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That's after years living in big and old, dense and highly-populated urban East Coast cities like Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston and New York City, but always in their small dense active thriving neighborhoods.
In Washington it was Georgetown, in Philadelphia it was Logan Circle and South Street, in Boston it was The North End and Fort Point Channel, in New York it was first in Greenwich Village. All those 'neighborhoods" were integral low-rise parts of the high-rise urban cityscape that sprang-up and later developed around them.
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BLOGGER NOTE: It's a good time to take a look again at a $40,000 city-funded symposium staged here in DTMESA one year and ten months ago to change that narrative. . . did it work? Or did the Think-Tank Brookings Institution and ASU speakers miss the mark on their 4-year old program?
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Let's leave that on the back-burner for the time being, and take a look at an article published yesterday by Richard Florida in City Lab
The Particular Creativity of Dense Urban Neighborhoods
A new study finds evidence that Jane Jacobs was right about the dynamic and innovative qualities spurred by living in dense, urban neighborhoods
"Long ago, Jane Jacobs showed us how dense, diverse urban neighborhoods filled with short blocks and old buildings were catalysts of innov ation and creativity. But when economists and urbanists measure innovation they typically look at big geographic areas like metros. Yet, what Jacobs was talking and writing about was the micro-geographic texture of much smaller neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village.
A new study, forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics, takes a close look at the effect of small urban neighborhoods—and in particular on key characteristics of their physical layout—on innovation.
The study, by Maria P. Roche, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business, examines the effect of certain neighborhood characteristics on innovation.
The study compares the rate of innovation (based on patents granted between 2011 and 2013) to two key neighborhood characteristics that capture older more compact, neighborhoods built before the mass onset of the automobile:
(1) street density (based on the total miles of streets shared by cars and pedestrians)
(2) percentage of housing stock built before 1940.
> This suggests that neighborhoods with denser streets help facilitate greater knowledge exchange and higher levels of interaction over the ideas they generate, . .
> The study also finds population, employment, and amenities like bars and restaurants to be positively associated with neighborhood level innovation.
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Roche sees these as factors that work together with the layout of streets and neighborhood form to spur interaction between people—the exchange of knowledge and ideas that ultimately generate new innovations.
For too long, we’ve seen innovation as something that takes place in corporate R&D (research and development) centers, university laboratories, and suburban office parks.
But as Jane Jacobs long ago said, new innovations are more likely to come from the density and diversity of urban neighborhoods.
> These Jacobs-identified factors have tended to elude economists and urbanists, who have lacked the kinds of detailed neighborhood-level data and analysis needed to track and identify them.
Until now, most studies of the geography of innovation have tracked innovations or startup companies broadly across cities and metro areas.
Roche’s study uses detailed data to help us better understand how factors of urban form interact with density to shape geographic micro-clusters of innovation at the neighborhood level.
Not only does innovation turn on the presence of universities or concentration of talent or human capital, but on physical characteristics like street layout and form of the neighborhood.
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Taking Innovation to the Streets:
Microgeography, Physical Structure and Innovation
© 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Review of Economics and Statistics
-Just Accepted
Review of Economics and Statistics
ABSTRACTIn this paper, we analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. We exploit a novel data set covering all Census Block Groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes, street infrastructure, as well as population and workforce characteristics. To deal with concerns of omitted variable bias, we apply commuting zone fixed effects and construct instruments based on historic city planning. The results suggest that variation in street network density may explain regional innovation differentials beyond the traditional location externalities found in the literature.
