What's to become of "urban culture"?

Richard Florida (professor at George Mason and author of The Rise of the Creative Class) has an article in October's Atlantic Monthly which discusses why college graduates are clustering in major metro areas and "superstar cities" such as San Francisco, LA, and Seattle like never before. First, they go because quality of life is often better--more diversity, more cultural events, more tolerance, more fun.

But more importantly, they go because of economics: "increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a [superstar city] in order to realize their full economic value." And a large and diverse talent pool is one of the primary determinants of economic growth.

There are powerful reasons to believe that the wealth disparity between some city-regions and others will continue to grow, and perhaps even accelerate, thanks to the snowball effect of talent attraction. "This spatial sorting," says economist Joseph Gyourko, "will affect the nature of America as much as the rural-urban migration of the late nineteenth century did."

America's most successful cities may increasingly be inhabited by a core of wealthy workers leading highly privileged lives, catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.

As urban centers are gentrified to handle this housing demand, we might see "urban culture" and "urban youth" as we know it really become an "urban fringe" community--whether it's around New York, Beijing, or Sao Paulo.