M.I.T research led
by Wei Pan concluded that productivity and innovation in urban areas grow at
roughly the same rate as population, largely because the greater density of
people living in a city increases the opportunities for personal interactions
and exposure to different ideas. Put simply, living in a city makes us more
innovative.
The idea that Archimedes
yelling “Eureka” as he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse is a nice visual
for the concept of discovery, albeit unlikely given the story first appeared in
a book two centuries after the Greek scholar had died. The story does however feed the fantasy of discovery as a solitary and sudden
experience.
Wei Pan, analyzed
all kinds of factors to tabulate the “social-tie density” of different
cities–that’s the average number of people each resident will interact with
personally.
They looked at everything from the number of call partners with
whom a cellphone user will end up sharing a cell tower to the number of people
connecting through location-based social networks like Foursquare to the
contagion rates of diseases spread only through personal contact. And they found
that the higher a city’s social-tie density, the higher its levels of
productivity and patents awarded.
