The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

Dismiss the hostile reviews. There's too much that's good to ignore. Here are some of the author's thought-provoking contentions: America's ability to attract migrants, and its comparatively high birth rates, are signs that our economic problems are temporary. Immigrants would not be scrambling into our country if it had lost its opportunistic luster. Some of the highest birth rates in the developed world suggest many Americans see beyond Narcissism toward longer-term goals. Our land is by no means used up. Fast population growth in many mid-section cities suggests the country's vast hinterland has room for more. Suburbs, out of fashion among planners, nonetheless offer low-cost living, growing ethnic and cultural diversity, and freedom from the high land costs, NIMBY restrictions, and other constraints in more urbane - and impossibly expensive - coastal cities. Energy constraints are an issue, but Americans have always been adaptable. We populated the west in the days of horse-drawn wagons; battery-powered cars and other innovations can keep us moving. Kotkin offers a useful urban planning reality check. Our country's suburbs are too vast, and too full of enterprising people, to just dry up and blow away as some urban theorists would like. He points out that the American core-centered city , which many planners uphold as an ideal, was really just a blip in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. Older European cities like Paris, London and Rome are less core-centered than Chicago or New York. As an urban planner myself, I believe Kotkin gives short shrift to urban sprawl. Low-density development traps people in cars, feeds obesity and obliterates neighborhood character. Today's New Urbanism is more than a pointy-headed intellectual dream. It represents market forces driven by people who want to live in cohesive neighborhoods. Nonetheless, The Next 100 Million has a thorough grounding in common sense and real-world data. Not all of its predictions will pan out, but it certainly gives fresh and worthwhile insights.

This is a must read if you want to plan for the future. Do you want to live in the suburbs, countryside, or in the city. "America in 2050" illustrates with well researched documentation regarding future trends!

Joel Kotkin's The Next Hundred Million is going to be a frequently referenced classic. It's a must read for anyone interested in livability planning in our metropolitan areas, and not withstanding our somewhat limited success at drawing a large percentage of our population to community outreach planning workshops - that actually includes most of us. Kotkin has made connections in the data that has been sitting out there available to us that we hadn't made before. He found patterns that had previously not been discernable to us before. We missed them. The reader will experience that wonderful reaction that occurs when reading any classic major commentary - the light bulb will go off, and you will turn around, look back, and start to make the connections and see the patterns yourself. He says that suburbia will be reinvented. Well yes. We hadn't really focused on this but actually we are starting to see what he projects right here in our older suburbs. Most older suburbs were originally small towns, with town centers and main streets, and they are indeed being revitalized. We can project that they will begin to develop once again into cohesive communities, within connections to the larger metro area. We can see the beginnings of a trend towards good interactions between these suburbs and our urban downtown core. Our light rail is busy on weekends, well beyond initial projections, with people coming downtown to be entertained in one way or another. On weekdays we have a two way commute as employees go out to the land, available in the older suburbs, which now houses light manufacturing and tech businesses. We've got people out there walking and biking to nearby workplaces. He says that immigrants will have a big hand in that revitalization. Well yes. I think we are beginning to see that as well - just hadn't really noticed it. There is a reason that even in this very foodie community, arguably the best Indian restaurant in the area, and perhaps even the best Vietnamese restaurant as well are out in the old suburbs. Those are the communities that are attracting immigrants. The prices are lower, the houses, while substantially smaller than the new McMansions in the single developer communities in the newer suburbs, are nonetheless larger than apartments downtown. Throughout the history of this country the waves of immigrants have always generated small entrepreneurial ventures - they don't have the money, or the language skills to do anything other than bootstrap their way up - and they can hire their extended family to multiply the financial value of their ventures. There are parking lots out here that now house clusters of low cost start up ethnic food carts. The same as a mall's food court, only different. Much different. Kotkin says that we will be doing more of our work from home now, because we have the technological capabilities. And not just start-ups. I visited a friend in an old suburb. His home is the northwest office of a substantial,

Any good book about the future illuminates a lot about the present, and this one is no exception. Kotkin has obviously put a lot of thought and research into the issues this country faces now, and pushes that forward here with his projections of how they will play out in the future. There are some surprising insights. Not everyone will agree with all of them - and certainly not the racists and xenophobes frightened by the immigration that Kotkin recognizes as an essential engine driving the American economy in the past, present and future. But one thing is certain: America will be a better nation in 2050 if more of us spend some time thinking about these issues now.

Obviously some of the high-verbals above have not read this book. Pity. Joel Kotkin dares to posit a future US that differs from the rank and file urbanism of the professoriate. You may not agree with all of his intellectual jiu-jitsu, but here, I think, is one important key: Suburbia is the future, but not the wasteful lonely suburbia of the 1950s. Instead we must fashion a new kind of suburban landscape, one that selectively borrows the successful and vital elements of big city life and uses them to make a more vibrant small cities. The book is a classic urbanist polemic, one that may occupy a place on the right hand side of the same shelf as Jane Jacob's classic Life and Death of the American City. Get the book and read it. If you can handle it...