Paging Richard Florida

News flash: Brooklyn and Manhattan are cool. Or so UBS' 20- and 30-something traders think, which is one reason why the Swiss bank may return its American headquarters to New York from Stamford, Conn. -- the bank finds it difficult to hire new staff because few want to commute there. The other reason is UBS realizes it wants to be closer to its clients, most of whom have remained in Manhattan even after the bank left the city for the outer suburbs about 15 years ago.

This story is an excellent explanation for why cities will always matter. Cities are cooler than any other type of place, so people will always want to be there, at least during some point in their lives; and even in the early 21st century, the importance of face-to-face professional interaction can't be replicated via technology, and businesses will plant themselves where they can take advantage of proximity. In both scenarios, agglomeration wins.

Smiling widest at this news is probably Richard Florida, the pop urban theorist, whose arguments about the "creative class" explain why UBS will likely return to New York. Florida writes that in present day, metro economies are driven by creative, intelligent people, defined quite broadly to include most types of intellectually challenging work, such as technology, medical science and law, in addition to creative arts. These people want to live in exciting, tolerant places, so if cities want to have growing economies, they need to focus on creating these types of environments. Commodity traders in their early 30s no longer care so much about having five-bedroom houses in Fairfield County, Florida would likely argue; they'd rather be somewhere like Williamsburg where they can be around intriguing people after work and go to a cool bar (or something. Also, if bankers think Williamsburg is cool, it's probably no longer cool.) Consequently, cities can change their economic policies. They no longer should lavish tax breaks on companies, as New York's mayoral administrations eagerly do whenever a large employer threatens to leave, because tax breaks don't decide where companies locate; creative people do.

Then again, promises of urbanism's sustained renaissance are largely anecdotal. This is probably why the Times has written so much in the past 10 days about UBS' possible return: It's about as big and as promising as an anecdote as you can have. In reality, metro population growth remains strongest in the suburbs and is generally small in cities proper. The greatest growth actually happens in inner-ring suburbs, once home to the postwar middle class and now attracting all different types of immigrants. Houses there are smaller and more affordable and they usually have some amount of public transit for people to reach downtowns. Florida's work mostly focuses on the well-educated and the well-paid. I wonder what he'd have to say about semi-forgotten inner suburbs like these that are having mild rebirths of their own, thanks to ethnic groups that have moved in, bought real estate and rented downtown storefronts. What can these cities do to keep their reinvention moving forward?