Why innovation thrives in cities –“ when the population
of a city doubles, economic productivity goes up by an average of 130 percent.”
a new explanation for that "superlinear
scaling": Increases in urban population density give residents greater
opportunity for face-to-face interaction.
When you
pack people together, something special happens,
This is
the sort of thing that Adam Smith wanted to explain. He explained it through
specialization: People were able to narrow what they did to get better at it,
and because they were nearby, they could trade with each other. And Karl Marx
described a different kind of specialization, which is classes -- management
class, owner class and proletariat. And other people have come up with other
explanations for this basic phenomenon."
What the
new work shows, Pentland says, is that "a lot of the things that people
have been arguing about for centuries are not actually things that need
explaining. They just come from the basic pattern of social networks."
“there's evidence that the principle of superlinear
scaling does not hold in poor countries, even in cities with the same
population densities as major European and American cities. "The reason is
that the transportation is so bad,"
While i'm sure this is all plausible, and I don't deny it, I still feel that internet technologies and instantaneous communciation, not to mention free video conferencing, all also allow for increased economic producitivty by increasing interactivity, decreasing commuting time, increasing resource sharing and spontaneity of ideas and best of all, don't require that millions of people be living on top of each to attain this. Having said that, all of this benefits can be harnessed anywhere where there is a decent internet connection, and are no doubt cumulative with other direct benefits to being in close proximity to such a body of people and ideas that only a city can provide. Still, these things could theoreticaly be done vertically. As I want to live more rurally than in the hustle and bustle of the city, i'm certainly trying to persuade myself of this at any rate!
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