The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida
The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida
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The New Urban Crisis
How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do about It

Author: Richard Florida

Narrator: Traber Burns

Unabridged: 8 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/06/2017

Synopsis

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. Our winner-take-all cities are just one manifestation of a profound crisis in today’s urbanized knowledge economy.A bracingly original work of research and analysis, The New Urban Crisis offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all.

About Richard Florida

Richard Florida is a regular columnist for the Atlantic. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and other publications. His multiple awards and accolades include the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Idea of the Year. He was named one of Esquire magazine’s Best and Brightest (2005) and one of Businessweek’s Voices of Innovation (2006). He lives in Toronto, Canada.

About Traber Burns

Traber Burns worked for thirty-five years in regional theater, including the New York, Oregon, and Alabama Shakespeare festivals. He also spent five years in Los Angeles appearing in many television productions and commercials, including Lost, Close to Home, Without a Trace, Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Gilmore Girls, and others.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Matt

I want to be careful here: this book is a classic, a necessary reference for this point in time, but it is also a slog, a college text-type statistical brick and was not that fun to read. I feel like it was good for me, but it doesn't mean I really enjoyed it. Kind of like working out. But, I'm glad......more

Goodreads review by Lauren

Although I've read many of his articles on CityLab, this is the first full book I've read by Richard Florida. I was slightly surprised at how surface-level this book felt. The analysis and presentation of data was definitely useful in providing some concrete proof of certain economic and geographic......more

Goodreads review by Anthony

As a Bay Area resident facing rising rental costs, diminishing access to home ownership, crappy public transit systems dismantled by out-of-control car culture, and the expulsion by cities of their historically poor and non-white residents, I had hoped The New Urban Crisis would shed some valuable i......more

Quotes

“Florida takes a hard look at the problems and, as usual, comes up with some smart new policies. Making cities work for all residents is one of the great economic, political, and moral issues of our time.” Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“An essential diagnosis of our contemporary ills and a clear-eyed prescription of how to cure them.” Steven Johnson, New York Times bestselling author

“Bracingly confronts this tension between big-city elites and the urban underclass.” Wall Street Journal

“Traber Burns does an admirable job narrating…using good pacing and emphasis to make the prose as clear and easy to follow as possible.” AudioFile

“Vividly expose[s] how gentrification, followed by rising housing costs, concentrated affluence, and glaring inequality has pushed the displaced into deteriorating suburbs far from mass transit, employment, services, and decent schools…and proposes solutions.” Washington Post

“Florida writes about the tensions and the divides that have emerged within and between cities, between the broader community—and I felt it throughout the book and loved it.” The Atlantic

“A keen assessment of the state of global cities in 2017 and a vision for how they need to move forward.” Englewood Review of Books

“The New Urban Crisis provides a tidy, timely summary of the current urban problem, in all its enormity.” California Planning and Development Report

“Florida proposes promising ideas for building stronger cities that offer greater opportunities for all.” Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City

“A sweeping narrative of the most significant human movement of our times: global urbanization…Clear, compelling, and full of vision.” Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland

Awards

  • Library Journal bestseller
  • Bloomberg News Pick
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