The Way We Live Next: The New Economic Map of Work, Life, and Power

Summary

A sweeping account of one of the most consequential changes in modern life: how digital technology is unbundling work and life from the old constraints of place—and how we can build better cities, communities, and lives in the world that comes next.

Where should we live? Where should we work? Where should we raise our children, care for our families, find community, and build a life? For most of history, those questions were bound together. People lived where they worked, and communities formed around the farms, factories, ports, offices, and downtowns that organized economic life.

At rare moments, those foundations are upended. The Agricultural Revolution bound human life to land and kinship. The Industrial Revolution reorganized it around factories, cities, and wage work.

What is happening now runs deeper still—and is far less understood. Digital technology, remote work, AI, and new forms of mobility are untying work and life from the old constraints of place. But the future is not placeless. Place does not disappear; it becomes more important—more chosen, more contested, and more unequal.

A New Economic Map is emerging—taking shape around powerful global hubs and rising satellites, reinvented downtowns and comeback cities, linked by flows of talent, capital, ideas, and work. It opens enormous freedom even as it concentrates advantage and deepens divides, as wealth, talent, and power gather in some places while others risk being left behind.

In The Way We Live Next, Richard Florida, Vladislav Boutenko, and Suresh Subudhi map this new geography of possibility: not just where we live, but how we live, how communities thrive, and who gets to shape the future ahead.

We need new frameworks to navigate a world that is changing daily. The Way We Live Next provides ta vision for what’s coming: a better future that is well within our reach, if we have the foresight and the courage to shape and govern it.

Here the authors offer their collective insights into:

The Future of Work: When people don’t have to stay in one place for employment, the world opens up. What does that world look like, and how does it function?

The Future of Economics: The global markets of the future don’t look like they do today, but there is already a roadmap for us to follow.

The Future of Humanity: Movement is part of human nature, but where people move in the future will reconfigure entire populations, cities, markets, and more.