Economy
The Real Reason Cities Are Centers of Innovation
GDP and patents in cities usually grow at a faster rate than population. But why?
It’s obvious from human history that people have long found unique value in living and working in cities, even if for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. Put people together, and opportunities and ideas and wealth seem to grow at a more powerful rate than a simple sum of all our numbers. This has been intuitively true for centuries of city-dwellers.
"What people didn’t know," says MIT researcher Wei Pan, "is why."