Should Columbia Embrace 'Opportunity Urbanism'?

Joel Kotkin, the influential author and Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, has articulated a new vision of how urban economies should evolve that challenges the likes of Richard Florida. Kotkin calls his new notion "Opportunity Urbanism", a concept that stresses a region's ability to create jobs, offer affordable housing, and present entrepreneurial openings to a growing and highly diverse population as the surest signs of urban vibrancy. His emphais on a city's ability to provide opportunity for a broad spectrum of citizens rather than on the area's ability to attract the wealthiest individuals or the people with the highest skills is a strategy that may make more sense for the Midwest--and for Columbia in particular.

Kotkin argues that seeking ways to keep the doors of opportunity and homeownership open to the working and middle classes is better economics and more in keeping with American values than what he percives to be the preoccupation of "superstar" cities to boost their attractiveness to elites. He argues that "one of the primary historic roles of cities has been to nurture and grow a middle class--to be an engine of upward social mobility."