Join selected CEOs, entrepreneurs, CPG and foodservice executives, venture capitalists, and players in the government, scientific, educational and NGO communities to rally and network around the goal of reclaiming leadership of the food and agricultural industries that are vital economic, social and cultural engines for the heartland.
It’s a new world for sure, but for better or worse — or simply different? What kind of world is being created, and how will it affect developing countries, big cities, suburbs and smaller towns around the world?
On this episode of Feudal Future Marshall Toplansky moderates a discussion of the global future with Richard Florida, Joel Kotkin, Bheki Mahlobo, Li Sun, and Laure Mandeville.
Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading urbanists. He is a researcher and professor, serving as University Professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and a Faculty Chair at NYU’s Schack School of Real Estate. He is a writer and journalist, having penned several global bestsellers, including the award-winning The Rise of the Creative Class and his most recent book, The New Urban Crisis. He is co-founder of CityLab, the leading publication devoted to cities and urbanism. He is an entrepreneur, as the founder of the Creative Class Group which works closely with companies and governments worldwide.
Laure Mandeville is a Senior Reporter at the French newspaper le Figaro, where she covers American and European Affairs as well as intellectual debates around the world. She joined the foreign desk of Le Figaro in 1989 to cover the end of communism and spent twenty years covering the post- Soviet world. She was the Russia bureau chief in Moscow from 1997 to 2000 and then US bureau chief in Washington from December 2008 to August 2016. She also covered Islam in Europe from 2000 to 2008. She is the co-founder of the Tocqueville Conversations, an annual Conference on the Future of our democracies and a member of the Board of the Tocqueville Foundation. Laure Mandeville holds a BA in Slavic languages from the University of Toulouse and graduated from L’Institut d’Etudes politiques de Paris, in International affairs. She also holds a postgraduate degree in Political Science from Science Po and was visiting scholar at Harvard University, as a Fulbright and Arthur Sachs fellow.
She is the author of “Who is Donald Trump” (2016, Les Equateurs/Le Figaro), “The Russian Reconquest” (Grasset, 2008), and “The Russian Army: A Power in Tatters” (1994, Ed n°01). She contributes to Politique Internationale and The American Purpose. She is a regular guest on the TV Show C’est Dans L’air, LCI, and France 24.
Dr. Li Sun is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Prior to the UK, she worked in universities in Germany, the Netherlands, the US, and China. Besides academic positions, Dr. Sun also serves as a consultant to the UN, World Bank, and OECD, as well as various government offices in the UK, the Netherlands, and China. Her main research interest is urbanization and governance in China including rural-urban migration, social policies, land, and housing issue. Her publications appear in leading journals of relevant fields such as Cities, Social Policy & Administration, Land Use Policy. Her book entitled Rural Urban Migration and Policy Intervention in China was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019.
Bheki Mahlobo is an analyst and economic researcher at the center for risk Analysis (CRA), Johannesburg. He is primarily involved in writing chapters for the Socio-Economic Survey of South Africa, an annual publication that provides information and data on major trends in various social and economic fields. The Centre For Risk Analysis (CRA) is one of the top think tanks in South Africa that provides analysis and advice on scenario planning and macro-economic strategic advice on South African risks, as well as global trends for corporate and individual clients.
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. He is Senior Advisor to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. He is Executive Editor of the widely read website www.newgeography.com and a regular contributor to the City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette, American Affairs and Real Clear Politics. Kotkin’s most recent book is The Coming of Neo-Feudalism.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
On this episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Tom Campbell, former congressman, and Shawn Steel, republican national committee member. This show is a round table discussion on the future of California politics.
Tom Campbell served five terms in the US Congress and two years in the California State Senate. He was finance director of California and director of the bureau of competition of the Federal Trade Commission. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard. He was a White House Fellow and a US Supreme Court law clerk, a tenured law professor at Stanford, dean of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, and dean of the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University.
Shawn Steel was elected in 2016 to a four-year term as the national committeeman of the Republican Party of California. He is a former chair of the Republican Party of California and has been active in GOP politics since he worked for Ronald Reagan's California gubernatorial campaign in 1966.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
According to Los Angeles Times reporter Ralph Vartabedian (see: Cost overruns hit California bullet train again amid a new financial crunch, October 8), the troubled California high speed rail system could face additional cost overruns. According to Vartabedian, “The California bullet train is facing at least another billion dollars of proposed cost increases from its contractors, following a history of sharp cost growth on construction work over the last eight years, The Times has learned.”
The already much delayed start of service could be delayed further: “The current plan would start train operations by 2030, but officials working on the project say privately that it appears difficult, if not impossible, to meet that timetable.” At the time of the 2008, when voters approved Proposition 1-A to authorize $10 billion in bonds, the Los Angeles (Anaheim) to San Francisco (Transbay Terminal) line was to have cost $33 billion and entire route was to have opened in 2020. Current cost estimates are in the area of $100 billion, though that is after scaling the project back significantly and sharing conventional commuter rail tracks in the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas.
Joseph Vranich and I authored a report on the system in 2008 (see: The California High Speed Rail Project: A Due Diligence Report). In that report we projected cost overruns of 30% to 60% for the entire system, which was to have included spurs to Sacramento and San Diego. Our projections were embarrassingly low, with the much more modest system now likely to cost more than the full promised system with its Sacramento and San Diego branches, little of which appears likely to be opened even 10 years late.
The announcement that Tesla is moving its headquarters to Texas may not be a surprise, but it confirms trends that California’s progressive gentry simply refuse to acknowledge. Tesla, among the diminishing number of large manufacturers based in the state, joins a growing exodus that includes such tech giants as Oracle and Hewlett Packard, financial firms like Charles Schwab, and a host of high-end engineering and business service companies.
