A Review of “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity”

The Great Reset addresses the angst of the Great Recession of 2007 through 2009, yet it also provides hope by suggesting a blueprint for recovery. This economic crisis has been discussed at length by social scientists and their attention persists as daily headlines report continued high unemployment and housing foreclosures. The lack of a true economic recovery since the official end of the recession in June 2009 makes Richard Florida’s arguments about underlying causes all the more relevant. His newest book offers a most accessible comparative discussion of two previous economic downturns of equal magnitude and how they were both similar and different from this latest recession. It also offers a unique spatial perspective by highlighting some contemporary urbanization trends that could actually help propel a more sustainable economic recovery that Florida calls the Great Reset. Richard Florida claims that Great Resets are born out of economic crises like the Great Depression and that they remake an economy by stimulating creativity and innovation. He did not invent the reset concept, but was struck by the term when he heard it used by General Electric’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who suggested that the current crisis was something more than a normal business cycle. Florida provides an ample review of Marx, Shumpeter, and Keynes, who all theorized about how economic downturns transform old systems by replacing them with new ones. He contributes to this discourse by describing the spatial dimensions of such downturns. More specifically, he argues that it is the reconfiguration of the physical economic landscape that is the “real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset” (p. 6). Although he adopts Harvey’s (1981) “spatial fix” concept to frame a corollary idea, it seems to me that Borchert’s (1967) transport epochs and associated reconfigurations of metropolitan dominance would have been a more appropriate model, especially because Florida is really focused on the new infrastructure that displaces the former infrastructure in such resets—or the physical foundation that changes the comparative advantage of cities in a national or even global urban system: