Plan B Forum

Why innovation thrives in cities
Double a city’s population and its economic productivity goes up 130 percent. MIT researchers think they know why.

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Planning for productivity

“When you pack people together, something special happens,” says Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science and director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory. “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.”

The availability of different types of data varied across the hundreds of cities in the United States and Europe that the researchers considered.

Macy cautions that while the researchers’ measures of social-tie density correlate well with productivity, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that other factors are at work. “They’re suggesting a line of research based on a generative model that fits the data really well,” he says. “But obviously, when you fit a model well to data, that doesn’t mean that that’s the only model that could do it.”

"... The work could, however, have very real consequences for urban planning. For instance, Pentland says, 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,” Pentland says. “People might as well be in the village, because they only interact with their little local group.
Similarly, Pan says, “People know that when a city’s population grows, there’s scaling, and the productivity increases. But in these megacities, especially in China, no one knows whether that scaling will continue, because no other city is that big.”

In Beijing today, Pan says, “it’s really hard to move from one side to the other. I believe, personally, that social-tie density will drop because you can’t really move freely anymore with the population increases. Unless Beijing solves these transportation problems, pumping in more people won’t continue to drive the density.”

Pentland adds that another figure that usually scales superlinearly with urban population is crime. But an exception to that rule is Zurich. “For various reasons, its population has exploded in the last 20 years,” Pentland says. “And they knew this was going to happen because of demographics. So they invested just an unholy amount of money in public transportation. You end up with this cloud of towns around Zurich, but everybody can get into Zurich in 15 minutes. More than 60 percent of the population moves into the center of Zurich during the day.” As a consequence, Pentland says, Zurich enjoys all of the productivity benefits of social-tie density with much lower crime rates.

“In the next 10 years, we expect that India and China will each build a hundred cities of a million people or more,” Pentland says. “Hopefully, what we can do is help them make better choices in designing these cities.”” ...

Amazing how the blazingly obvious can be missed by the very stupid. As I have said; hatred makes you stupid. Either that or you are innately stupid and innately stupid people are drawn to hatred. Tough to say.

when called on it, claims he's being "hated on".

dales wrote:Boise,Idaho was really in the hinterlands in 1984......it still is.

Microsoft started in Redmond, WA in 1982......wtf?

Apple Corp started in Cupertino,CA (huh?) 1977.

Hardly giant metorpolises.

HP started in Palo Alto in a freaking gargae in the 1940's ferchrisakes!