Richard Florida (Rise of the Creative Class) has an interview and article in the Atlantic on how the financial meltdown is likely to affect the geography of human settlement in the United States.  Following on his point in an earlier October 2005 article “The World is Spiky“) he argues that we should be optimistic about the outcome of what will essentially be a major realignment of the geographic distribution of prosperity and innovation, but that there will be winners and losers.  There will be enormous losses in many parts of the country, but the major mega-cities will likely thrive in the aftermath and grow.  Home ownership rates will decline (with a more mobile population of renters providing greater labor flexibility), and both innovation and wealth will be attracted to increasingly dense nodes in networks of creative professionals.  His prescription for accelerating the changes:  liberal zoning to densify urban core and surban ring, investment in rail, congestion pricing on roads, and an end to the tax deduction for mortgage interest.  The article is nicely decorated in the online magazine with an interactive map displaying geographic distribution (with time slider bar, no less) of patents, income and population.  The concentration and increase in patents is an interesting story, though I’m not sure the income or population ones necessarily back up his story.

As a resident and homeowner in a large post-industrial American city and a member of the so-called “creative class”, I’ve always found Mr. Florida’s arguments seductive.  However, I was also intrigued by an article in The Economist this week, making the case (with a map of the distribution of retirees) that communities in California that had fewer young people, opposed new development, had lower populations of renters and more retirees were more stable and had experienced little or no economic decline.