Naturally, Collision Density Explains the Start-Up-Ness of a City

I believe people develop, not places. I think people develop, not places. Which sentence comes across as more convincing? The first sentence is wishy-washy. The second sentence executes a binding contract with the reader. If I think something is true, then I'll have to prove it to you. I can believe in whatever I like and I don't expect anyone to care. From the density cult:

So, I believe that startup cities are those that amass a significant amount of potential to facilitate collision density between different kinds of thinkers. Collision density is naturally much higher in cities than in suburbs and suburban tech parks because cities house a much higher rate of diverse actors in smaller, more compact spaces. As the tools of innovation are becoming more democratized, and cities are increasingly home to dozens, if not hundreds, of accelerators, coworking spaces, fab labs, and the like, combined with proximity to artists, designers, schools, and users, entrepreneurs are able to regularly mingle with and create mashups of ideas, some of which may turn into commercializable innovations.

Emphasis added. The words "believe" and "naturally" act in tandem in this non-argument. Naturally, everyone believes collision density is higher in cities than in suburbs because Jane Jacobs didn't like sprawl. That's how the paragraph reads to me.

For geographers, the use of the term "natural" or "naturally" will set off the alarm of environmental determinism. Many geographers believe that environmental determinism is bad. The perspective is an academic taboo, like geopolitics. Naturally, Nazi Germany should do something about that Czechoslovakian knife sticking in the side of the Vaterland and keep going until lebensraum is restored.

Because of greater collision density, the increasing democratization of the tools of innovation will increase the commercializable innovations in cities. What does that even mean? Put a bird on it and present the model at the next International Economic Development Council conference.

The United States has a long, recent history of successful innovation and commercialization in the very places where, naturally, collision density is lacking. Believing in Jane Jacobs density won't change that fact. But democratization will? Excuse me while I pursue my manifest destiny.

Urban Renewal and Innovation Districts

Do legacy cities birth innovation districts or do innovation districts sow the seeds of revitalization in legacy cities? I think legacy cities beget innovation districts. What Harvard economist Ed Glaeser thinks:

There’s an overwhelming error of urban policy over the past 75 years which has been to follow a Potemkin village strategy of urban revitalization that acts as if what you need to do to get a city going again is to build more stuff ... Innovation districts are … a hypothesis; they’re not a proven strategy at this point in time. I think they’re as sensible a hypothesis as any one out there, but they’re merely a hypothesis ... It’s very hard to imagine how you can have anything that can be plausibly called an innovation district if 10 percent of your adults have college degrees ... It’s all about having smart people who are connected by urban density and who learn from each other and work with each other.

All of the above are Glaeser's words. If you know his work, you aren't surprised. Cities should get smarter before building innovation districts. Don't build innovation districts to get smarter. In that regard, Glaeser and I are on the same page.

"[A]ll about having smart people who are connected by urban density and who learn from each other and work with each other" is a hypothesis, too. The positive correlation between urban density and innovation may support Alfred Marshall's hypothesis, but doesn't prove it. In this regard, Glaeser and I are on different pages.

Glaeser is a market ideologue. He makes the facts fit his a priori conclusions. An overwhelming error of urban policy over the past 15 years has been to follow a Jane Jacobs East Village strategy of urban revitalization that acts as if what you need to do to get a city going again is to build denser stuff. Denser makes it better. Marshall told me so. Enough said.

We are to question the innovation district, but not the density hypothesis. Instead of cities building more stuff, cities should cram into small spaces more smart people. Both approaches offer to put more of something into a given space. Stand back and then let the market magic happen. Color me skeptical.

Policies Promoting Innovation

Two popular approaches to promoting innovation, deregulation and densification, don't work. The latest boondoggle on the deregulation front comes from Austin, Texas:

The City Council is telling the entrepreneurial community that if you would like to innovate and potentially disrupt an existing industry, you should do it elsewhere.

The City Council dares to impose some regulation on Austin's sharing economy. The disruptors claim that doing so will make the sky fall. At stake isn't innovation, but a regulatory environment that favors the startups over established businesses. The capital rich get richer at the expense of labor. Uber is as old as dirt.

