In planning for efficient, ultra productive cities of the future, urban planners need to think about more than density, according to a Wall Street Journal article that cites SFI's cities and urbanization research.
Read the Wall Street Journal article (July 27, 2012)
"Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have been able to demonstrate that bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life," writes Richard Florida. "Doubling a city's population, the Santa Fe researchers found, more than doubles its creative and economic output, a phenomenon known as 'superlinear scaling.'"
But, he writes, "in terms of innovation and creative impetus, Shanghai pales in comparison to New York, London, Paris and Milan, not to mention high-tech hubs like Silicon Valley, the Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin and North Carolina's research triangle, all of which have much lower densities."
What matters most, he writes, "isn't density itself but how much people mix with each other. And there isn't just one formula for that. It can happen in the pedestrian-oriented sidewalk culture of New York and London but also—to the chagrin of many urbanists—in the car-dependent sprawl of a suburban nerdistan like Silicon Valley," which manage to emulate the functions of bigger, denser cities by encouraging the clustering of talent and enterprise and fostering a high level of information-sharing.
Read the Wall Street Journal article (July 27, 2012)
Watch the video about SFI's cities & urbanization research (7 minutes)
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