This was an enjoyable read; my angle of interest is the evolution of cities, and urban planning policy-makers failures to understand this.

I spent years arguing against urban utopians faith in “vibrant” inner cities and “the creative class”. Now at last Richard Florida, a celebrity urbanist, has recognized that bohemianism is actually not synonymous with practical creativity.

I am further arguing that inner-city gentrification (which pushes out the Bohemians) is also seldom related to “creativity” of a kind that increases aggregate wealth. It is all about conspicuous consumption and “economic rentier” sectors like Finance, Bureaucracy, and Property Investment. Almost all the aggregate real wealth in the world is created either outside the cities, in the rural areas, mines, forests, oceans, etc; or in so far as production of goods is involved, this is almost entirely a suburban phenomenon.

Most of the wealth associated with inner cities, is a “charge” on the aggregate wealth that has been created elsewhere (or even worse, involves conspiracies to gouge from that wealth). It is really quite immoral for urban planners to give the “vibrant” inner city the primacy that they do. The US economy is what it is because of the vast real-wealth-creating economies outside of inner cities, and the planning of the past that enabled the explosion of suburban locations was not an economic mistake.

Frank Lloyd Wright summed it up very well: dispersion is going to happen anyway; why not plan it well? It was not well planned; but suburbanization was not of itself, an evil. Robert Fishman’s “Megalopolis Unbound” is worth a read. Some people are blind to the way that suburbs evolve anyway in response to big trends, so that they do not remain “sterile” or “uncreative”. Fishman’s term for suburbanites “cultural” activities, is “a la carte”. They travel by car to multitudes of different locations where they gather with people with common interests. Dense urban locations tend to risk a lot more inter-personal conflicts because of differing tastes (music, pets, children, sport, politics, etc).

Bohemians priced out of inner cities by gentrification, need to see their glasses half-full and find a suburb to make over. Your essay hints at this as the natural trend that lies ahead.