Editor’s note: This is an adapted version of the epilogue to the newly released paperback edition of The New Urban Crisis.
A colleague who heard me speak shortly after The New Urban Crisis was published in hardcover approached me at a follow-up event a few months later: “You seem a lot more optimistic than you did the last time I saw you,” he remarked. “What happened?”
His question took me aback, and I hesitated for a moment before venturing an answer. Then all at once it struck me. “You’re right,” I blurted out. “It’s because I’ve been traveling and visiting cities all across the country.” I’d been amazed at how willing people were to take ownership of their role in the new urban crisis, and how ready they were to devise new strategies to come to grips with it.
Over the course of my career in urbanism, I’ve constantly been inspired by cities’ capacities to adapt. For the past 20 years, an incredible number of cities big and small have successfully transformed their post-industrial neighborhoods into vibrant hubs of culture and commerce, in a process that is still ongoing. They worked hard to turn their downtowns and neighborhoods around, and now they are ready to take the next step, which is to create a more sustainable kind of urbanism that spreads its benefits more broadly—what I’ve called an “urbanism for all.”
[For more on this post by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...urban-crisis/560873/]
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