Jonah Lehrer on cities and innovation:
While certain institutions can foster innovation, the scientists are quick to point out that the innovative abilities of cities are ultimately rooted in the one thing that every city has in common: lots of human interaction. “Cities concentrate our social interactions,” Bettencourt says, “and that’s what leads to this explosion in knowledge creation and innovation.”Perhaps significantly, the metropolises of the future of fast growing desert communities like Phoenix and Las Vegas don’t generate this kind of human friction. They work by minimizing our dealings with other people. These rapidly growing cities are really collections of suburbs, in which density gives way to single-family homes and air-conditioned garages. The sidewalks are empty; the commuters commute alone. But unless these new cities find ways to make their citizens interact to create public spaces that people want to share they might not generate the conditions that allow them to continue their rapid growth. The equations imply that a city without concentrated human contact is destined to stall and wither, since it won’t be able to innovate at the necessary rate. Urban growth without urban density is unsustainable.
This is a mathematical demonstration of an old idea. Jane Jacobs, in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), argued that every healthy city was defined by its ability to facilitate social interaction. She saw the busy sidewalk as an improvisational “ballet,” in which information freely flowed between city dwellers. Her book identified the specific urban ingredients from short city blocks to mixed-use neighborhoods that encouraged “the intricate mingling of diversity.” When strangers were forced to communicate, Jacobs wrote, the city developed the “innate ability…to invent what is required to combat its difficulties.” Interaction and innovation were intertwined.
Tags: cities, innovation
