I just finished Joel Kotkin's The City, a stimulating historical survey of the rise and fall of cities around the world. He uses this survey to make the case for the "universality of the urban experience", cutting across the enormous diversity of individual city experiences, and to argue that "urban areas have performed three separate critical functions - the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the host for a commercial market." In effect, Kotkin argues that cities prosper when they perform these three functions well and they inevitably decline when they fall short on one or more of these functions.
Kotkin's book led me to reflect on the role of cities. My own view is that the three functions he cites are really secondary. The primary role of cities has been to provide robust concentration points for people and information flows in order to accelerate capability building. Kotkin quotes Socrates as remarking: "The country places and the trees don't teach me anything, and the people in the city do." This captures for me the primary role of cities. In this context, sacred spaces, security and markets support the primary role of cities. Sacred spaces have historically been important in creating shared meaning and values that are essential for building trust. Security provides an environment conducive to learning and development. Markets generate flows of people, goods and ideas to advance learning and development. But the reason people come to cities and stay in cities is to get better faster by exposing themselves to a much more diverse and rich set of interactions than they could in less densely settled areas.
As uncertainty increases, I believe this role of cities will become even more valuable. Rather than seeing more dispersion, supported by the capabilities of robust technology networks, I expect that we will see even more concentration, supported by the need to connect with other people in much richer face-to-face settings. Concentration points of flows of people, goods and ideas become strategically important in uncertain environments and cities provide these concentration points.
Although he doesn't refer to him explicitly in the text, it is clear that Kotkin is highly skeptical of Richard Florida's focus on cities as concentration points for the "creative class" (see Florida's great book The Rise of the Creative Class) - at least in the absence of a "sacred place" that can provide a common set of values. Shared values and a common sense of purpose are important in accelerating capability building, but I believe these are emerging within the creative class while at the same time leaving ample room for diversity.
It is also remarkable to me that Kotkin only makes one passing reference to Jane Jacobs in the text of a book devoted to cities. Jane Jacobs remains a seminal thinker on this topic and her books - especially The Economy of Cities and the Death and Life of Great American Cities - describe with great insight how cities must continue to evolve in order to survive.
Given this perspective, I believe that a key element of business strategy will be choices about how to most effectively participate in the economies of cities that have the greatest potential to accelerate capability building. Companies that decide to move their headquarters out to pastoral suburbs may be heading in exactly the wrong direction.
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