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.

I care a lot about transit.

I fundamentally believe that it needs to be the backbone of any well functioning and thriving metropolis. As the global economy continues to become an increasingly more urban one, we are seeing the rise of cities at a scale the world has never seen before.

Tokyo is over 37 million people. Jakarta is almost 27 million. Seoul is almost 23 million. And the list goes on. With cities of this size, do we really think it’s reasonable for everybody to be driving around in cars? It ain’t going to work.

Here’s an image from the Guardian, with the title, “Imagine if Paris had as many new cars as Mumbai”:

Now, by global standards, Toronto is a relatively small city, at just over 6 million people in the region.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have challenges. In my view, the single biggest threat facing Toronto’s long term economic competitiveness is our severe infrastructure deficit. It’s impacting productivity levels, social cohesion, the environment, our global brand and many other things.

Because of this belief, I’ve become interested in the work of CivicAction. It’s a group of non-partisan civic leaders who care about the future of our city. They have 3 areas of focus:

1. Accelerating regional transportation

2. Enhancing the region’s economic performance

3. Fostering inclusion and resilience

They’ve just launched a pledge that allows Torontonians to make their voice heard to elected officials. I just pledged to support new ways to raise funds for a better transportation network, and I would encourage you to do the same if you care about the future of our city. I know I certainly do.

At the time of writing this post, 2,821 members of the general public and 126 elected officials had pledged.

I’m going to New York City tonight. I’ll be flying Porter from the island airport. And I’ll probably walk there.

I’m a big fan of Porter and, while I’ve noticed some minor slippage over the last few years, it’s still one of the best flying experiences in the city.

But the island airport has always been a contentious subject. Stopping a bridge to the island was a fundamental part of our last mayor’s original election campaign.

Today the contentiousness is around expanding the airport so that it flies further using “jets.” Primarily people appear concerned about noise and that the runway will need to be expanded out and into Lake Ontario to a certain extent.

As someone who lives along the waterfront, I really don’t share the same concerns.

For one, the “whisper jets” are supposed to produce the same amount of noise as the current fleet, which don’t bother me in the least. I hear yappy dogs barking more than I hear planes.

Secondly, I think the island airport is fantastic from an economic development standpoint. If we were in Europe, Toronto would have high speed rail connections to New York City, Montreal, and other cities.

But it’s not Europe and we don’t have those rail lines. What we do have though is short haul flights from the island which, similarly, allow people to leave the city from downtown.

This may not seem like a big deal, but an extra hour can mean the difference been making and missing a morning meeting or whether your trip needs to be overnight or not.

If you’re against the expansion, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. Debate is important.