Romanticizing the city

In the Virtual Revolution on BBC2 last night, Steven Johnson said:

Inventions are dramatically, disproportionately, centred in urban areas. One of the great things about cities is that they're filled with public spaces like a coffee shop where people come together...and in that point of convergence they sit around and talk and share ideas and it becomes a kind of connected space.(About 50'22" in)

And presenter Aleks Krotoski asked:

Could it be that the essence of what makes a city great - the gossip, the connections, the serendipity - could also work on the web?

This echoes a point made by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing...opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters.(The Black Swan p 209)

This strikes me as weird. I lived for 21 years in London and I don't think I ever had a serendipitous encounter. Living in a big city didn't connect me to others but separated me - because when I wasn't stuck at a desk I was wasting the equivalent of a working day each week on public transport.
And I'm supposed to have worked in a "creative profession".
What's more, if I ever had gone into a coffee shop on my own, all that would have happened is that I'd have minded my own business and others would have minded theirs. If I'd tried to talk to a stranger, I'd just have been regarded as a creep or weirdo.
Nor is it obvious that I would have had more ideas if I had had such encounters. Yes, it's possible that my interlocuter would have reacted to a half-formed thought by offering ways to develop it into something good. But it's more likely he'd just have said "that's crap". And the correlation between my ideas being crap and someone saying they're crap would almost certainly be less than one, and pehaps not even positive at all.
Indeed, it seems to me that social networks are as likely to repress ideas  as to develop them - at least social and political ones rather than business ones - because most people's ideas are a set of banalities and biases formed by peer pressure.
To me then, the web is not like a city at all. It's vastly better than that, as it is a way of connecting to newish ideas in a way that living in a city isn't.
Now, I say this out of bemusement. Are Johnson and Taleb romanticizing the city? Or was I doing something wrong?

Comments

[tomslee]

I vote for you, at least on the cities question. Not that I have any facts or anything, but then neither do J&T from the bit I heard. Yes there are good things about cities, but gossip and connections happen everywhere. Do they talk about weak ties? A danger sign, I think.

[Roger]

My experience of London was the same as yours - I spent ridiculous amounts of time on tubes, trains and buses cocooned away with my walkman and paper or book surrounded by legions of others all studiously avoiding eye contact.

If you did talk to strangers it was because it was late, you were in a pub, pissed and on the pull - not because you felt the need to spontaneously discuss the book they were reading.

However if I were an academic or journalist who had complete control of my time and could actually afford to live in the centre of town rather than a suburb and spend my time in clubs like the Groucho rather than All Bar One or the Slug And Lettuce it probably would have been very different.

[chris c]

No, you're right, they're trying to romanticise it. Which is strange, because for a lot of people the city doesn't represent any of those things, it represents the opposite - it's usually where people are set to work minimum wage for long hours in those coffee shops to be able to afford the rent on their shitty bedsit above a chip shop on the high street and once in a while go out and get high or get pissed to make sure I stopped noticing my miserable life spent waiting on academics like Johnson and Taleb, who apparently are wandering around in a world that no-one I know believes actually exists.

Except maybe in Friends.

I think that's it - they've been watching too much TV.

[Tim Almond]

"Inventions are dramatically, disproportionately, centred in urban areas.".

I'm not sure about that at all. In fact, I'm struggling to think of that much invention in urban areas. Even the dotcoms that I know in Britain seem to mostly be in places like Brighton and Oxfordshire, not London (London is more finance and advertising).

[ConspicuousCBM]

I agree with you entirely Chris. I live in a smallish town here in Stafford and we have been made to feel welcome via the school & the local business community in a way that I could never have imagined possible. Strangely I have also met a whole bunch of people via Twitter in the local community who have become good acquaintances. If this had been London, no way this would have happened.

[Mean Mister Mustard]

I think you're all full of dung. Implicit in the idea of serendipity is that the really meaningful interactions are almost certainly infrequent. Yes, most of urban life does NOT involve hobnobing with great inventors or even good poets and dramatists. But compared to country/small town life, where the welcome is virtually always the most meaningful interaction, urban life offers the opportunity for much more variety.

