I was catching up with a friend of mine over coffee this morning and he was telling me about his recent trip to Porto, Portugal. I’ve never been, but it’s fairly high up on my list of places to visit.
He was telling me about how beautiful the center of the city is and how it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But he was also telling me how eerie it was to see so many abandoned and decaying buildings.
And part of the reason for this – I learned – is that up until fairly recently, Portugal had some incredibly onerous pro-tenant rent controls in place that dated back to the beginning of the 1900s.
Because of this, landlords in many cases could not, and cannot, actually afford to maintain their properties. Buildings were left to decay, and in some cases they were completely abandoned. That was their only option. And it led to a virtually
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently teamed up with a few other research groups to investigate the relationship between human interactions and city size. If you happen to be a member of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, you can download the full report here. But in true ATC fashion, I’m going to give you the Coles Notes version here.
What the study did was look at billions of anonymized mobile phone data in both Portugal and the UK in order to determine how our real life social networks change with city size. And what they found is a pretty consistent relationship:
[T]his study reveals a fundamental pattern: our social connections scale with city size. The larger the town you live in, the more people you call and the more calls you make. The scaling of this relation is “super-linear,” which means that on average, if you double the size of a town, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way.
What’s interesting about this finding is that it starts to explain how cities–and the clustering of people–can act as fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The bigger the city the more people you probably know.
I was catching up with a friend of mine over coffee this morning and he was telling me about his recent trip to Porto, Portugal. I’ve never been, but it’s fairly high up on my list of places to visit.
He was telling me about how beautiful the center of the city is and how it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But he was also telling me how eerie it was to see so many abandoned and decaying buildings.
And part of the reason for this – I learned – is that up until fairly recently, Portugal had some incredibly onerous pro-tenant rent controls in place that dated back to the beginning of the 1900s.
Because of this, landlords in many cases could not, and cannot, actually afford to maintain their properties. Buildings were left to decay, and in some cases they were completely abandoned. That was their only option. And it led to a virtually
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently teamed up with a few other research groups to investigate the relationship between human interactions and city size. If you happen to be a member of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, you can download the full report here. But in true ATC fashion, I’m going to give you the Coles Notes version here.
What the study did was look at billions of anonymized mobile phone data in both Portugal and the UK in order to determine how our real life social networks change with city size. And what they found is a pretty consistent relationship:
[T]his study reveals a fundamental pattern: our social connections scale with city size. The larger the town you live in, the more people you call and the more calls you make. The scaling of this relation is “super-linear,” which means that on average, if you double the size of a town, the sum of phone contacts in the city will more than double – in a mathematically predictable way.
What’s interesting about this finding is that it starts to explain how cities–and the clustering of people–can act as fertile ground for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The bigger the city the more people you probably know.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
This morning I stumbled upon a blog post by a Berlin-based venture capitalist (Ciarán O'Leary) talking about how Lisbon feels like the next Berlin. In other words, it feels like the next great European startup hub.
The tech scene is organic – it happened on its own, came out of nowhere. That is much more fun and sustainable than any kind of political or targeted economic strategy.
There are a ton of constraints (funding, local talent base, etc.) so entrepreneurs need to hustle to make things happen. Hustle is good.
Berlin was an economic void, Portugal had a massive economic crisis and Lisbon sure isn’t letting that crisis go to waste.
Entrepreneurship has the real chance to be a center stage act, not a side gig. It’s everywhere.
The city is very, very cool. You just want to be here.
You can have a great life on a startup salary.
Everyone speaks english; everyone is welcoming and open. That matters a lot when you want to attract international talent and funding.
And while being “very, very cool” may not seem immediately relevant to creating a robust startup environment, it really is. It may be the most important point. It makes the city a magnet for talent.
Just the other day I was trying to explain Berlin to someone and I used a similar lexicon. I said: “It’s an unbelievably cool city. It bleeds hipness. You will love it.”
If you’re a city, that’s a great thing to be.
non-existent rental housing market
(according to the IMF).
Clearly, this is a problem. If you have a market distortion as serious as this one – where there’s virtually no incentive to invest – you’re on a highly unsustainable economic trajectory.
The hope was that the reforms would allow Portuguese landlords to charge more reasonable and market-oriented rents, as well as do other crazy things like evict tenants that don’t actually pay their rent. Not surprisingly, many fought the changes.
I don’t know precisely how these reforms have ultimately played out in the market over the past few years (if you do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below), but I do believe that liberalization of the market was, and probably still is, needed.
While paying €5 a month for a 4 bedroom apartment in a desirable central neighborhood might be great for that one individual family, it’s not so great for the economy as a whole. And ultimately that comes around to impact even that household.
But what I’m curious about (I don’t have the report) is if there’s some kind of upper limit. Presumably this “super-linear” relationship tapers off after a certain city size, because there has got to be limits to the number of people we can maintain productive relationships with.
This morning I stumbled upon a blog post by a Berlin-based venture capitalist (Ciarán O'Leary) talking about how Lisbon feels like the next Berlin. In other words, it feels like the next great European startup hub.
The tech scene is organic – it happened on its own, came out of nowhere. That is much more fun and sustainable than any kind of political or targeted economic strategy.
There are a ton of constraints (funding, local talent base, etc.) so entrepreneurs need to hustle to make things happen. Hustle is good.
Berlin was an economic void, Portugal had a massive economic crisis and Lisbon sure isn’t letting that crisis go to waste.
Entrepreneurship has the real chance to be a center stage act, not a side gig. It’s everywhere.
The city is very, very cool. You just want to be here.
You can have a great life on a startup salary.
Everyone speaks english; everyone is welcoming and open. That matters a lot when you want to attract international talent and funding.
And while being “very, very cool” may not seem immediately relevant to creating a robust startup environment, it really is. It may be the most important point. It makes the city a magnet for talent.
Just the other day I was trying to explain Berlin to someone and I used a similar lexicon. I said: “It’s an unbelievably cool city. It bleeds hipness. You will love it.”
If you’re a city, that’s a great thing to be.
non-existent rental housing market
(according to the IMF).
Clearly, this is a problem. If you have a market distortion as serious as this one – where there’s virtually no incentive to invest – you’re on a highly unsustainable economic trajectory.
The hope was that the reforms would allow Portuguese landlords to charge more reasonable and market-oriented rents, as well as do other crazy things like evict tenants that don’t actually pay their rent. Not surprisingly, many fought the changes.
I don’t know precisely how these reforms have ultimately played out in the market over the past few years (if you do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below), but I do believe that liberalization of the market was, and probably still is, needed.
While paying €5 a month for a 4 bedroom apartment in a desirable central neighborhood might be great for that one individual family, it’s not so great for the economy as a whole. And ultimately that comes around to impact even that household.
But what I’m curious about (I don’t have the report) is if there’s some kind of upper limit. Presumably this “super-linear” relationship tapers off after a certain city size, because there has got to be limits to the number of people we can maintain productive relationships with.
