Glendale is a good location for the times. Read on below for an Atlantic Monthly article’s predictions and excerpts on which this conclusion is based.
Among other clippings of interest to Glendale, California citizens last week were the Glendale News Press report on the newly approved Triangle Project, an infuriating cartoon detailing the actual performances and exit compensation packages of some of our nation’s top financial “talent,” and the announcement of a major Colorado newspaper’s closure.
All those clippings were buried under the 7-page Atlantic Monthly essay on the economic crash and its geographical impacts.
If the article is accurate, Glendale is a pretty good place to be situated. U.S. born urban studies theorist and University of Toronto professor Richard Florida begins with this thesis:
No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. Nonetheless, as the crisis continues to spread outward from New York, through industrial centers like Detroit, and into the Sun Belt, it will undoubtedly settle much more heavily on some places than on others. Some cities and regions will eventually spring back stronger than before. Others may never come back at all. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life.
Florida disagrees with those who argue that New York and the United States are about to rapidly relinquish global financial leadership, but comments that over the long-term:
…You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire—the fall long prophesied by Paul Kennedy and others.
He analyzes locations of greatest economic activity throughout the world and says that mega-regions, or systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings are where two-thirds of global economic output occurs and where nearly 9 in 10 new patents are created. The Los Angeles region is cited as having global strength in media and entertainment industries. Talent clustering, or
…Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can.
Geographical economists use the term “spatial fix” to describe how an economic era is reflected in the physical landscape. Glendale is by Florida’s measure well on its way to a post-crash economic and cultural development strategy (see the Triangle Project article, above!):
Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.