The buzz for urban planners over the past decade has been over "the creative class." Cities that could lure the young and hip would succeed in the new economy because they would create the next generation of cutting edge technologies and the businesses that would spawn off it. Other would want to follow behind them and growth, hip growth, would ensue. Since the members of this class could live anywhere they wanted, cities had to compete to create environments that would lure them: green spaces, clubs, restaurants, all that stuff.
Joel Kotkin is out to disprove this theory and presented his ideas to the Greater Houston Partnership today.
He calls his theory "opportunity urbanism" and argues that the creative class focuses too much on elites. The true growth cities are those that focus on building the old fashioned middle class by providing a solid infrastructure, good schools, a manufacturing base that attracts blue collar workers, and let's the fancy stuff take care of itself.
He uses Houston as a prime example of such a city and points out that the "superstar" cities like San Francisco and New York are pricing out the middle class and are actually losing population as a result.
