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
If any of you have gone to architecture school (or know someone who went to architecture school), you’ll know that everything revolves around something called studio. Studio – that’s really all you need to say – is worth many multiples of your other classes and… Read More
Eduardo Porter recently published this piece in the New York Times on the “relentless economic decline” of small-town rural America. We often talk about rising income inequality, but the greater concern is the alarming rate of joblessness in many of these communities. Earning less than others… Read More
We often talk about agglomeration economies in terms of their horizontal clustering within cities. But a new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics – summarized here by Richard Florida – has looked at the other dimension: the vertical clustering of economic activity within tall buildings. … Read More
This morning I came across the below graph in a Medium article by Eric Jaffe of Sidewalk Labs. It is taken from a research paper by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman called, Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America. What this… Read More
When I met with all of the lovely folks from Amsterdam last week, one of the things that I mentioned about intensification is that it is almost certainly a contributing factor towards innovation, agglomeration economies, and the overall startup ecosystem here Toronto. I don’t know… Read More
I don’t always agree with economist Edward Glaeser, but I really enjoyed the talk that he gave at the Vancouver Urban Forum back in 2012 (at least part 2 of it). I came across it on Twitter today and, since it only has about 300… Read More
