Earlier this year, Enrico Moretti, who is a professor at UC Berkeley, published this research paper looking at the effect of high-tech clusters on productivity and innovation. (I am unclear if there is any relationship to the Italian brewing company Birra Moretti.) One of the… Read More
We know that innovation and economic growth tends to be unevenly distributed. This is the bull case for living in cities and, more particularly, for living in certain cities. But of course, the big question these days is whether or not our little work from… Read More
The research isn’t absolutely conclusive, but Matt Clancy — who is an assistant teaching professor of economics at Iowa State — makes an interesting case (over here) about entrepreneurship being mostly contagious. The article cites a long list of studies that have more or less… Read More
It was recently announced that the City of London — the historic town center and primary CBD of the region — is aiming to create at least 1,500 new residential units in the Square Mile by 2030. Part of its strategy is to convert disused… Read More
One of the reasons why I remain so bullish on cities is because we know that new ideas disproportionately come from cities (typically big and dense ones). Matt Clancy does an excellent job of explaining this in a recent post. In it, he cites a… Read More
The Financial Times is running a series right now on the future of the City of London. In their latest article, they looked at “How London grew into a financial powerhouse,” while at the same time comparing it to other global financial centers. It’s interesting… Read More
The Penn Institute for Urban Research has just launched a new initiative called, Cities and Contagion: Lessons from COVID-19. The inaugural piece is a special edition of its Urban Link publication. But going forward, the initiative is planned to include not only publications, but a… Read More
The media tends to describe agglomeration economies — one of the benefits of big urban areas — as being entirely serendipitous. Minimize travel. Maximize chance encounters at the local coffee shop. And then all of a sudden patents will go up and new startups will… Read More
A recent study by the City of Toronto has looked at why tech firms cluster (agglomeration economies) and where they cluster in the city. Here are maps of what they found: Downtown captured almost half (49.2%) of all tech employment in the city with some… Read More
Here is an excerpt from a Guardian article that was published last year (by Tim Burrows) about Grimsby, England: In Grimsby’s 1930s heyday, fishermen used to head to Freeman Street as soon as they were off the trawler, straight to the Lincoln or the Corporation… Read More
