growing economic distance and social divide between the UK classes. He calls the UK “a country”. so unbalanced that it has fallen. “That’s when my ears started buzzing, and I hadn’t even left the show!
For Florida, many people in our cities are trapped in poverty and, surprisingly, one of the most affected groups, in their opinion, is the middle class. As he monitored global cities, he saw a pattern in which the most favored and the less fortunate are increasingly geographically separated within the urban area. So, he says, now we’ve entered an era he calls the “new urban crisis. “It is defined by five dimensions.
1. La widening economic gap between a small number of “superstar cities” (London, New York, Los Angeles, etc. ) and the rest of the world. These cities have a disproportionate amount of high-value business and talent around the world. He points out that the UK has the worst income inequality in Europe, with central London being hugely rich compared to the rest of the country, living with large bands of degradation and decline. This means that there is now a huge and growing culture and economic gap between London and the rest of the UK. Thus, for example, with regard to the recent vote in the European Union, he points out that more than 60% of London voted to remain against 70% of east Midlands votes (the numbers are almost as high as in much of the north).
2. These superstar cities face exorbitant housing costs which, once again, lead to huge inequalities. Most of the centers in these cities have vacant properties that have been bought solely as investments by billionaire / billionaire moguls who have no intention of live there. (More than 750 properties valued at £ 5 million in London are currently uninhabited). As this practice increased housing costs, workers were forced to leave the city due to inaccessibility of housing and rents.
3. Middle-class neighborhoods have now been drastically reduced as a result of these inequalities. According to Florida, two-thirds of the UK population identified themselves as middle class in the 1980s. Today is less than half. During the same period, poverty increased from 10% to 27% of the population.
“Instead of the old class division of poor cities versus rich suburbs, has a new model emerged?A metropolis of patches in which privileged small neighborhoods and large areas of poverty and difficulties cross the city and the suburbs ?.
4. The suburbs are becoming places of high crime, poverty and racial and class segregation. So, for example, almost all of London’s poverty was in the city centre. According to Florida, “Today, 60% of the poverty in Greater London is in the suburb of London?”(p. 8). In the old world order, the poor were in cities and urban centers, which were at the center of crime, etc. , and the emerging middle class and the rich have settled in the suburbs to escape social problems. especially in the world’s superstar cities.
5. The urbanization crisis in the developing world. Developing countries believe that if they build more cities, they will become rich like Western superstars. But the problem is that this has never been the case for most westernized cities. Western production comes from some of the superstar cities. “Superstar cities, in fact, form their own association, and they often have much more in common with each other than with other cities in their own country” (p. 19).
This new urban crisis is also fueling much of the gentrification taking place in and around many cities around the world. Florida is a fan of gentrification, to some extent, and that’s the part of the book I liked the most, because it happens to my own community (and all over Scotland) as we speak. “In general, gentrification describes a process in which a neighborhood gets richer and its population becomes more prosperous, whiter, and younger. (P. 65) Put this in the context of popular Scottish housing programs and we can be even more specific. Gentrification is an economic force for the good of our community (and others), but it is also evolving indeliblely.
[1] Editor’s note: Gentrification is a process of transformation of urban centers by changing the social groups that exist there, where the low-income community comes from and the inhabitants of the richest strata enter (Source: meanings)