Hi. Rich Florida here, and thank all of you for being part of our special version of our online course, The City and You, developed for all of you, U of T alumni. We have covered why cities are important and what they do. We talked about how we live in a world of cities and how cities are really an urbanization or the elements that power the growth of our societies and growth of our economies and growth to this global economy, economic world we live in. Now, we're talking about really why cities and how cities are key drivers of innovation and creativity. What really drives our economy is the clustering of people and knowledge and ideas and the ability of people and ideas to combine and recombine in cities. Our cities have long been the great organizing units of creativity and innovation, the sources of economic and social and cultural progress. So it's great to have you a part of the course and it's great to share what I know and the learnings I've made about these and hopefully you're excited and as passionate about this as I am. We have several, well there has been many, many comments from folks, alumni, who are participating in the course and we picked three. Our team and I pick three for me to talk about, really talking about week two of the course and this idea of the city, and the rise of global cities. The first commenter says, really what are the factors that make a global city? Every city has its own story. But what are the factors that global cities have in common? Well, that's a tough question. I think one thing that we know is that global cities and cities that are global cities now, most of them develop a long time ago, even if they're rapidly expanding cities in China or in Southeast Asia. Our global cities today tended to develop a long time ago as areas around rivers or harbors, natural harbors, and ports. They were places people settled around fertile agricultural soil, river deltas, they are places people began to locate and to use waterways to trade goods. I think what defines a global city today is that it has a certain threshold of population that is bigger than a million people, no probably bigger than five million people maybe bigger than 10 million people, that it has significant knowledge-based institutions and has great universities like the University of Toronto. It's a place that is connected to the global economy and one thing that we're learning is the role of airports, and global airports and global gateway airports play a huge role in creating a global city. And so all of these factors combined to create a city that's part of a global economy. There are many other kinds of cities but when we say a global city, you mean a city that's really fundamentally integrated into the world economy. And here's kind of a number for you, when scholars and researchers really try to enumerate the number of significant global cities of the world economy, the number they come up with is about 50. There is about 50 cities in metropolitan areas around the world like New York, or London, or Hong Kong, or Toronto, or Sydney, Australia or Bangkok, Thailand and many others that have the level of scale, the level of economic development, the level of interconnectivity that make them what we'd call global cities. Cities that are really part of the connections and connectivity and the structuring of economic activity in the world economy. Our second comment talks about the fact that cities are these organisms. They're living organisms. They have their own metabolisms. They have their own ecosystems and that's really about the natural environment of cities and what happens if that natural environment is that ecological diversity is thrown out of balance. The way I like to think about it is that cities are combinations of a human factor, there are human beings in cities. Our natural environment, that natural environment, the biological environment of cities. And a built environment, and that built environment are things, the infrastructure, the buildings, the housings, the office buildings, the streets, the subways, the trains we put in, the airports we put in cities. And sometimes, that built environment itself can be at odds with the natural environment and so one of the things we're learning is that we have to adapt our built environment to the natural environment. Instead of building up to the very edge of coastlines, to allow a natural coastal areas to develop, to allow them to be buffers for flooding and water control. Oftentimes, we believe that we can reconfigure the physical environment to keep the natural environment at bay but with climate change, with a warming planet, with sea level rise, we're showing how difficult that is. So I think, you're absolutely right. This line of questioning is absolutely right, that cities not only have a metabolism, we talked about this last time, they're the kinds of places, the one kind of organism that as it gets bigger, its metabolism speeds up. That they're part of these physical and natural ecosystems that have to be kept in balance. And that's one of the things, I think, the field of city building and urban planning is focusing on more and more today. We're still no there. We still don't fully understand how to keep the natural, the human in the biological part of our cities, and the physical part of our cities in balance, but we are getting better. The final question talks about, global cities are not just parts of their own country, they're part of a global economy. And today, our global cities are really spiky, a lot of investment, a lot of talent, a lot of immigration, a lot of wealth is concentrated in a small group of cities. My own rubric is that the 40 largest mega regions, the areas like the New York, Boston, Washington corridor, greater London, greater Tokyo, Shanghai to Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, Sao Paulo in Rio, these mega regions house less than 20 percent of the world's population, they produce more than two-thirds of all of our economic output, and about nine in 10 of our innovations. So the world really is spiky. And this commenter says, it's producing a backlash, and a backlash in the form of populism, in the form of nationalism. This commenter says, racism and xenophobia. Absolutely, right. And you'll see when we get to the section of the course in a couple of weeks on a new urban crisis, that's sort of the fundamental theme of my latest book on the new urban crisis that the very clustering of people and ideas and wealth and economic activity in a small number of cities that drives innovation and economic progress creates these enormous divides between regions, successful regions, successful cities and less successful cities, and within them that carved these huge divides in our society that precipitate this backlash of populism and nationalism. My great friend, the late Ben Barber, the political theorist, anticipated this in the early 1990s. He wrote an essay for The Atlantic magazine and then a book called Jihad Versus McWorld. Jihad being the nationalizing aspect, McWorld being after McDonald's, this global homogeneous spiky world. And Ben, back there predicted, he said, the real divide in our economy would be between the global cosmopolitans that are connected through these cities and the nationalists who are saying, "No, no, no. We're being pushed further and further behind." So I really think the way out of it is to make sure that our global cities and these innovative impulse no longer carves divides. And I talked about moving from a kind of winner take all, we'll talk more about that in week four of the course, but moving from our current system of winner take all urbanism when a very small subset of global cities and a very small subset of areas within those cities are the big winners, and everybody else goes farther and farther behind to a kind of what I call an urbanism for all. And we are more and more of us and more cities can share in the growth of our global economic system. But I think that it's good enough to stop there for today. Let's focus today on what global cities are and how they're growing and what global urbanization is. We'll talk next time about the growth of creative and innovative cities. And then in the fourth week of the course, really turn to these problems, this fundamental contradiction of our society, this fundamental new urban crisis where the same forces of concentration and clustering to create wealth also create the divides that force our society further apart and create this kind of populist backlash. Again, thanks for your contributions. Thanks for being part of this course. We have a record. Thanks to you, we have a record enrollment and please, if you have questions, I know quite a few you have written in to me. There were questions for registration to the discussion boards and discussion forums. Please feel free to write myself and the course team. My colleague, Karen King, have been all over this and trying to resolve any issues you've had. Please continue to be part of the exercises we're doing, in the assignments, and participate in the discussion boards and forum. And again, thank you for being part of this journey and learning about the city and you.
