I Am Still Alive

Richard Florida penned a piece for the Atlantic about how the recession will affect American cities.

“No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. Nonetheless, as the crisis continues to spread outward from New York, through industrial centers like Detroit, and into the Sun Belt, it will undoubtedly settle much more heavily on some places than on others. Some cities and regions will eventually spring back stronger than before. Others may never come back at all. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life…”

His look at ‘suburbanization’ particularly resonated with me on a personal level – as I am in the course of a move from Brooklyn (after 7 years) to who really knows where. I am on the West Coast now and thinking hard on where I’d like to settle for another longish period.

“Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.”

“But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.”

This idea of velocity is important to all aspects of urban life (economic, cultural, social, et c), regardless of how hard it may be to get by in a big city with much of your self intact. It’s that sense of velocity – pursuing it – I think that may push my decision one way or another.

“At AllthingsD.com, our website, we have coined a term for the economy; we’re calling it the ‘econaclypse’...”

And then

“Just because the market is in the eight thousands instead of the eleven thousands or unemployment – which is actually the more serious number in my opinion for gauging the length of the recession – is 8.5 percent, which it might get to rather than 4 percent, it doesn’t mean people stop working on new ideas, particularly in tech and particularly in consumer tech.”

‘Econaclypse’ is a phenomenal contraction.