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 lot of people love New York. They love it for the culture, the nightlife, the shopping, the opportunities, as well as for many other reasons. And these are all great reasons. But being the city geek that I am, there’s another reason I think New York is great: express trains.
Broadly speaking express trains are simply trains that run faster than other trains on a network. In the case of New York, there are express trains and local trains. The latter stop at every station and the former typically just stop at major transfer points.
To make this all work, the New York system uses a 4 track system. There are 2 tracks headed in each direction with the local train on the outside track and the express train on the inner track. On stations where the express trains stop, the 2 tracks split from each other and the platform sits in the middle so that you can switch across the platform from express to local (and vice versa).
The benefit of express trains is obvious. It makes it significantly faster to travel long distances. And it makes, in a lot of cases, taking the subway the fastest alternative. That’s how transit should be.
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:
Accelerating regional transportation
Enhancing the region’s economic performance
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.