They generate a lot of positive things, productivity, ideas, wealth,
social advances, cultural advances, political tolerance.
But, but, but they also generate negative things on the other side of the equation.
Waste, congestion, political stressors,
and this person says, how do you think about the good and bad?
And they believe the cities are doing more good than bad, and I think I agree.
You'll see when we get through the course to week four,
where we talk about my latest research on what I call the new urban crisis.
I make essentially the same point,
although I think the question frames it better than I do.
It set frames beautifully, that cities are driving innovation.
The clustering of people and ideas are making us more productive.
They're generating wealth, they're generating revenue.
But that same basic force, that clustering force, generates congestion.
It generates increased housing prices, it carves divides such as inequality and
it makes us more segregated.
It actually creates a political backlash in the form of populism and anti-urbanism.
But I tend to think on balance cities do, do more work with them.
I don't want to give the whole course away,
but I think that over the course of human history more and
more of us have moved to cities, more and more of us have urbanized.
Cities have become more advanced.
So I think these negative effects while they're quite really in our time and
especially as University of Toronto alums.
Especially in the great city of Lake Toronto or a New York or a London or
Seoul or Paris, and I could go on.
I think that ultimately it will be the place these problems are resolved
because cities, unlike gated suburbs are very diverse places.
They have representation across socioeconomic classes, ethnic and
racial groups.
So that political process, I think will cause these problems to be addressed.
And that's something we'll talk about more as the course goes on.
Second question, cities represent communities of individuals, people,
businesses, social structures, and the infrastructures that undergird them.
They are clusters of activities that help people live their lives and
better their lives.
They can also be destructive of this balance of work and living and
well-being get out of balance.
And this person talks about what happened in US cities, cities like Chicago.
That's so hallowing out, that's poverty, my own city were I was born, of Newark,
New Jersey.
Where the affluent moved out in the city was almost fully taken over by poverty and
economic dysfunction.
This person says, they become resource deserts.
How do we make these cities better?
What will be the future?
Well that's the subject of the course.
I think on the one hand, many of our cities have revived almost automatically.
The past 20 years have been the years in which cities like Chicago, Toronto,
Washington DC, Boston, London, cities all over the world have revived.
But not just those great cities, cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago.
If you go to Chicago, now it's downtown is thriving.
Cities like Detroit, even Newark where I was born, but
that revival process is uneven.
The affluent colonize certain areas of the city, that may be more the case in
Chicago or New York, But bt's also the case in Toronto.
And the poor are pushed out further and further, and our cities become separated.
We become really a tale of two cities as the affluent concentrate in certain
parts of the cities.
And certain parts of the suburbs around the downtown core, around transit,
around knowledge institutions, around amenities.
And the less advantage are pushed out further away, and
that's what the course is about.
We'll discuss that phenomenon, why it occurs and
also talk about how we can begin to have a conversation about and begin to solve it.
The third question is,
cities do something that few other forms of human organization do.
They manage people, they facilitate our interaction
on a massive scale in a non-hierarchical manner.
They evolve organically, they're kind of emergent systems.
Another way of saying is they have their own metabolism.
One thing I like to say is,
if we think at all other organisms as they get bigger you go from an ant, to a mouse,
to a cat, to a dog, to a person, to a horse, their metabolism slows down.
Cities are the one organism that as they get bigger they have to get faster,
their metabolism has to speed up.
And as Jane Jacobs, really the greatest urbanist of all time,
told us cities are really arenas of disorganized complexity.
There isn't a master plan, there isn't a boss, there isn't a hierarchy.
It's groups of people organized in neighborhoods that kind of find one
another and they emerge, they emerge organically.
And actually, when we try to intervene with big top down plans,
oftentimes we throw off that balance.
So yes, this question or this learner is absolutely right.
Cities are unlike business corporations, they're unlike business firms.
They're unlike other forms of human organization is that they
are quintessentially emergent and complex and dynamic.
And they have their own unique metabolism, and that's why they're so
interesting to study.
And the fact of the matter is if the farm was the platform of the agricultural age.
And the factory was the platform of the industrial age,
these complex, self-organizing, dynamic,
disruptive places called cities which depend on us, right?
To combine and recombine and create ideas and
new things are really platforms of the knowledge age.
So not are they only a different kind of organization,
they're the kind of organization that is in many ways the principa.
Or primary organization that organizes our economy and society in the knowledge age.
Thanks so much for being part of the course.
Thanks so much for these unbelievably fantastic questions.
Please continue to contribute.
Please continue to be part of the discussion forums.
And please continue to build on one another's ideas.
And if you have a question for me, or you have a concern about the course,
there's something we could help you with.
Please email me, and I'll make sure either I or
a member of the course team handles it.
And thank you again for being part of The City and You.
Richard FloridaUniversity Professor and Director of Cities, University of Toronto
