I like to keep up with the latest demographic research and predictions about the future of cities, and so I recently started reading Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. 
Joel is referred to as America’s “uber geographer” by the New York Times, and he contributes a great deal to a global conversation on cities. He is Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and an Adjunct Fellow with the Legatum Institute based in London, UK. Joel is highly respected as an authority on political and social trends, urban issues, and economic development.
Since CityandCitizen will be a site focused on cities and a host of city-related topics, I thought it would be great to start with a brief interview with one of the leading experts. Here are few questions I recently asked Joel:
Travis Vaughn: Joel, you’ve written a great deal about what it takes for America’s cities to flourish. Can you talk about that a bit?
Joel Kotkin: Different cities will flourish differently. The elite ‘luxury cities’- New York, SF, Boston – will do best by keeping some of their middle class and not chasing away business entirely. The aspirational cities – say Houston, Dallas, Charlotte – can grow through being pro-business, relatively affordable and by moving into high value added industries. The rust belt cities will need to take advantage of their latent skills (craftsmanship), low prices and historical amenities (neighborhoods, cultural institutions) if they want to revive
TV: From your perspective, what are two of the biggest challenges (social, economic, cultural) facing cities in the West today?
JK: The biggest problems for cities are the growing class divide and the political economy which works against job creation (public sector bloat, anti-business attitudes, weak basic infrastructure).
TV: Can you talk about your work? Why the interest in cities?
JK: I grew up in NY and have lived in the City of LA for the last 35 years. Cities are evolving creatures and interesting not only in their similarities but differences. Actually particularly their differences. Each has a different DNA , historical trajectory and set of possibilities. Much of work has also taken me abroad where I have studied such cities as Singapore, Mumbai, Mexico City and London; each of these is very different, yet face some similar issues. The key is to look at cities as residents see them, not as extensions of some academic theory. That is what I tried to do in The City: Global History, using diaries and firsthand accounts as much as possible. Cities are not intellectual constructs; they are agglomerations of stories and people. That’s what makes them interesting.
TV: Your latest book talks about the future of cities. What do you see as the biggest difference between cities of tomorrow and cities of today? What are the similarities?
JK: The similarity is that cities that are aspirational usually gain the most – in part because they have ambition to grow. Those that have lost hope and ambition – for good reasons or not – will lose out. The biggest difference today is we have many steady-state cities, places that really don’t want to evolve except as amenity regions. This is a relatively new phenomena.
TV: You’ve written about “cities of aspiration”. Can you unpack that a bit?
JK: A city of aspiration attracts ambitious newcomers who then make a life there. It is not a place, for example, one sojourns just to get the ‘experience’ and then move on. It is a city that promises the prospect of upward mobility for more other than the elite class.
TV: What do you see as the biggest shift(s) in religion in the 21st century, and how do you think these changes will play out in American cities in the future?
JK: Religion will continue to be a force, but it will become less formal and more diverse. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam – as well as various branches of evangelical Christianity – will remain important even as formal church attendance declines. The key thing about religious institutions is that they provide a method of social support that is not dependent on the state or politics. It is critical to maintaining families – particularly children and the elderly.
TV: It seems that you disagree in some ways with those who advocate for an intensely “urban” future. Do you believe suburbia has a future, and if so, what will it look like?
JK: The future will have intense urbanism but I can’t see it being the preference for more than 20 to 25% of the population, maybe less. This has been the pattern since 1900 in advanced countries. The technological revolution will accelerate rather than decelerate this process. But the suburbs of the future will not be like those of the past; they will be more diverse in age and ethnicity, more self-sufficient culturally and economically. Think of them more as an archipelago of villages rather than a subset of a dominant central core. In most of the US this older, much revered notion is already vestigial.
You can find out more about Joel Kotkin’s work here, or you can go to newgeography.com, where Joel serves as Executive Editor.