Regulating the sharing economy might be a bad idea. But the supposed crisis of innovation is a red herring. More likely, HomeAway and others are squawking about innovation because they cannot marshal a good argument against the proposed laws. Weak tea.

As for densification, I've spent years mocking the supposed benefits of urban planned knowledge orgies. At best, the density dividend for innovation is a positive correlation without a proven causality mechanism. Google wondering about collaboration and productivity:

The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like ‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’

The short version of a long article, cramming a bunch of smart and talented people into a room doesn't predictably lend itself to innovation. Turns out, the quality (not the quantity) of the interactions is the magic sauce. Urban or suburban, with or without innovation districts, innovation depends on the social dynamics of the team. Density doesn't matter.

Capital Rich, Labor Poor

Let's share. Do my taxes and stay at my seaside mansion. I don't have to do my taxes. You don't have to pay for a vacation place you can't afford. Deal.

The deal is this. My capital steals your work. I pay you spare capacity. La la la la la La.

All you have is labor. I own all the capital. My capital returns more than your labor. If I have enough capital, I don't need your labor.

Well, truth be told, I need your labor. You can't have my capital. Fuck you.

Sharing economy.

Splendid Isolation: Geography of Innovation

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Ideological geographies are stubborn things. Once a stereotype takes hold, the myth persists decades after reality gave up the ghost. The ghost is Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida the torchbearer of her myth. Alfred Marshall and all that, urban density begets innovation. Something in the air makes ideas have sex. Somehow, "something in the air" has become a social science maxim.

Turn out, that something in the air is decidedly suburban. And suburban can be rural or urban. Compare and contrast Apple (rural) and Amazon (urban):

Amazon and Apple aren’t all that different. As Amazon has grown, the famously unflashy company has started to build things in South Lake Union that are as monumental and futuristic as Apple’s infinite loop, including a set of spectacular “biospheres” now under construction that will be at the center of a new urban campus with more than three million square feet of office space. Slated to open in 2017, the giant domes of glass and steel promise the same security and privacy as Apple’s Cupertino retreat. They are in the city, but not of the city.

Urban Amazon isn't a sidewalk ballet. Ideas have sex as in a brothel, not in public space or a third space. Sure, proximity matters the same way it does in the sprawl of Cupertino. The monastic campus operates in the same way in Palo Alto as it does in downtown San Francisco. Wherever the spaceship lands, the results are the same. Innovation.

The common thread is crowded isolation. High-functioning introverts (default social invalids) live, work, and play in new and old buildings walled off from reality. It's a bubble in more than one sense of the term. The Silicon Valley bubble is, first and foremost, a fishbowl.

The fishbowl doesn't work so well without exotics. Rural is as good as urban given proximity and diversity. Guard against inbreeding homophily.  Innovation doesn't require a city. Innovation demands migration.

Economic Geography of the Cloud

An abundance of digital data predicts where the jobs will be.

Theme: Economic restructuring

Subject Article: "A Surgery Center That Doubles as an Idea Lab."

Other Links: 1. "Google to Make Driverless Cars an Alphabet Company in 2016."
2. "IBM’s latest deal is a new test case for the big data economy."
3. "'Moneyball' meets medicine: DePodesta joins Topol at Scripps."
4. "Seattle Is the Next Detroit."
5. "Time travel: An isochronic map shows where to go, how long it took to get there – and what changes were on the way."
6. "The next civil rights issue of our time."
7. "Buckaroo Banzai - There You Are."

Postscript: Flipping my post on its head, "The Urban, Infrastructural Geography Of ‘The Cloud’." If you are interested in walking into the cloud, read that. This understanding is backwards. The data a user consumes comes from the cloud, which is located in some physical location that conforms to some rhyme and reason that looks like economic geography. The economic geography I'm describing is a smartphone input. The "user" produces data, which goes into the cloud. That data input is just noise, lots of information with no rhyme or reason until some algorithm finds the signal and transforms all those 1s and 0s into knowledge.

Goldilocks and the Geography of Innovation

A sweet spot in the Technology Readiness Level attracts private industry.

Theme: Economic geography of innovation

Subject Article: "Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department."

