[ExI] Are Cities Dead? (was Re: moving bits, not butts)

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Fri Mar 4 15:22:39 UTC 2011


On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 8:25 PM, Damien Sullivan
<phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 11:18:07AM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> Cities are also good for enabling you to live a mile away from your
> neighbor.  If the population was evenly spread over the Earth's land
> surface in a square grid, there'd be a person every 140 meters.  If
> you allow for families and specify clumps of 4, you'd have a family
> every 280 meters.  A 3 minute walk to other people, no matter where on
> Earth you were, save the oceans.  You get space because the rest of us
> clump up.

This is a fact that I am very grateful for. I just don't entirely get
why people want to do so.

> There's evidence that a lot of creative economic activity scales up
> super-linearly in cities, e.g. 2x the people will generate more than 2x
> the productivity, 15% more economic activity per capita, while using
> less than 2x the energy (only 85% more).  By contrast corporations are
> sublinear (profit per employees shrinks with size)
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=a
> http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301.abstract

This is interesting. I have a general theory that the more people get
involved in an activity as a group, the less efficient they are.
Perhaps cities buck this general trend because they aren't as cohesive
as a corporation or government agency.

> Arguably a safer place to raise children than outer suburbs
> http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-27-want-a-safe-place-to-raise-kids-look-to-the-cities

I'm sure my place is safer than a city. ;-)  At least safer from other people.

-Kelly




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