http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/why- ... -0604.html
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.”
