The New Urban Crisis

Book launch hosted by Centre for London and LSE Cities

In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement in his ground-breaking The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrated how the same forces that power the growth of the world’s superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality. In London, unaffordable house prices saw people in their 30s leave the capital in record numbers over the last year.

But if this crisis is urban, so is its solution. Cities remain the most powerful economic engines the world has ever seen. Florida argued that the only way forward is to devise a new model of urbanism that encourages innovation and wealth creation while generating good jobs, rising living standards, and a better way of life for everyone.

The New Urban Crisis offers a diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring growth and prosperity for all.

This event was supported by British Land and UNCLE.

Photograph: Bill Parry

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    Richard Florida

    Richard Florida is a researcher and professor, serving as Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, a Distinguished Fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, and a Visiting Fellow at Florida International University. He is an author and journalist having written several global best sellers, including The Rise of the Creative Class. He also serves as senior editor for The Atlantic, where he co-founded CityLab.

    Ricky Burdett

    Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age project. He is a member of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board, and was chief advisor on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and architectural advisor to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. He was director of the International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2006. With Deyan Sudjic he is co-editor of The Endless City (2007) and Living in the Endless City (2011) and, with Philipp Rode Shaping Cities in an Urban Age (2018).