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Are you interested in mid-sized cities and their economic contributions?

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Our summary today works with the article titled The economy forward framework: How midsized cities can achieve inclusive growth in the knowledge economy from 2021, by Richard Florida PhD, Ross DeVol, Cordell Carter, Jennifer Hankins, and Nicholas Lalla, published by the Aspen Institute.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Nick Lalla in episode 348 talking about the economic side of urban sustainability.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how mid-sized cities can be involved in urban futures from the economic perspective. This article investigates pathways for mid-sized cities to transition to the knowledge economy while ensuring available opportunities and measuring progress.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.

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Speaker 1: do you ever feel just well swamped by information, especially about big things like how cities are changing or maybe you’ve heard buzz about a great reset in urban economies, but it’s fuzzy what that means outside the huge tech centres. Today we’re diving deep into exactly that. We’ve got a really fascinating white paper here called The Economy Forward Framework, how Midsize Cities can achieve inclusive growth in the knowledge Economy. And this isn’t just Silicon Valley stuff. It’s about a huge transformation happening right now in cities across the American heartland and frankly, beyond.

Speaker 2: That’s absolutely right. We’re pulling this straight from some groundbreaking research by Tulsa Innovation Labs, Heartland Forward. The Aspen Institute, it’s to introduce a totally new way, a new framework for measuring something vital, which is inclusive economic growth. It’s about moving past those old metrics, the kind of narrow ones to really get what sparks opportunity for everyone in this rapidly shifting world we’re in.

Speaker 1: So maybe you’re prepping for a meeting on urban development. Maybe you’re just curious about how cities adapt this framework. It offers some really surprising insights into what actually makes the city forward. Ready today. So when we talk about this great reset, a lot of that thinking initially comes from Richard Florida’s essay, America’s Great Reset. He points out this huge shift, right? For years, the big coastal tech hubs were everything but the cost of living there. Just tremendous add in, changing priorities. And let’s face it, COVID really put that into overdrive and companies talent moving away from those giant coastal markets moving right into the heartland. It’s a big decentralization happening. But here’s the tricky part for these mid-size cities. They need to become stronger knowledge hubs, stronger innovation centres. Yes. But they have to figure out how to do it without recreating the same problems, the housing crises, the equity issues that we see in the existing tech hubs. Florida actually calls this the new urban crisis, so it’s this like once in a generation chance, but it’s a real tightrope walk too.

Speaker 2: It’s a huge balancing act. Yeah. Yeah. And Ros DeVos essay Challenges and Promise in the Heartland really digs into this. He points out that generally speaking, Heartland cities are often well less prepared for this specific kind of shift. Why You’ve got factors like higher risk from automation in their current industries. Research universities maybe haven’t kept pace quite as much slower formation of those young dynamic firms and often lower overall educational attainment levels. These are significant hurdles. So this kind of brings up a key question for you, the listener. Why should you care about what’s happening in the heartland? Because investing in human capital, there we’re talking talent, research, innovation, health, digital access, investing in those things can actually create a more innovative, a more economically diverse America overall. It’s not just about one region success, it’s really about national resilience, national opportunity.

Speaker 1: That’s such a critical point. And you mentioned a term there, the knowledge economy. The report defines this pretty specifically. How does it break that down? It’s more than just coders, right?

Speaker 2: Absolutely vital To get this, the source defines it as production and services based on knowledge intensive activities. Okay, so what does that mean? It means greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. So think less about factories, more about brain power and yeah, it includes a really wide range of jobs. Data scientists. Sure. But also lawyers, healthcare professionals, artists, designers. It’s about problem solving, creativity, information, not just raw stuff or manual work.

Speaker 1: Okay, so with all these challenges, the automation risk, the need to catch up, where do these cities even start? Is there like a roadmap and this report puts forward something called the Economy Forward Framework. What’s the goal there? How does it guide these mid-size cities, which by the way, they define as MSAs metropolitan statistical areas with populations roughly between 750001.5 million.

