Andreas Feininger

Richard Florida writes about the decline of the sprawling exurb toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs, suggesting it isn't just about the price of gas.

"But what's happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order – what geographers call “the spatial fix” – of which the move back toward the city is just one part.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age – the geographic expression of mass production. Low-cost mortgages, massive highway systems and suburban infrastructure projects fuelled the industrial engine of postwar capitalism,...