John Gordon used to cry tears of frustration on his morning commute. A Web designer in suburban Maryland, he had to drive for an hour to get to the office park where he worked. "You park, you go in, you're at a cubicle," he recalls. "I interacted with five people on a given day." After only a year, Gordon decamped to Astoria, Queens, where he now works. "I'm on my feet more, so I deal directly with people. I've gotten work while standing in line at the store. It's invigorating," he says. "I'm constantly in touch with the best design in the entire world everywhere I go. I get so much inspiration from something like a funky, homemade, misspelled sign for a Cypriot soccer club."
The evidence is mounting that, as in the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, your mental garden buds, blooms, and proliferates when cross-pollinated with the many other flowers and fruits crowding the urban jungle. People come up with more and better ideas and produce more results from those ideas by finding more collaborators as well as critics.
For the past decade or so, a pop-sociology debate has been raging between "Flatworlders" and "creative class" boosters. Flatworlders, so-called after Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat, argue that information technology erases distance, distributing the tools of innovation equally to everyone. Creative class types, like Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class, say nope—there's something unique and special about actually being in a city that gets the intellectual juices flowing. They argue that environments like Gordon's multinational neighborhood provide more avenues for social contact and for creative collaboration and feedback.
Flatworld economists and sociologists look at the growth of telecommuting and instant messaging, e-mailing and videoconferencing, outsourcing and offshoring, and conclude that technology puts creative individuals at all levels, from Boston to Bangladesh, on a level playing field. Increasingly complex tasks in medical, legal, and editorial industries are being outsourced; where you are in the world doesn't matter, because everyone has access to the same tools, technology, and information. As Thomas Friedman put it in a recent interview, "When the world gets this flat, when so many people have this much productivity and this many distributive tools of innovation and collaboration...whatever can be done, will be done." In other words, when people are equipped with the right tools, the result will be creativity and innovation—regardless of locale.
Creative class types, on the other hand, have been documenting the evidence that geography still matters. People around the world may have access to the same tools of information technology, but you're still at a disadvantage if you live in, say, rural Alabama. Cities, they argue, continue to exert a special gravitational pull as centers of creativity and innovation—just as they did in Cicero's Rome and Shakespeare's London. Highly educated people, who have more choice about where to live, are far more concentrated in certain big metropolitan areas than they were 30 years ago. And for every doubling in city size, there's a 14 to 27 percent increase in productivity per worker—meaning that individual workers are far more productive if they live in cities than they would be out in the sticks. As Richard Florida put it in a 2005 speech, "The world is not flat... there are two dozen spiky"—that is, particularly creative—"places in the world that account for 98 percent of innovation." What, then, are the urban boosts to individual creativity?
The it-factors of urbanism are density and diversity. The potential edge that urban dwellers enjoy over their country cousins can be linked to having more and different people to meet, and more meeting places—parks, coffee shops, parties, or simply the sidewalk. Population size isn't the only measure of urbanism, of course—someone who lives and works in a walkable college town like Ithaca, New York, may talk to 30 different people in a day, from neighbors to shopkeepers, while someone who lives in a gated enclave in Los Angeles and drives an hour to work may exchange words only with her spouse and a few office mates.
You may not think of the impatient queue breathing down your neck at the deli as a potential source of cognitive benefits. Yet Judith Olson, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, believes that existing and even future technologies will never replace the advantages of face-to-face interaction. This comparison is the main research focus of her field, called human-computer interaction. "There are a lot of things that 'come for free' when you are co-located," she says, such as body language, gestures, and the nonverbal cues that tell you when to interrupt and when not to.
People learn, understand each other, and trust each other more when they deal in person. The most important effect of being around others at work, Olson says, is simply knowing that others are working too. The scent of stress in the air is crucial for keeping you motivated.
Duncan Watts, who studies social networks at Columbia University, points out that talking face to face trumps communicating in bits and bytes, especially as tasks become more complicated. While simple tasks with clear instructions and clear outcomes can be outsourced, he says, we still have disarmament summits, not disarmament teleconferences. "When you're talking about innovation and really intense collaboration—negotiating an arms control treaty—it's helpful to be in the same room," says Watts. "That's one reason why we still have to congregate in geographically clustered areas."
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