The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 |  | Author: Joel Kotkin
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 13864
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
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Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 1594202443
Dewey Decimal Number: 307.7609730112
EAN: 9781594202445
ASIN: 1594202443
Publication Date: February 4, 2010
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Product Description
Visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America in 2050, revealing how the addition of one hundred million Americans by midcentury will transform how we all live, work, and prosper.
In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced nations, the United States is growing at a record rate and, according to census projections, will be home to four hundred million Americans by 2050. This projected rise in population is the strongest indicator of our long-term economic strength, Joel Kotkin believes, and will make us more diverse and more competitive than any nation on earth.
Drawing on prodigious research, firsthand reportage, and historical analysis, The Next Hundred Million reveals how this unprecedented growth will take physical shape and change the face of America. The majority of the additional hundred million Americans will find their homes in suburbia, though the suburbs of tomorrow will not resemble the Levittowns of the 1950s or the sprawling exurbs of the late twentieth century. The suburbs of the twenty-first century will be less reliant on major cities for jobs and other amenities and, as a result, more energy efficient. Suburbs will also be the melting pots of the future as more and more immigrants opt for dispersed living over crowded inner cities and the majority in the United States becomes nonwhite by 2050.
In coming decades, urbanites will flock in far greater numbers to affordable, vast, and autoreliant metropolitan areas-such as Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas-than to glamorous but expensive industrial cities, such as New York and Chicago. Kotkin also foresees that the twenty-first century will be marked by a resurgence of the American heartland, far less isolated in the digital era and a crucial source of renewable fuels and real estate for a growing population. But in both big cities and small towns across the country, we will see what Kotkin calls "the new localism"-a greater emphasis on family ties and local community, enabled by online networks and the increasing numbers of Americans working from home.
The Next Hundred Million provides a vivid snapshot of America in 2050 by focusing not on power brokers, policy disputes, or abstract trends, but rather on the evolution of the more intimate units of American society-families, towns, neighborhoods, industries. It is upon the success or failure of these communities, Kotkin argues, that the American future rests.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
 This Will Be A Classic March 8, 2010
PDXplanner
28 out of 32 found this review helpful
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, albeit narrowly focused, European company. He spends 50% of his time working from his home office, 40% out on the road visiting clients, and 10% back in Europe at company headquarters. Next to him he pointed out, is a couple - both of whom work for IBM -that spend maybe 20% of their time in a company office, 40% out of home, and 40% on the road. Next to them, a similar home-road-office split for a Sony employee. Two more houses down - a former cook who now runs her own food cart a couple of blocks away. Across the street is a woman who was laid off from a state job in the previous financial crisis who is now a consultant, earning more than she ever made before, working out of her office at home. Isn't this going to grow as the technology gets better? Isn't that why more than 200 communities are now hustling with Facebook pages for Google's new hi speed connection project?
The book is impressively well researched and the analysis and arguments he provides for his very supportable conclusions are on solid foundations. There is no doubt that he knows the thinking in the field to date. There are no less than 46 pages of small print references and citations of everyone from Lewis Mumford and Daniel Yergin to Pat Riley! How can you not be impressed with this kind of effort? It's substantiated and rigorous scholarship. This book will be a well thumbed classic for those open minded enough to use it. It will help move planning out of the box of its present orthodoxy.
My major problem with it is that it offers real potential for a positive picture of America in 2050. I surely hope that doesn't cramp my ability to bitch and moan about pretty much everything anyone else ever does. Because I've got my "we're not doing it right" argument down pat by now. It's comforting to me to feel superior. I like figuratively placing little yellow stickies on everything - telling them they need to improve (i.e. do it my way). And Kotkin's effort says if the trends he has identified continue it may not be so bad here after all in a few decades. OMG. Now what will I do for an ego soothing hobby?
Great look at America's future March 4, 2010
Reader 2010
15 out of 18 found this review helpful
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.
If you can handle independent thinking, get this book! February 17, 2010
G. P. Critser (Pasadena, CA)
26 out of 36 found this review helpful
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...
An Original and Independent View of the Future April 18, 2010
Jonathan Lupton (Little Rock , AR USA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE March 21, 2010
DISCOVER (Milwaukee, WI)
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
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!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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