Urban Discoveries Baltimore

The March 2009 issue of the Atlantic has a must-read article by Richard Florida:  “How the Crash Will Reshape America.” Basically, instead of parroting gloom-and-doom forecasts, Florida looks at what has made the U.S. resilient in the past, and what will carry us through to the future. And the answer he comes up with rings true:  efficient, creative, diverse cities. Like, well, Baltimore. Read the whole thing, or just our synopsis below, and let us know if you come to the same conclusion we did—that with smart investment and creative approaches, Baltimore might be poised to be one of the success stories of the twenty-first century.

• Economic growth in the U.S. is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries. And diverse environments encourage creativity. Here’s Florida citing urbanist Jane Jacobs:  “Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.”
• And it’s the creative cities that will be able to adapt and thrive despite a generally uncertain financial future:  “Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can.” Cities with precisely this kind of “fast metabolism” become more efficient, productive and innovative as they grow; when businesses fail, they can re-absorb talent and come up with new solutions.
• The Sun Belt is facing even harder times because the region never developed a sustainable industry: “[Growth] was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. Whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.”
• The suburbs are part of the problem; while low-density sprawl may have made a certain economic sense in the mid-twentieth century, it’s the wrong geography for a creative, post-industrial economy… so any solution that attacks the problem through infrastructure spending will have to go beyond patching up bridges and building more highways, and instead develop “a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.”

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