Has the U.S. Passed Peak Car?
Richard Florida is Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. See his most recent writing at The Atlantic Cities. More
Florida is author of The Rise of the Creative Class, Who's Your City?, and The Great Reset. He is founder of the Creative Class Group.
Human progress, to a large degree, has depended on the continual expansion of social networks, which enable faster sharing and shaping of ideas. And humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city. As our cities grow larger, the synapses that connect them—people with exceptional social skills—are becoming ever more essential to economic growth.
The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?
America’s educated elite is clustering in a few cities— and leaving the rest of the country behind
