Cool Cities: The Latest Version of Bread and Circuses.
Joel Kotkin diagnoses the ills of cities, and dismisses faddish solutions such as "cool cities," in this TNR essay reprinted at the blog Fix Buffalo Today.

Here's the nickel version of the "cool cities" approach: "Richard Florida ... seems to offer a simple formula for urban revitalization: Get hip and gay. Hip cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Boston are the new role models, Florida has argued; and non-hip locales are duly forewarned, as a headline in The Washington Monthly put it, that cities 'without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race.'"

Here's my favorite dismissal of the "cool cities" notion: "The number-one destination, in terms of net migration gains of young, single, educated people as a percentage of the total population? Naples, Florida."

Naples?

The idea that "cool" is the key to city life is just one of several propositions--call them a different kind of urban legend--that Kotkin takes apart.

Among the other urban legends:

• Cities are again gaining people;
  
• Cities are where the successful people are, or what Kotkin calls the "cult of ... the Darwinian superiority of cities."

So what can cities do? Make sure that the basics are available to residents: high-quality education for children, at a decent price; transportation systems that let people move from here to there at a reasonable price; policing that keeps crime under control, and so forth.

This will take mayors and other city leaders with formidable political courage to take on obstacles to reform. Kotkin cites teacher unions as a prime example.

"Right now school reform is often hostage to the power of teachers' unions. City budgets, which could be applied to improving economic infrastructure, are frequently bloated by, among other things, excessive public sector employment and overgenerous pensions. In the contest for the remaining public funds, the knitted interests of downtown property holders, arts foundations, sports promoters, and nightclub owners often overwhelm those of more conventional small businesses and family-oriented neighborhoods that could serve as havens for the middle class."

Boring policy, it turns out, is good for cities.

Labels: Cool cities fad

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