How the Crash Will Reshape America

Interesting article on America’s geography post-crash — the end of the “sprawlconomy” and the beginning of the information economy… go read the whole thing if you’re interested, it’s good.

What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

The Stanford economist Paul Romer famously said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes. Over the course of the 19th century’s Long Depression, the country remade itself from an agricultural power into an industrial one. After the Great Depression, it discovered a new way of living, working, and producing, which contributed to an unprecedented period of mass prosperity. At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?

via The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida.

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5 Responses

  1. The idea of clustering (nearly) the whole population into megacities which produce nothing material does not seem a complete or sustainable solution. Rather, I think the internet allows people to live wherever there is connectivity, and a few well designed public transportation systems can make the central areas reachable from far away. Nothing in this article was said about farming and agriculture, leaving the multinationals in charge of feeding us would be a bad idea in my opinion.

  2. I do understand your concerns. If you read Bruce Babbitt’s “Cities in the Wilderness”, he predicts the future is large, compacted cities surrounded by less densely populated more suburban areas and farmlands and wilds with protected watershed areas surrounding those rings. Very sustainable.

    We don’t want people everywhere, that’s what is destroying our planet. If they are more concentrated, but in a sustainable way, it’s going to actually work out better for us. There will be lots of wild space for those who prefer to live there, too. Think northern California, with San Francisco as the megahub, or Seattle with all the Washington wilds, or Portland, Vancouver, Toronto. They are the future great cities. Perhaps even San Diego, if we can preserve enough of the wilds around it…

    Anything will be better than the spawlconomy we have now. Contrast to the crap that Phoenix has become. Contrast Tucson, which also is too sprawled, but has promise. Outer areas have been kept more wild and are still salvageable.

  3. Also think great Universities in the center of these hubs, education and spreading information. We don’t need more stuff, more production. We need to produce enough that people are comfortable and cared for, but not so much that we are wasting 60% of what we do produce.

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