Speaker 2: It really is meant to be a new kind of compass. What’s cool here is it wasn’t just dreamed up in isolation, it was built collaboratively. Tulsa Innovation Labs, the Aspen Institute, Heartland Forward, they all worked on this together, and it’s fundamentally rooted in this understanding that the old metrics, number of jobs created average wages. They just don’t cut it anymore. They don’t capture true growth. They often miss the nuance, the diversity, the resilience of those jobs. Let’s be super clear on inclusive growth. What we mean based on the report is economic growth that actually translates into increased household consumption and critically growth, where the gains are broadly distributed across various demographics of the population, especially for people from underserved communities. It’s directly inspired by Raj Chetty’s work. His research showing the American dream is fading for many with widening inequality. So this framework is explicitly trying to push back against that trend.

Speaker 1: The framework lays out these three core themes that cities absolutely have to balance. It’s not just about raw economic horsepower, it’s about lending that growth with real opportunity for everyone and also creating a place people actually wanna live. It distills down to three things. First, industry, growing the right, innovation industries, the ones that fit their strengths. Second, accessibility, making absolutely sure the opportunities in those industries are open to all residents, no matter their background. And third vibrancy actively creating a more attractive community place people choose to be. It’s about life, not just work. So those are the big goals. How does the city know if it’s actually making progress? This report gets super practical here. Gives nine specific metrics. A detailed report card. We probably don’t need to go through every single one, but maybe we can hit some highlights from each category just to get a feel for this new compass.

Speaker 2: Exactly. So under industry, yeah. They measure the share of knowledge economy, jobs, those IR paying ones. But they also look at something called the Young Firm Employment Ratio, YFRR and Young Firm Knowledge Intensity, YFKI. Basically, this tracks how many new smart companies are starting and growing and how educated their workforce is. It’s a huge predictor of future dynamism, IT real organic growth potential. Another key one is academic r and d expenditures. Herd university research that fuels innovation, new companies, even if the payoff takes a few years.

Speaker 1: Interesting. So it’s about future potential, not just the snapshot today. Okay. What about making sure people can actually access those opportunities

Speaker 2: for accessibility? The framework looks closely at the labour force participation rate, but broken down by race and sex. LFPR. This isn’t just a single number. It shows how well different groups are navigating economic shifts, especially those vulnerable populations often hit hardest by things like automation. And then there’s the share of minority and women-owned firms in knowledge intensive industries. This one’s critical. It helps track whether the economic shift is accidentally making wealth inequality worse by leaving certain entrepreneurs behind. It’s about building wealth inclusively.

Speaker 1: And the last piece, vibrancy. Making the city a place people want to be. What metrics stand out there

Speaker 2: for vibrancy? They look at public investment in quality of place. This measures is the city investing in things that attract and keep talent. Things like parks, cultural stuff. A lively downtown. Creating that sense of community, think Austin’s music scene, that kind of vibe. And really importantly, they track retention of graduates from local colleges and universities. Does the city have strong enough opportunities to keep its own homegrown talent or are they leaving? That tells you a lot about the city’s stickiness and its future brain power.

Speaker 1: And what’s really smart about these metrics, you mentioned this briefly, is they’re designed to actually show changes relatively quickly, like within five years. So cities aren’t just waiting a decade to see if a big plan is working

Speaker 2: precisely. It allows cities to learn much faster, adapt their strategies, figure out what’s actually moving the needle, and what needs tweaking. It encourages agility.

Speaker 1: Okay, with that framework laid out, let’s pivot to a real world example. They use Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city that’s really trying to grab this opportunity. Historically, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world, and it was home to the incredibly prosperous Greenwood district, black Wall Street, before the absolutely devastating 1921 race massacre. It’s a city with a really complex history, deep highs and terrible lows. And today there’s this powerful vision taking shape, a new and catalytic effort they call it, to essentially rebirth Greenwood to turn it into Black Tech Street, the new global capital of black tech. That’s a huge, bold ambition.

Speaker 2: It really is. And as Jennifer Hankins from Tulsa Innovation Labs points out in her essay in the report, Tulsa’s Economy historically has been pretty dependent on big employers, oil and gas manufacturing. While that brought stability for a long time, it also delayed the shift towards a more diverse, resilient knowledge economy that reflected in its lower young firm metrics, the YFER and YFKI. We talked about fewer new knowledge based startups. Plus automation is a bigger risk for many service jobs, which often employ more people of colour and they’ve had issues with rain drain a lower share of residents with bachelor’s degrees compared to pure cities.