Other Links: 1. "Richard Florida, Roger Martin and David Wolfe on getting innovation right."
2. "Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley."
3. "From Metal to Minds: Economic Restructuring in the Rust Belt."
4. "Boston Versus Silicon Valley: Advantage Beantown."
5. "Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in U.S."
6. "The Valley of Death."

Postscript: In "Engine or Infrastructure? The University Role in Economic Development" (1999), Richard Florida writes:

It is quite clear that Silicon Valley or the Cambridge/Boston regions are not the only places with excellent universities working in areas of potential commercial importance.  One way to begin to structure the problem is to think of the relationship between the university and the economy as composing a simple two-dimensional system, in which the university transmits a signal, which the regional economic environment must absorb.  Increasing the volume of the signal need not result in effective transmission or absorption if the region's transmitters, so to speak, are not turned on or are functioning ineffectively.  In short,the university appears to be a necessary but insufficient condition for regional technological and economic development.  To borrow a phrase from the work of my CMU colleague, Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal (1990) what appears to matter here--and what is to often neglected in policy circles--is what we might call  "regional absorptive capacity,” the ability of a region to absorb the science, innovation, and technologies which universities generate.  Another way of saying this is that regions need to capture the "spillovers" of the technologies and innovations they generate.

I'll start by saying that there is a lot in Florida's paper that resonates with my own research into the matter. Also, the above quoted passage can adequately explain why tech transfer did not flower in Pittsburgh. I've learned that the flowering of tech transfer is rather beside the point. What happens at the university along the NASA scale from Levels 4-7 is, indeed, driving regional economic development.

Technological Innovation Begets Migration

In a virtuous circle, migration and innovation make the world go round.

Theme: Innovation geography

Subject Article: "In the age of disruptive innovation, adaptability is what matters most."

Other Links: 1. "Space and the city: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost."

Postscript: This post was inspired by the latest paper from Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth." Artificial housing supply constraints are deemed to be a drag on economic output. That assumes lower housing prices would allow more people to live in the most productive places. That is, lower housing prices would beget higher population. Which raises the question, how much do housing prices affect inter-regional migration and population change?

Stanford University Is Dying

You go where you know. You went to the wrong college and spent too much money.

Theme: Innovation geography

Subject Article: "How to Survive the College Admissions Madness."

Other Links: 1. "Silicon Valley Is Already Dead."
2. "From Metal to Minds: Economic Restructuring in the Rust Belt."

Postscript: The a-ha moment came while reading about how the regional economy in Waterloo, Ontario thrived despite the demise of Blackberry. The pursuit of tech transfer is the holy grail of economic development. Pittsburgh desperately tried (still tries) to hit on its own Blackberry. This quest spurred world class knowledge production at Carnegie Mellon University. That asset, as it turns out, drives economic restructuring.

Stranger Danger: How Community Stifles Innovation

Free-range kids are economic development.

Theme: Geography of innovation

Subject Article: "‘Free-range’ kids and our parenting police state."

Other Links: 1. "How helicopter parents are ruining college students."
2. "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)."
3. "Why Designers Should Care About the Mechanics of Mixing."
4. "My own private metropolis."
5. "#LittleKnownFact Calvins dad and @Cliff_Clavin_ are related somehow."

Postscript: More evidence that greater density doesn't catalyze innovation:

Could a designer reverse-engineer a public space to support social mixing by cracking the code of places that already mix people well? We know the opposite can be true: Plenty of urban spaces suppress interaction and empathy between people by seeming unsafe, uncomfortable, just plain too crowded … or not crowded enough. But if we really understood the mechanics of mixing, could we design for it?

"Alone in a crowd" is a cliché for a reason.

In Big City, New Ideas Aren't as Promiscuous as They Used to Be

Ideas can have just as much sex in the suburbs as in the city.

Theme: Innovation geography

Subject Article: "Cities and Ideas."

Other Links: 1. "No Innovation Without Migration: Do Places Make People?"
2. "The Urban Tech Revolution."
3. "Urban Density and the Rate of Invention."
4. "1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, a.k.a. the Hart-Cellar Act."
5. "Manufacturing Migration: Who Will Move for Low-Skill, Low-Pay Jobs?"
6. "Density Boondoggles: Innovation Districts."
7. "Regional network drives growth of UK’s tech nation."

Postscript: For a companion paper to "Cities and Ideas", see "New Ideas in Invention."

