Richard Florida, author of the incredibly dense with way too much dry statistics for this brain, Rise of the Creative Class, writes:
But what’s happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order – what geographers call “the spatial fix” – of which the move back toward the city is just one part.
Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age – the geographic expression of mass production. Low-cost mortgages, massive highway systems and suburban infrastructure projects fueled the industrial engine of postwar capitalism, propelling demand for cars, appliances and all sorts of industrial goods.
The creative economy is giving rise to a new spatial fix and a very different geography – the contours of which are only now emerging.
Rising fuel costs are one thing, but 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. And, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, commuting is among the least enjoyable, if not the single least enjoyable, of all human activities.
Thus providing necessary background, data, and theory to my assumption that we’re leaving the industrial age and it’s economy altogether. On to the biological revolution!!! (see: Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry)
