Design
The Historic Link Between Cities and Innovation
Density and transportation have spurred new ideas since before the industrial revolution.
Cities, with their dense mixtures of people and economic activity, have long been fonts of innovation. To start, density spurs innovation by pushing people and ideas together, enabling them to combine and recombine in new ways. And advances in transportation—from railroads and subways to automobiles, planes, and high-speed rail—increase the circulation not only of goods and people, but of ideas as well.
Most of the evidence connecting urbanization and innovation focuses on recent times. Now a study by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman, a Boston University economist and doctoral candidate, documents the ways that urbanization and transportation spurred American innovation in the late 18th and 19th centuries.