March 11, 2004

No Panacea

I just ran across a very interesting Q&A with futurist Joel Kotkin in the January 2004 edition of Metropolis magazine about whether or not there is an urban revitalization panacea. Short version: No.

Joel Kotkin may be one of the most hardheaded futurists on the planet. In a field where fuzzy predictions are commonplace - many of them based on anecdotal evidence as flimsy as a Google search - his predictions are often tough and contrary. During the 1990s, for example, when lifestyle journalists were heralding the urban revival, Kotkin took a close look at the numbers and cautioned that a smattering of coffee bars in a handful of cities does not constitute a rebirth.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Kotkin via cellphone for a special package of stories I was writing for Business Nashville magazine about efforts the make Nashville more successful in economic development. If memory serves me correctly, Kotkin, a prolific and busy author who is a senior research fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, called me from his car on some highway in California. I'd emailed him after reading a study he'd co-authored titled Knowledge-Value Cities in the Digital Age, which I'd found by Googling around the Net looking for something to underpin and guide my story.

Doing journalism in the Internet age is rather more fun as the Internet makes it possible to find, contact, and even on occasion interview-by-email experts who, pre-Google, would've been unknown to me or, at the least, more difficult to contact.