Where Innovation Thrives

There is no geography of innovation at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "What Still Makes Silicon Valley So Special."

Other Links: 1. "The Urban Tech Revolution."
2. "The Question is Moot."
3. "How Competition Saved New York."
4. "Searching for Silicon Valley in the Rust Belt: The Evolution of Knowledge Networks in Akron and Rochester."
5. "Cultural diversity and entrepreneurship: Evidence from England and Wales."
6. "Diversity Cult."

Postscript: Dense cities are not innately more innovative geographies. New ideas don't necessarily love old buildings. A lot of folklore out there dressed up as academic analysis resulting in lazy and lousy economic development policy.

The Geography of Innovation, or, Why Almost All Japanese People Hate Root Beer

For innovation, migration trumps density at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "Downtown and out? The truth about Tony Hsieh’s $350m Las Vegas project."

Other Links: 1. "Why almost all Japanese people hate root beer."
2. "Our Japanese reporter visits an American sushi restaurant in Japan."

Postscript: The folly of engineering serendipity:

Between 1997 and 2012, Jussieu’s campus in Paris’s Left Bank reshuffled its labs’ locations five times due to ongoing asbestos removal, giving the faculty no control and little warning of where they would end up. An MIT professor named Christian Catalini later catalogued the 55,000 scientific papers they published during this time and mapped the authors’ locations across more than a hundred labs. Instead of having their life’s work disrupted, Jussieu’s researchers were three to five times more likely to collaborate with their new odd-couple neighbors than their old colleagues, did so nearly four to six times more often, and produced better work because of it (as measured by citations).

Forced to be nomads, the researchers did better work. The magic of cities are new odd-couple neighbors, not great density.

Tech Company Wagons Ho! Geography of the Urban Land Rush

Tech companies build suburban campuses in the urban core at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "Space Shift: As Wealthiest Flock to Supertall Condos, Offices Go Horizontal."

Other Links: 1. "Are Millennials Willing to Spend Most of Their Income on Housing?"
2. "Why Technology Firms Are Moving Downtown."

Postscript: Millennial housing choices subsidize tech labor costs when firms locate downtown (while retaining a suburban-like footprint):

Seattle boasts the highest number of micro-dwellings in the country—3,000 at last count. It also permits the most audaciously minimal units, some as small as 90 square feet. That’s about the size of two prison cells put together.

It’s not for the claustrophobic, but it does come with perks—including the chance for millennials and those with modest incomes to settle in vibrant urban neighborhoods. Their presence, in turn, injects new energy to the heart of the city while tamping down suburban sprawl. Micro-housing reflects a growing zeitgeist—to stop accruing, go minimalist and reduce one’s footprint. Indeed, the name of Seattle’s leading micro-housing development company is called Footprint.

Tech companies, looking to employ well-educated millennials, are expanding their urban footprint. Millennials, looking for city-living and proximity to work, are actively shrinking their urban footprint to lower the cost of rent (or homeownership) forced up by in-migrating tech companies.

The Creative Class Boondoggle in Downtown Las Vegas

The lust for greater density is pornographic at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "Downtown Las Vegas Is the Great American Techtopia."

Other Links: 1. "Why Density Matters."
2. "Looking Beyond the Maps of Richard Florida’s 'The Divided City.'"
3. "The Urban Tech Revolution."
4. "STATEMENT From Tony Hsieh, 9/30/14 Downtown Project Q&A: there are a lot of misleading headlines flying around out there…"
5. "Is Jane Jacobs The Justin Bieber Of Urbanism?"
6. "Tony Hsieh: Helping Revitalize a City."

Postscript: Follow the Re/code series (6 parts of, I believe, 10 are already published) about Tony Hsieh's Downtown Las Vegas project.

No Innovation Without Migration: Portlandia Is Dying

Creative collisions in Portlandia fail to produce innovation at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Other Links: 1. "Field Of Dreams Portland."
2. "We Got More Educated, We Are Better Off... Right? An Analysis of Regional Conversion of Bachelors Degree Attainment into Positive Labor Market Outcomes."