Speaker 1: But wow, there’s a huge flip side too, isn’t there? Tulsa has some incredible assets. They’ve made some major moves recently. You’ve got the George Kaiser Family Foundation, GKFF. That’s a massive local philanthropy focused on fighting poverty. They actually started Tulsa Innovation Labs, TIL, which is spearheading a lot of this. That’s pretty amazing, right? A foundation focused on poverty, creating an innovation lab, and then you have things like Tulsa Remote. Mm-hmm. Program giving incentives for remote workers to move there, and the gathering place is absolutely stunning. World class, $465 million Urban Park. These are serious game-changing investments,

Speaker 2: huge investments and TAL built on those assets.

They did this data-driven strategy they call Tulsa’s tech niche. They looked at, okay, where does Tulsa have existing strengths? What’s feasible and where are the inclusive job opportunities? And they landed on five areas, virtual health, energy tech, advanced aerial mobility, think drones and air taxi, cyber and data analytics. And you can see the logic, right? Ou. Tulsa’s strong in health research. The oil and gas history feeds energy tech. University of Tulsa has a top ranked cyber program. It’s about playing to your strengths,

Speaker 1: right? Which brings in that innovation flywheel idea from Jim Collins. It’s not just one big push, but lots of coordinated things happening together across research, talent, community capital, employers, all working together to build this like system-wide culture of innovation. And it feels like Kohl’s really starting to get that flywheel spinning.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Nicholas Lala, who co-founded TIL, writes about how they’re defining success in Tulsa using the economy forward framework. We discussed they’ve set really specific, measurable five-year goals, and they’re pretty compelling, like increasing the share of knowledge economy jobs from just under 29% to 30% by 2026. That sounds small, but it represents real movement. On accessibility front, they’re aiming for STEM programs. They support to actually mirror the diversity of the metro area, and for vibrancy, they want public investment in quality of place to grow 5% faster each year than the city’s overall spending grows. These aren’t vague hopes, they’re hard targets.

Speaker 1: Those are incredibly specific, and it just hammers home that this isn’t about fuzzy ideas. It’s about having a quantifiable compass, knowing exactly where you’re aiming and whether you’re actually getting there.

Speaker 2: Okay, wrapping this back around. What does Tulsa’s story mean for you, maybe in your community? Their experience offers some big lessons for how any city can try to forge its own path towards inclusive growth. Even without a massive foundation like GKFF, the report pulls out three key things. First, you need a leader, someone, or some organization, maybe not the usual suspects. Maybe it is a philanthropy or a university needs to step up and pull together a broad coalition driven by data Second. You absolutely have to draw on the expertise of the social sector, nonprofits, community groups. They understand the needs on the ground. They have to be at the table right alongside the VCs and the business leaders from day one and third. Industry needs skin in the game. Private sector buy-in, actual investment from the start. That’s crucial. To make real lasting change takes both civic will and business commitment.

Speaker 1: And what’s really powerful here, I think is a core argument. Cities can’t just attract their way out of stagnation, just trying to lure talent from elsewhere or snagging a big corporate HQ. That might give you a short-term bump maybe. But the report argues the surest path to real, sustainable inclusive growth is building up your own institutions, leveraging your unique local assets, really growing from the inside out. Cultivating your own garden, so to speak.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, and it’s worth repeating. This is hard work. It’s complex, it’s painstaking. You don’t expect overnight results. It’s all about sustained effort, intentional strategy, and constantly measuring and learning along the way.

Speaker 1: Let’s clear this economy forward framework provides a really powerful lens, a new way to think about success, measure success for mid-size cities, trying to navigate the knowledge economy. It really does redefine what thriving looks like.

Speaker 2: And that maybe leads to a final thought for you, our listener, to chew on. How might the unique assets and maybe even the challenges of your own community look different? How could they be reframed as opportunities for inclusive growth? If you started measuring them through this kind of different, more holistic lens,

Speaker 1: what does inclusive growth really mean? Where you live and how could you start identifying that untapped potential? Maybe write in your own backyard.

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Episode and transcript generated with ⁠⁠Descript⁠⁠ assistance (⁠⁠affiliate link⁠⁠).