Is Urban Sprawl Over

Posted by on July 14, 2008 |

Richard Florida insists that high gas prices are not the only thing driving the move back to cities.  In today's Globe and Mail, Richard writes that we are moving toward a new geographic order -- what geographers call "the spatial fix."  

"Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age – the geographic expression of mass production...The creative economy is giving rise to a new spatial fix and a very different geography – the contours of which are only now emerging."

In today's idea-driven economy, "it's time costs that really matter. With the constant pressure to be more efficient and to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So the most efficient and productive regions are the ones in which people are thinking and working – not sitting in traffic."

The result, he writes, is that urban cores are again becoming centres for technology, jobs and economic growth.

Richard points out the new spatial fix is simultaneously more global and more concentrated – oriented around a smaller number of large world cities and global mega-regions.  This continues to reinforce the disturbing conclusions in Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort (a book, btw, that…

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