Postscript: In reaction to the subject article, Alan Berube (Brookings) tweeted, "Portland is 'overeducated and underemployed but GDP per head up 50% since 2001? Doesn't add up." Consider manufacturing. employment goes down while production goes up. More efficient labor means less people benefit from gains in economic output. Welp, "You Can’t Feed a Family With G.D.P.":

Percent change indexed to 1993 level

%

40

30

20

10

0

Per Capita G.D.P.

Median household income

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2013

Source: Census, Bureau of Economic Analysis

No Innovation Without Migration: The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance had little to with Harlem the place, at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "In Whose Garden Did the Harlem Renaissance Grow?"

Other Links: 1. "The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America."

Postscript: All will tell the same story, of migration:

Alphabetically we can list a hundred names of blues and jazz greats from Perry Anderson to Muddy Waters and all will tell the same story: grew up in the South, honed their skills in the bordellos or clubs of a southern city, went on to fame, if rarely fortune, in one of the music capitals of the North or West.

Wherever the migrants ended up, a great music scene flourished. No innovation without migration.

No Innovation Without Migration: Do Places Make People?

People make places innovative, not places make people innovative at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography

Subject Article: "Scientific ties that bind?"

Other Links: 1. "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities."
2. "Turning Buffalo from a Rust Belt City into a Start-up City."

Postscript: I'm spending a lot of time exploring theories about innovation geography because I'm trying to understand how universities can spur regional economic redevelopment. I hypothesize that migration is missing from the policy analysis and discussion. Could migration be driving Rust Belt urban redevelopment?

No Innovation Without Migration: ‘Most Migrants Only Proceed a Short Distance, and Toward Centers of Absorption’

Looks like agglomeration, but short distance migration drives innovation at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography

Subject Article: "Job Hopping, Information Technology Spillovers, and Productivity Growth."

Other Links: 1. "Ernest George Ravenstein: The Laws of Migration, 1885."
2. "Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley."
3. "No Innovation Without Migration."
4. "Triumph of the Entrepreneurial City."
5. "No Innovation Without Migration: Breaking Convention."
6. "Silicon Valley fights order to pay bigger settlement in hiring case."
7. "Your Knowledge Is Nothing If No One Else Knows You Know It."

Postscript: The introduction of the subject article makes the point better than the passage I quoted in the blog post:

Because the mobility of these skilled technical workers tends to be local, geographic location may play a particularly important role in determining access to the specialized skills and know-how required for the installation of these new technologies, and may partly explain why firms locate in high-tech clusters despite facing higher factor costs for other inputs, such as land and labor (Saxenian, 1996). The primary goal of this study is to test the hypothesis that firms benefit from the IT investments of other firms through the skill content of the IT labor pool because the flow of specialized technical know-how among organizations facilitates the implementation of new IT innovations. Although a substantial literature has focused on estimating the impact of R&D spillovers, there has been little empirical work on IT spillovers, and no work on IT spillovers generated through the IT labor pool.

Mind you, this forthcoming publication is dated January 2013. So we forge ahead with innovation districts regardless of how little empirical research has been done on the matter. Instead, we give the benefit of the doubt to theorists such as Jane Jacobs. That's a lousy foundation for policy and wholly ignorant of legitimate competing explanations with actual empirical analysis.

No Innovation Without Migration: Breaking Convention

Michael Porter's cluster theory is modern-day snake oil at Pacific Standard magazine.

Theme: Innovation geography.

Subject Article: "Job Hopping: Driver of Regional Tech Growth?"

Other Links: 1. "No Innovation Without Migration."
2. "Industrial Organization Continued. The Concentration of Specialized Industries in Particular Localities."
3. "Clusters and the New Economics of Competition."
4. "The Pseudoscience of Jane Jacobs and Innovation Districts."
5. "Chile teaches the world a lesson about innovation."
6. "Job Hopping, Information Technology Spillovers, and Productivity Growth."

Postscript: Speaking of modern-day snake oil:

"The motor force of economic development is exactly what Jane Jacobs told us it was. It was the clustering of diverse groups of people in urban centers," [Richard Florida] said.

To be fair, Florida might be right about that. But we don't know for sure if he is. From the evidence I've weighed, I think he's wrong. Regardless, that's a big bet by New York City given the flimsy evidence in support of such an approach to spurring innovation.