The below piece was published as the lead story in Aspenia, an Italian journal on international affairs. Their June issue explores the "rise of the city-state.”
Around the world, nation-states are looking backward—electing populist leaders who want to set back the clock on economic, social, and cultural advancement. Our cities remain our truest beacons of progress and compassion, developing new approaches to equity, devising new initiatives on jobs, healthcare, and education, and, of course, hosting the clusters of talent and technology that power innovation and economic growth and raise living standards.
But this reality has created a lopsided prosperity, which I call “winner-take-all urbanism.” A small group of cities across the world, a small number of neighborhoods within them, and a small sliver of their advantaged classes haul in the lion’s share of benefits from our new urban age, while many more cities, many more neighborhoods, and many more people fall further behind.
Winner-take-all-urbanism has in fact set in motion the populist backlash that sees cities as the enemy and would cut off their sources of growth and progress. The very same clustering of talent and economic assets that has made cities so successful is also fracturing our society. This new urban crisis is not just a crisis of cities; it also represents the fundamental contradiction of modern knowledge-driven, place-based capitalism.
[For more on this story by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...s-and-losers/562583/]
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