Dense cities: Is Richard Florida right?

Having just listened to an interview between Paul Kedrosky and Richard Florida on Infectious Talk recorded last month, I felt compelled to address in rather short-handed blog form, some of the issues the gentlemen discuss.

While Professor Florida's insights have led to stimulating discussions about cities and the impact of geography and mobility and human "behaviour" on the economy,the questions related to how we might optimize productivity and creativity in geographic regions that he and so many socio-economists seek to answer with mathematical theory, strike me as somewhat rhetorical in nature--answered by the masses with their feet and bank accounts.

Human beings know where their utopias are, or at least what they "ought" to look like. And these utopias, depending upon a culture's shared socially constructed worldview, look quite similar to one another.

An unfortunate result, perhaps, of a more and more homongenized globalization is that while we may, as human beings, come to understand one another better and communicate more easily, we have diluted and are continuing to dilute the very diversity that helps to stimulate innovation. An irony inherent to university and college communities is that higher education reflects a form of diversity--often augmented by a flow of international students migrating around the world-- while that same diverse community is forced into homogeny by such things as measurement and rankings--be they city rankings or academic rankings (fueled by testing boards). Even the imposition of the English language, while opening dialogue, destroys diversity and for now--decreases clarity of much communication and knowledge sharing.

We are attracted to medium-sized communities like Boulder, Colorado or Austin, Texas because the communities are accessible yet rich in diversity and stimulation. We can comprehend what the community contains. Moreover, these places are situated in physically attractive terrain which draws a natural human response to the land and nature--mountains, lakes, trees. A keen desire to preserve these environments drives municipal governments to establish preservation laws, signage laws, building laws, and these things actually increase the community's attractiveness and drive up costs. The increased costs however are not usually driven by the market as much as by the increase in tax values on property (artificially imposed and therefore driving so-called regentrification). Another irony--or perhaps merely paradox. Can Boulder or Austin become too large? Absolutely? Would cities do well to shrink? Absolutely.

But what of the argument that the cost of energy and infrastructure is too high to allow for multiple diffused population centers that are under 500,000?

Well, first, while it is true that 50% of the world's population live in large urban centers, the other 50% all live in centers under 500,000. So which way do we want to tip the scale and why?

Second, there are reasons why energy costs more today than 15 years ago and it has little to do with the cost of productivity (except to the extent that we are building larger and larger homes and consuming more and wasting more). The energy industry, since deregulation, has driven up the cost of energy to sustain a virtual market tied to the buying and trading of electricity. We should ask what the re-regulation of the industry, some levels of protectionism of resources, and elimination of trading, and even of some, though not all, energy grids, would do to our cities and to the costs of energy. It might be interesting to see the kinds of energy innovations created in lands where the grids are not yet constructed--grids that will likely depend primarily on older technologies--albeit improved.

High density population centers, at some point, become uncomfortable. Tall buildings are aesthetically unappealing to those who live in their shadows (the buildings often look good from a distance as a part of a landscape--narrated into popularity by the architects and promoted by the realestate developer to gain the highest percentage return on rents and sales). City planners for the City of Paris since the time of the Industrial Revolution understood something about the aesthetic of scale when it insisted on its center being restricted to buildings under 8-10 stories high. Unfortunately, there is now talk to allow skyskrapers (other than the long-disputed Montparnasse) into the city center, despite the fact that Paris is the number one tourist city in the world--attracting human beings because of its organized and well-planned streets and architecture. Seven stories, to my mind, is an even better number for many reasons-- practical, aesthetic, and even philosophical or spiritual if you will. But that must remain for another discussion.

Today we can build the kinds of transport systems that we dreamed about 50 years ago, at less than half the cost--with better and safer materials: monorails, light rails, quiet roads, alternatively fueled cars and trucks. (Electric cars have been possible for many years, but we know that they have become more interesting to those who control the supply of power, so of course we will see advertising by large utility companies promoting their development and use).

The kinds of communities that people are attracted to are those that have "old towns" in them. Those that are far-sighted and modern without being tributes to functionalism for functionalism's sake. Those that have large parks, hills, rocks, varied terrains, and yet maintain some kind of order to sublimate the chaos that we often create of our lives. Those that protect the past and tradition, echo patterns that remind us of our history and traditions and who we might be, while striving to see a future that is even better.

City-centers are attractive for the life they project, but life does not mean sheer chaos like something reminiscent of a Hogarth engraving.

The key to quality of life and well-built environments is empathy, awareness of others' motivations, sensitivity to nature, repression of ego, expression of beauty in that rather Bottin-like sublime sense, and a complete elimination of the kind of greed and lack of ethic that has come to define capitalism and free markets today. Market drive does not mean that which industry shoves into the hands of consumers who can barely find time to educate themselves or even to find alternative choices if they wanted them. Market drive means competing with quality goods, not mediocrity. And market drive means allowing end users to dictate prices of goods, not artificially driven internal and virtual markets that prevent consumers from ever having a say about their own purchasing power. Perhaps we should not only shrink cities, but shrink or eliminate certain markets or market instruments themselves. Downsize and dimunize. Less really can be more.