We’ve come to the end of another year at New Geography. Here’s a look back at the most popular pieces from 2013. Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.
12. The Rust Belt Roars Back from the Dead In December, Joel and Richey Piiparinen laid out the case for the rustbelt resurgence based on human capital and a new maker economy. This piece also appeared at The Daily Beast.
11. Best Cities Rankings Our annual Best Cities for Jobs rankings crunched by Michael Shires are based on an index of short-, medium-, and long-range job growth.
10. How Segregated is New York City? Daniel Hertz uses a series of maps to show that New York City is more segregated than many people realize. Be sure to check out Daniel’s blog: City Notes.
9. Affordable Cities are the New Sweet Spots Photographer and keen city observer Johnny Sanphillippo uses a Cincinnati neighborhood to point out that older, affordable urban neighborhoods are great places to be. He concludes that “It’s like moving to the suburbs except you get to live in a great vibrant city instead of a crappy tract house on a cul-de-sac an hour from civilization.” Read more from Johnny at GranolaShotgun.com.
8. Composite Traffic Congestion Index Shows Richmond Best In June, Wendell Cox combined the results of the three major American traffic congestion indexes to show the best and worst metropolitan areas for traffic.
7. Special Report: 2013 Metropolitan Area Population Estimates In April Wendell summarized the results of the latest Metropolitan Area population estimates.
6. Our Father, Who Art in the Apple Store In this Forbes column, Joel ponders the implications of our increasingly techno-centric culture.
5. The U.S. Middle Class is Turning Proletarian Joel argues that the biggest issue facing American society is the gradual decent of the middle class to proletarian status. What to do about it? Encourage growth of blue-collar industries over those profiting from asset inflation, address the costs of education, promote skills training, and work to ensure the benefits of capitalism inure to all. This piece also appeared in Forbes.
4. The Metro Areas with the Most Economic Momentum Going into 2014 One year ago, Joel and I created this economic performance index of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas using 8 short-term indicators, covering jobs, unemployment, income growth, migration, birth rates, and education. This piece was also published by Forbes.
3. America’s Smartest Cities This piece covers our human talent index of all the nation’s metropolitan areas. Places ranking at the top increased their share of residents with a bachelor’s degree the fastest, added the most educated residents, and have the highest current educational attainment rates.
2. The Demographics that Sank the Democrats in the Midterm Elections Joel’s post-mortem from November’s mid-term elections was this year’s second most read piece on the site. It also appeared at Forbes.
1. Largest World Cities: 2014 This year’s most read article is Wendell’s intro to his annual World Urban Areas publication, a comprehensive report listing population, land area, and density data for the world’s urban areas. The report is the only annually published inventory of these data for the world’s urban areas of more than 500,000 population.
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