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The Next Hundred Million
Joel Kotkin
America in 2050
Penguin Press
February 2010
On Sale: February 4, 2010
320 pages
ISBN: 1594202443
EAN: 9781594202445
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Visionary social thinker Joel Kotkin looks ahead to America
in 2050, revealing how the addition of one hundred million
Americans by midcentury will transform how we all live,
work, and prosper. In stark contrast to the rest of the world's advanced
nations, the United States is growing at a record rate and,
according to census projections, will be home to four
hundred million Americans by 2050. This projected rise in
population is the strongest indicator of our long-term
economic strength, Joel Kotkin believes, and will make us
more diverse and more competitive than any nation on earth. Drawing on prodigious research, firsthand reportage, and
historical analysis, The Next Hundred Million reveals how
this unprecedented growth will take physical shape and
change the face of America. The majority of the additional
hundred million Americans will find their homes in
suburbia, though the suburbs of tomorrow will not resemble
the Levittowns of the 1950s or the sprawling exurbs of the
late twentieth century. The suburbs of the twenty-first
century will be less reliant on major cities for jobs and
other amenities and, as a result, more energy efficient.
Suburbs will also be the melting pots of the future as more
and more immigrants opt for dispersed living over crowded
inner cities and the majority in the United States becomes
nonwhite by 2050. In coming decades, urbanites will flock in far greater
numbers to affordable, vast, and autoreliant metropolitan
areas-such as Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas-than to
glamorous but expensive industrial cities, such as New York
and Chicago. Kotkin also foresees that the twenty-first
century will be marked by a resurgence of the American
heartland, far less isolated in the digital era and a
crucial source of renewable fuels and real estate for a
growing population. But in both big cities and small towns
across the country, we will see what Kotkin calls "the new
localism"-a greater emphasis on family ties and local
community, enabled by online networks and the increasing
numbers of Americans working from home. The Next Hundred Million provides a vivid snapshot of
America in 2050 by focusing not on power brokers, policy
disputes, or abstract trends, but rather on the evolution
of the more intimate units of American society-families,
towns, neighborhoods, industries. It is upon the success or
failure of these communities, Kotkin argues, that the
American future rests.
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