© JAMIE HOGGE
© ROSHAN NEBHRAJANI
Who?
Richard Florida is University Pro-fessor
at University of Toronto’s
Rotman School of Management
and School of Cities, where he al-so
serves as Chief Urbanist in the
Creative Destruction Lab. He is a
Distinguished Fellow at New York
University.
He is the author of more than
ten books including The Rise of
the Creative Class and more than
one hundred books chapters and
articles in peer-reviews academic
journals.
He is a Senior Editor at The
Atlantic, where he co-founded
and serves as Editor-at Large for
CityLab, the world’s leading pub-lication
devoted to cities and ur-banism.
Florida previously taught at
Carnegie Mellon, George Mason
University and Ohio State Univer-sity,
and has been a visiting pro-fessor
at Harvard and MIT and a
non-resident Senior Fellow at the
Brookings Institution. He earned
his Bachelor’s degree from Rut-gers
College and his Ph.D. from
Columbia University.
est increase in college grads were rural
counties located in places like Alaska,
Colorado, Nebraska and Montana.
Is density a risk?
Assumptions about the impact of COV-ID-
19 on urban and rural America are
equally susceptible to broad brush gener-alizations.
Large urban areas with dense
populations and strong global connec-tions
such as New York and London are
experiencing surging rates of infection
and hospitalizations as are cities linked
to major supply chains such as Detroit.
Analysis I undertook for CityLab
found that density alone fails to cap-ture
the dynamics of the pandemic. Dis-tinctions
in the nature of jobs impacts
the risks created by density. A greater
proportion of workers who can easily
shift to remote work and telecommuting
may explain why lockdowns in places
such as San Francisco are more effective
at bending the curve of new infections
than in cities such as New York that have
more jobs dependent upon face to face
interaction.
A similar distribution of risk factors
exists in rural communities. Research by
Bill Bishop and Tim Marena of the Daily
Yonder* has found COVID-19 spreading
through rural communities at about the
same rate as large cities, but recreational
centers, such as ski towns and areas ad-jacent
to lakes that are linked to national
and global tourists, are seeing infection
rates four times their rural counterparts.
A new vision for economic
and social vitality
Americans in large urban centers now
line up, six feet apart, to enter food
stores with a new appreciation of the
bonds to rural workers utilizing ad-vanced
technologies to sustain the na-tional
food supply chain. Health Re-searchers
in places such as New York
and San Francisco racing to discover
COVID-19 treatments may draw upon
the power of cloud computing clusters
located and maintained in places like
rural Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa,
whose communities may depend upon
telemedicine services from cities.
Students in rural communities out-side
of cities such as Pittsburgh face hur-dles
posed by inadequate access to high
speed broadband as school closures shift
learning online. But their fellow students
some urban Pittsburgh neighborhood
also suffer from the digital divide.
Post-pandemic America will demand
a reset, a new vision for economic and
social vitality. A reawakened sense of the
value of all occupations and interregional
economic bonds creates an opportunity
to shape a vision for leveraging techno-logical
advances to craft a new narrative
for urban and rural America.
* Daily Yonder 1.4.2020, Pandemic spreads
into rural America at rate similar to ur-ban
areas, https://www.dailyyonder.com/
pandemic-spreads-into-rural-amer-ica-
at-rate-similar-to-urban-are-as/
2020/04/01/
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