[Innocent Abroad]

I suspect this theory would stand up a lot better on the other side of the pond...

[ortega]

One thing that troubled me in that program was the final speech of the presenter.
Probably meaning to be as vacous as that things use to be, she said, with a lovely innocent smile, that internet gave us, among other things, the chance 'to change human nature'.
Where have I heard that before?

[John Terry's Mum]

London is too big to support anything but a transactional network of relationships.

In smaller towns and cities ones has more opportunity for serendipity by regularly seeing familiar faces.

I would guess that the "walkability" of a city might be a key factor and places like Dublin, Copenhagen, Glasgow are about the maximum size that can offer these *serendipities".

[Gaw]

If the programme is suggesting you tend meet strangers in London coffee shops then I think that's nuts. But if it's suggesting them as a venue to keep in touch with existing friends and possibly be introduced to their friends then I think the point holds water. Cities are also good places to connect not to people but to ideas - all the art galleries, for instance. However, I agree that the inner London experience is very different from the outer London experience what with the latter's its commute and more residential surroundings.

[diogenes1960]

It is nice to fantasise that maybe James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara met while they were living in Zurich. Or perhaps even more suggestive of possibilities, Trotsky, Varese and Eugene O'Neill might have met in new York in 1916. But they did not. The idea of urban cafe culture ever leading to anything other than some short-lived creative movements is hard to support eg the Rhymers Club in London, the cafe in Paris where Sartre used to hang out. Surely most innovations have come about through long-distance correspondence between people (including professional journals), or in tightly-knit laboratories rather than through serendipitous encounters in cities.

[Adrian]

It's not cities in general, it's London in particular. There's an English thing about not talking to strangers that doesn't exist nearly so much in other countries.

[diogenes1960]

vut still Adrian...the chats I have had with total strangers over a beer in bars in Amsterdam have just been chats rather than intellectual hothousing

[Sam]

The Web beats the city. I am in Covington, KY ( across the Ohio river from Cincinnati, Ohio) and I found your interesting blog.

[Jim]

@ Tim, Brighton and Oxford (the centre of the Oxfordshire tech economy) are both urban areas.

@ Chris: I think Johnson greatly overstates the extent to which this is about 'public space' rather than private spaces, but it's likely that we benefit from proximity with others partly through learning, copying or stealing ideas from them, that face to face communication is a rich source of these opportunities, and that cities provide more opportunity for a diverse range of face to face communication than rural areas. There's a long line of economic enquiry into these kind of proximity spillovers, from Marshall through Jane Jacobs and on to Ed Glaeser today.

For some empirical evidence see

http://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpwp/01-14.html

and

http://www.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_2649_33735_37801602_1_1_1_1,00.html

Interestingly, the latter says "there is some evidence that mega-size cities – those more than 7 million people such as Seoul, Mexico City, Istanbul and Tokyo – have outgrown the economies of scale normally associated with cities."

[Cian]

I know I'm coming to this late...
My experience of London was pretty similar. However I've also lived in Cambridge and Brighton, and in both those cities if you work in particular professions (tech in Cambridge; IT and design in Brighton) there are plenty of opportunities to network with fellow professionals at meetings, lectures, events, etc. If you work in a different profession I imagine its like anywhere else. Certainly you're not going to meet many people at coffee houses.

I think the main differences between London are that both Cambridge and Brighton are fairly dense and easily navigated, and while big enough to have large numbers of very specific professionals, not so big that they're scattered over a large geographic area. The other thing is that they have plenty of spaces that can be easily used for professional activities (sympathetic companies, universities, etc).

[منتديات]

I think the main differences between London are that both Cambridge and Brighton are fairly dense and easily navigated, and while big enough to have large numbers of very specific professionals, not so big that they're scattered over a large geographic area. The other thing is that they have plenty of spaces that can be easily used for professional activities (sympathetic companies, universities, etc).