I have never read Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. There are a few reasons for this. First, his thesis was so ubiquitous in the 2000s that a distillation was easy to be had for free. People would write about Florida’s ideas. And he’d talk about it constantly in interviews.
Second, what was true about his model struck me as obvious, and what was not made it less significant. Single professionals in the knowledge economy are not by and large young Mormons who marry young and want to move into spacious tract homes in the suburbs as soon as possible. Rather, they will spend a significant part of their 20s and 30s expending and consuming in and around large cities, and want to be in circumstances where they can meet other like-minded people in similar situations.
But you can’t just create these cities by putting up bike paths. There’s no easy way to mimic what occurred in Silicon Valley. The Valley has a combination of structural (Stanford is there) and contingent factors (California has no non-compete clauses) that help it. It may be that in the modern world there are actually greater returns to locating in an ideapolis which is more expensive.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about academic research. What proportion in a given field of novel and innovative findings are produced by the top 10 institutions? The percentage varies by field and person to person, but I’ve gotten numbers ranging from 40 to 90% from people in different fields. In other words, research productivity is described by a power law as a function of institution.
Similarly, there will be one Silicon Valley, and everyone else will have the scraps. Information technology has not made the landscape flat. The visceral and concrete aspect of “being there” is even more of an advantage in a world where everyone is accessible via email and social media.
This article in Wired, Can the American Heartland Remake Itself in the Image of Silicon Valley? One Startup Finds Out, makes it pretty clear that it doesn’t matter how cool Denver is, it’s going to be hard if you aren’t in Silicon Valley.
The importance of geography and co-location is why I propose that a project for the 21st century should be the construction of a massive arcology between Long Beach and San Diego. Perfect weather on the coast and mountains inland. Aim to house the entire United States population there to start out with.