Archinect - News

'The New Urban Crisis' as Richard Florida's mea culpa

2017-08-21T14:45:00-04:00

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

Richard Frorida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes. Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. “Much more than a crisis of cities,” he writes, “the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time” — “a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”

The author offers both—specific solutions like more affordable housing, more investment in infrastructure, and higher pay for service jobs—and va...

Trudeau stakes Canada's economic growth on architects

2016-08-23T14:09:00-04:00

With the U.S. presidential election coming up, a few Americans are considering moving to Canada, a move that actually might be lucrative if you're an architect. Responding to the forces of globalization, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is aiming to inject new economic life into his country by investing in traditionally brainy industries like architecture and accounting, as reported in this Bloomberg News article:

So if manufacturers won't do the heavy lifting, who will?

Enter Diamond. The world-renowned architect employs 180 people, including 140 architects, in an airy but respectfully renovated early 20th-century building in Toronto’s Fashion District. It was Canada’s education system that brought him to the country—he set up the post-graduate architect program at the University of Toronto in 1966—but his eye has always been turned outwards.

For more on architectural employment tips/trends:

This "Decade of Perks" is ruining our creativity

2016-01-20T13:10:00-05:00

Give employees all the tools they need to innovate, make space for a little fun, then watch the sparks fly. The truth about creativity, however, is considerably less convenient. Discomfort, and even a degree of hardship, are what drive creativity, not bean bag chairs and ping pong tables. [...] if companies want to nurture creative employees, not only content ones, they must include challenges and even a dash of hardship in their bag of perks.

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