May 5, 2009 City Council packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Miami, which is being hit hard by the collapse of the real-estate bubble, nonetheless remains the commercial center for the large South Florida mega -region, and a major financial center for Latin America. Each of these places is the financial and commercial core of a large mega - region with tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars in output. That's not going to change as a result of the crisis. Along with the rise of mega -regions, a second phenomenon is also reshaping the economic geography of the United States and the world. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people —or human capital —has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the county, but that's no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented. The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent -clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by vridening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent -rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them. Big, talent -attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of "urban metabolism," according to a pioneering theory of urban evolution developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the SantaFe Institute. The rate at which living things convert food into energy —their metabolic rate —tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in 'innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale Like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve "super -linear" scaling. "By almost any measure," they wrote, "the larger a city s