Hi! Rich Florida here. Well, we've now done two full weeks of the course, we've covered why cities matter, and then we've talked about, and you guys have talked about what is going on with this world of cities, you know we have so many cities in the world. They're growing so quickly. Billions of people, literally millions and billions of people streaming into global cities. And now this week, we're going transition to really something that's been really important to my own interest in cities and what makes a city, why is a city creative and innovative? And the big thing there is, you know, we used to think in the older economy it was companies and industries and firms, startup companies that drove innovation but we're coming to understand is it's actually this clustering of people and their ability to clash and clamor in cities that actually spurs innovation. So we want you to think about a creative city you might know or a kind of innovative city you might know. What's innovative about it? Is it arts, is it fashion, is it technology, is it food, so that that's coming up next week. One thing I wanted to say is, you know, our team here that oversees the course has been looking at the discussion forums and everything's been going fantastically, and thank you so much for your energy and your contributions. But one little thing that might be helpful to all of us as learners in the course is right now you seem to be posting like a statement or a fact or something you've seen. Maybe, what you could do in the future that might help us help you is to be able to respond to one another. So if somebody posts something under discussion forum maybe add to that or reply to that or try to have a conversation. Anyway, things are going great now and that's just one little suggestion for the future. But keep up the great work. Keep with it. We think the course is going great, we hope you do too. And looking forward to week three. Well one question we got this week from a learner is about my categories for--and other researchers' categories for--discussing global cities. And quite frankly, they're static. They kind of think about, you know, is one a superstar city is one less great city. I forget my exact ones but they're done by income level, is one above income, an average income and I think it's based on the World Bank. If I remember correctly our categories are based on what the World Bank uses to classify income groups, and then we say in that income group how does a city fit? Advanced cities, less advanced cities, below, you know, cities that aren't doing so well. But the comment was those are very static. They capture a city at a moment in time. Wouldn't it be better to have something that was dynamic? So maybe an up and down arrow, you know, a city that's doing better, a city that's doing worse, and that would be great, but I think one of the reasons I wanted to do this course is because we really don't have very much data at all on global cities. And you know, I got to address the United Nations a couple of years ago. I wasn't dressed like this I actually had a suit on. But, you know, and what I addressed the United Nations on, was exactly this. Cities are our most important economic unit. They're driving our economy forward, they help us mitigate poverty. They're important to the effort on climate change, on economic opportunity and even mitigating crime and violence, that our cities do all those things. But we don't have the kind of data we need to, we can't compare them. We can't compare a city in the United States with one in Canada, with one in Europe, with one in Asia. We don't have data for cities like we do for nation states. So, I would love to be able to tell you which cities are growing and which cities are declining. But right now we just don't have enough data to do that. And if you want to learn more about that you've got to go in yourself, kind of compare your city and look at data for that city, and try to compare it to some other cities. But unfortunately, the data to compare global cities the way we might want to isn't there, and that was a big inspiration actually for me, to set up this course to try to enable you as best we can to use the data we do have to understand our world of cities. Well the next question is a really interesting one for me because it kind of anticipates many of the issues we're going to talk about in week three and week four, the upcoming next two weeks of the course and it's about this nexus between creativity, this idea that a city is kind of the beacon, the spur of creativity but also there's ways to regulate that creativity, zoning ordinances, land use restrictions, restrictions on patents and if they go, it's a whole gambit of things that might regulate creativity. And then also, the question is about affordability. Has cities become more expensive as more people move back to cities? As they become less affordable does that drive the creative impetus out? And those are two really good points and I think my main point is that we're going to cover those in more detail in upcoming weeks. But the one thing is, I think there's some consideration now among urbanists that we've sometimes overregulated cities. That with these zoning codes and building codes that prohibit new kinds of development, work-live-units, work-live-spaces that we've we've kind of prohibited the kind of development that we need. But, but, but, you know, I say this and you read stuff and I have an old video on this. These great historic neighborhoods that we have in cities with great buildings and old warehouse buildings--the reason so many people want to live in them is because there are so few of them. So as we deregulate these neighborhoods and as we reduce our land use restrictions we've got to be really really careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater that we protect these very important neighborhoods where tech companies and young people and baby boomers and art galleries and restaurants all want to be. So that's number one. The affordability thing is becoming a big issue in what I call the superstar cities. So that would be London and New York and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris and we could go on. And tech hubs, tech hubs would be places like San Francisco or the Boston area or even smaller ones in the United States--the so-called college towns like Boulder or Madison, Wisconsin to use some examples. So I think in this case, you know, my own research that I write about my book about the urban crisis, we haven't quite priced the creativity out of cities yet. Even when you look at New York or San Francisco or London or Paris, they seem to be as creative in arts and culture and design and now tech companies have come back, but it's getting to a tipping point. And I think the bigger issue is could a young creative person now, you know, to some degree these cities might be resting on their laurels. Could a younger creative person in their 20s or mid 20s or even 30s afford to live in that city and afford to raise a family there? The way artists could in the 60s and 70s and 80s and that's a big open question. So I think we'll talk about that more. There's no definitive answer, but I guess my short answer is it's not yet, we haven't seen the creativity these great cities decline yet but we may be reaching a point where that may well be in the offing.
