A friend of mine sent me a link this afternoon to an art project called “Vacated”. The artist (Justin Blinder) reverse engineered Google Street View images to create a series of animated GIFs intended to demonstrate New York’s “changing urban landscape during the Bloomberg administration.”

In his description of the project, Blinder ends by saying that “it’s up to the viewer to decide whether this change represents widespread gentrification.” Given the recent discussion we’ve had (here on Architect This City) about gentrification, I thought this post might be a good addendum.

One of the big takeaways from our discussion, I think, was idea that there’s good gentrification and bad gentrification. Gentrification, after all, is really just another word for investment. And so generally I would consider this to be a good thing for communities.

But there are instances when investment comes in and ruins what made the community worth investing in, in the first place. Perhaps the investment brought about the destruction of heritage buildings or the loss of the fine grain urban character that initially made it a great place to be.

In these cases, I would say that this is bad gentrification. Sure there has been investment, but now the community has lost what made it cool. And as Jane Jacobs rightly pointed out: “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

Richard Florida recently gave a talk at the Rotman School as part of Toronto's “Big City, Big Ideas” lecture series. It was called: Why Creativity Is the New Economy. You can watch it here via Rotman. It’s about an hour long.

If you’re familiar with the work of Richard Florida, you’ll find much of what he talks about familiar. But there is one point that I think is absolutely worth reiterating again, and again: The new economic unit of our time is the city. It used to be nations but, in today’s world, cities trump nations, provinces and states in terms economic importance.

Florida has long stressed this point in his work and I think he’s absolutely right. The problem, however, is that our governance structures are ill-suited to deal with this shift. There are too many layers of government and our cities do not have nearly enough autonomy. 

Toronto is also facing a profound leadership deficit at the municipal level, to say the least (See Rob Ford). This cannot continue. Strong municipal leaders are critical to our sustained global economic competitiveness. It’s every global city for themselves and I, for one, want to win.

To give you an example of the dramatic rise of cities, take a look at this recent TechCrunch article on billion dollar startups. If you take a look at learning number 9, you’ll see an incredible interesting fact: San Francisco–not “the Valley”–is now home to the most billion dollar startups. Startups are eschewing the suburbs for the city.

I’ve written a lot on this trend, but I still don’t think that our governments have truly woken up to the fact that, in the new economy, our cities are our most important asset.

A friend of mine sent me a link this afternoon to an art project called “Vacated”. The artist (Justin Blinder) reverse engineered Google Street View images to create a series of animated GIFs intended to demonstrate New York’s “changing urban landscape during the Bloomberg administration.”

In his description of the project, Blinder ends by saying that “it’s up to the viewer to decide whether this change represents widespread gentrification.” Given the recent discussion we’ve had (here on Architect This City) about gentrification, I thought this post might be a good addendum.

One of the big takeaways from our discussion, I think, was idea that there’s good gentrification and bad gentrification. Gentrification, after all, is really just another word for investment. And so generally I would consider this to be a good thing for communities.

But there are instances when investment comes in and ruins what made the community worth investing in, in the first place. Perhaps the investment brought about the destruction of heritage buildings or the loss of the fine grain urban character that initially made it a great place to be.

In these cases, I would say that this is bad gentrification. Sure there has been investment, but now the community has lost what made it cool. And as Jane Jacobs rightly pointed out: “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

Richard Florida recently gave a talk at the Rotman School as part of Toronto's “Big City, Big Ideas” lecture series. It was called: Why Creativity Is the New Economy. You can watch it here via Rotman. It’s about an hour long.

If you’re familiar with the work of Richard Florida, you’ll find much of what he talks about familiar. But there is one point that I think is absolutely worth reiterating again, and again: The new economic unit of our time is the city. It used to be nations but, in today’s world, cities trump nations, provinces and states in terms economic importance.

Florida has long stressed this point in his work and I think he’s absolutely right. The problem, however, is that our governance structures are ill-suited to deal with this shift. There are too many layers of government and our cities do not have nearly enough autonomy. 

Toronto is also facing a profound leadership deficit at the municipal level, to say the least (See Rob Ford). This cannot continue. Strong municipal leaders are critical to our sustained global economic competitiveness. It’s every global city for themselves and I, for one, want to win.

To give you an example of the dramatic rise of cities, take a look at this recent TechCrunch article on billion dollar startups. If you take a look at learning number 9, you’ll see an incredible interesting fact: San Francisco–not “the Valley”–is now home to the most billion dollar startups. Startups are eschewing the suburbs for the city.

I’ve written a lot on this trend, but I still don’t think that our governments have truly woken up to the fact that, in the new economy, our cities are our most important asset.