The Frontal Cortex

I'll have more to say about cities and the brain in the coming days, but I thought it was worth highlighting this thoughtful post by the economist Edward Glaeser on how NYC is "America's most resilient city":

When other cities, including Boston, experienced significant population declines from 1950 to 1970, New York City still grew, albeit modestly. Only during the 1970s, the years of my Manhattan youth, did the city a suffer major population decline.

However, New York managed to come roaring back, while other cities have just continued to fall. The secret of New York's post-1970 reinvention was that smart people, who knew each other and learned from each, innovated in ways that made billions in financial services. The same density that once served to get hogsheads onto clipper ships served to spread ideas.

What does this mean for the future?

New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city's extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital -- the education and skills of a work force -- predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York's human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

I won't be surprised if Manhattan prices do drop in the next few years, but I also strongly believe that the future of New York City continues to be bright. Homo sapiens are a social species; almost all of what we know we learn from each other. Dense cities, like New York, succeed when they take advantage of this fundamental aspect of our humanity. They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.

Last year, I wrote an article for Seed (not online) which looked at recent research attempting to construct a mathematical model of city life. One of the surprising insights was that measures of innovation were directly linked to measures of urban density and human interaction.

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⎯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.

This is why I smirk when I read about cities like Orlando, Florida trying to jump start innovation with a bevy of tax credits for high-tech businesses. These places don't need more tax credits - they need more coffee houses and crowded sidewalks.