Synopses & Reviews
From one of America's most visionary social thinkers comes a groundbreaking appraisal of how the digital revolution is radically redefining where Americans live and work.
It is well accepted that the digital economy's rise has turned America's established economic and social geography on its head in a manner not seen since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Many also believe that with the explosion of the Internet and new communications technologies--and our growing freedom to work from anywhere--place no longer matters.
Nothing could be less true, Joel Kotkin argues in The New Geography. In fact, place has never been more important. Today, people and businesses can search the entire country to find the places most desirable to them. Freed from old ties to raw materials or pools of cheap labor, the Information Age businesses that drive the economy, and their employees, can be anywhere they want. And so the question looms: Who wants to live where?
The New Geography decodes the massive shifting of resources under way nationwide, examining new forms of social organization that are blooming and old forms that are evolving or dying. Along the way, the book shows how this vast upheaval has been a blessing for some of America's cities, notably those that excel at the preindustrial city's age-old role as a crossroads for creativity, trade, and culture. But not all cities are created equal, and the book explains which are best equipped to thrive, which are doomed to decline, and why. The New Geography also explores a whole set of other kinds of communities--such as high-tech "nerdistans" and bucolic Valhallas--that are thriving while others are dying.
The product of years of research, The New Geography is an essential road map to the utterly new landscape created by the digital economy.
Synopsis
In this study of the digital revolution, renowned economic and social-trend forecaster Joel Kotkin focuses on the revolutions surprising impact on cities, as their traditional role as the centers of creativity and crossroads for trade and culture is becoming more essential in a globalized information-age economy. Kotkin also identifies new kinds of communities.
About the Author
Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a research fellow in urban studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute, and a senior fellow with the Milken Institute. He writes a monthly column, "Grass Roots Business," in the Sunday New York Times Money & Business section, and is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Opinion section as well as a columnist for the Los Angeles Business Journal. An active participant in the new economy, he is director of content for Prime Ventures, a high-tech venture-capital firm specializing in new-media and technology ventures. He has written four previous books, including Tribes. He lives in North Hollywood, California.