In a recent issue of FT Magazine, Edward Luce assessed the ongoing inversion of America's social geography:
That is why people like [Dan] Gilbert put so much emphasis on “place making” – creating a spectacle out of the street life that only cities can offer. It means good food, open-air events and renovated parks. Out go the discarded needles. In come the open-air chess boards. “American cities are becoming more and more European in their sensibility,” says [Richard] Florida. “It is all about lifestyle.” As the new urbanists put it (somewhat annoyingly), the US urban revival is driven by the “3Ts” – technology, tolerance and talent. ...
Today, people such as the author Alan Ehrenhalt talk of a “Great Inversion”, in which the educated (of all colours) are moving to the city and pricing the (often white) poor out to the suburbs. Some call it gentrification, or even “Brooklynisation”, after the revival of the New York borough. Others, such as Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, also at Brookings, talk of the suburbanisation of poverty. ...
It is a geographic inversion of the American Dream. “The suburbs were created to house the new middle-class in the 20th century,” says Katz of Brookings. “But the economy they were built around is vanishing. In the 21st century most of the good jobs are in the cities.” Nowadays the dream is as likely to involve an apartment close to the action in Manhattan or Haight-Ashbury as a picket fence McMansion in the suburbs.
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| Old dream |
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| New dream |
