Business

Globalization increasingly takes shape around city-regions with large concentrations of talent. Leading scholars concur that urbanization economies are the decisive drivers of economic growth, more important even than technology and innovation. As I argued in Rise of the Creative Class, cities are the key economic and social organizing units of the creative age. They promote economies of scale, incubate new technology, and match human capital to opportunities, ideas to places, and innovations to investment. They capitalize on the often chaotic ecosystem that creates previously unforeseen financial, scientific, social, political, and other linkages to one another.

Urban centers are therefore a core element of the infrastructure of creativity and competitiveness. Yet, in the United States, we have relegated cities and urban policy into a social policy afterthought. At best, cities have been conceived as the responsibility of mayors and city planners. At worst, they have been denigrated as reservations where the poor are allowed to exist.  In today’s creative centers, affordable housing and commercial space is being wiped out at an alarming rate. It is yet another irony of the creative age that as we rediscover the importance of vibrant cities, we threaten to choke off the very street-level energy that creates a vibrant city. We must find a healthy balance that allows real estate development to occur in ways that support rather than choke off our creativity and innovation engines.