None of this will change the “What, me worry?” crowd in Sacramento, fresh off an impressive recall win, and their media claque, who see no “exodus” despite the fact that since 2000, 2.6 million domestic migrants — a population larger than the cities of San Francisco, San Diego, and Anaheim combined — have moved from California to other parts of the United States.
According to the The Wall Street Journal, “The accounting and consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP says most of its U.S. employees can now live anywhere in the country, in the latest sign that the pandemic is upending traditional working arrangements in a variety of white-collar roles. The article, by Chip Cutter cites similar development among other major companies. For example, Facebook is expanding eligibility for remote work to “all levels of the company.” Those employees not able to obtain permission to work remotely “would be expected to come into the office, at a minimum, 50% of the time.” This means that employees will be able to work remotely up to a maximum of 50% of the time, a practice virtually unheard of among major companies before the pandemic.
The article also references a Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company survey finding that only 41% of pandemic remote workers “looked forward to returning to the office.” A hybrid approach, working both in the office and remotely, was favored by 29%. Ten percent of workers were not comfortable returning to the office “in any capacity.” This is similar to a research by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis to the effect that many employees will resist returning to the office, out of a “residual fear of proximity” (infection).
The city of Indianapolis is building a new jail and criminal justice center on the southeast side of the city. This means many of the current users of the City-County Building, namely the courts, will be vacating the property. There’s a lot of discussion locally about the future of that building and whether it should be redeveloped. The Indianapolis Business Journal asked me to contribute my thoughts, and I revisited my old idea to demolish the building entirely and redevelop the site.
Monday I was in Washington to participate in a book discussion of Howard Husock’s new work The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. Obviously we talk about the intersection of zoning and housing affordability, but the conversation ranges well beyond that. Here’s a replay of the event:
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
A recent op-ed in The Seattle Times written by transit activists claims a high-speed railroad from Portland to Vancouver B.C. would reduce air pollution. Although the piece doesn’t provide a source, it claims the project would “prevent 960 metric tons of harmful pollutants such as particulate matter and carbon monoxide from entering our atmosphere over the first 40 years of operation.”
Although that sounds like a lot, it is an absolutely minuscule amount. It shows how high-speed rail advocates must grasp at arguments to justify the tens of billions of dollars the project would cost to build.
The authors didn’t cite a study, but mentioned two particular pollutants: particulate matter and carbon monoxide (not carbon dioxide which is a greenhouse gas). They claim a reduction of 960 metric tons of pollutants over 40 years, which amounts to 24 metric tons a year.
Rail-based transit yields infinitesimal environmental benefits despite the massive cost. Advocates throw in the numbers, and multiply them by 40 years, in the hopes that people won’t check to see if they are meaningful.
This is a consistent pattern from transit activists.
In 2015, members of Sound Transit’s board justified spending billions on extending light rail to Lynwood saying it would reduce CO2 emissions. As we noted at the time, the same amount of emissions could be reduced for about $1 million a year - far less than the cost of constructing, let alone operating, the light rail extension.
The following year transit activist Shefali Ranganathan and the Transportation Choices Coalition implied the third phase of Sound Transit (ST3) would reduce 793,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. The real number was much smaller - only about 130,000 MT. After initially denying it, they were forced to add a footnote to an e-mail (an odd way to correct the record) acknowledging they were misleading.
Transit and environmental activists like to claim their projects will help reduce pollution. A look at the data shows that environmental benefits are little more than marketing afterthoughts, rather than sincere efforts at environmental policy.
On this episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by Ross Elliott, Chairman of the Urban Land Institute of Australia, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Professor of Psychiatry at UC Irvine. This show covers the psychological impact of COVID-19 and how governments are managing it.
Ross Elliott is the co-founder of Suburban Futures (formerly The Suburban Alliance). He has 30 years’ experience in the property and urban development industry, including a number of national leadership roles for the Property Council of Australia as its Executive Director, then Chief Operating Officer and later as National Executive Director for the Residential Development Council. In this time he pioneered a number of policy initiatives for the industry on urban growth and cities policies for Australia. He has both authored and edited a number of monographs on urban development policy, housing and cities policies for Australia. Ross was also founding CEO of Brisbane Marketing, winning an International Downtown Association’s (USA) award for City Marketing in 2003. A frequent speaker, author and commentator on urban development policy, he was in 2016 invited to be international keynote speaker for the American Planning Association’s Utah conference and in 2017 was published in a global joint MIT/Chapman University project “Infinite Suburbia.”
Aaron Kheriaty is Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health. He serves as chairman of the medical ethics committees at UCI Hospital and at the CA Department of State Hospitals. Dr. Kheriaty graduated from the University of Notre Dame in philosophy and pre-medical sciences, earned his MD degree from Georgetown University, and completed residency training in psychiatry at UCI. He has authored books and articles for professional and lay audiences on bioethics, social science, psychiatry, and religion. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Public Discourse, and First Things; he has conducted print, radio, and television interviews on bioethics topics with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox, and NPR. On matters of public policy and healthcare he has addressed the California Medical Association and has testified before the California Senate Health Committee.
This show is presented by the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, which focuses on research and analysis of global, national and regional demographic trends and explores policies that might produce favorable demographic results over time.
Recent California housing policies may result in the decimation of forests in both urban and suburban single-family neighborhoods of Los Angeles. L.A.-based policy analyst and writer Chris LeGras shows us drone footage of LA's "secret" forests that may be affected by the state's recent changes in housing policy.
Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Find out more.
Authored by Aaron Renn, The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City is the first Urbanophile e-book, featuring provocative essays on the key issues facing our cities, including innovation, talent attraction and brain drain, global soft power, sustainability, economic development, and localism.
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