The Particular Creativity of Dense Urban Neighborhoods

Long ago, Jane Jacobs showed us how dense, diverse urban neighborhoods filled with short blocks and old buildings were catalysts of innovation and creativity. But when economists and urbanists measure innovation they typically look at big geographic areas like metros. Yet, what Jacobs was talking and writing about was the micro-geographic texture of much smaller neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village.

A new study, forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics, takes a close look at the effect of small urban neighborhoods—and in particular on key characteristics of their physical layout—on innovation. The study, by Maria P. Roche, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business, examines the effect of certain neighborhood characteristics on innovation. The study compares the rate of innovation (based on patents granted between 2011 and 2013) to two key neighborhood characteristics that capture older more compact, neighborhoods built before the mass onset of the automobile: street density (based on the total miles of streets shared by cars and pedestrians) and percentage of housing stock built before 1940.