Ambition

As a follow-up to the previous post, another fascinating essay, this time by Paul Graham on his website, explores the messages cities "send" to their inhabitants, transmitted through you-name-it: culture, form, and economics, for starters. Sweeping generalizations here, but interesting reading for anyone who cares about jurisdictional advantage:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder....

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

As an example, anyone who lives in the Boston area (including many of the commenters on Graham's website, it seems) will recognize the sentiment behind what he says about the clustering of brainpower in his hometown of Cambridge, and what that does to the message the area "sends:"

Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else....Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.

I’d argue that Cambridge doesn’t have a monopoly on the production of nebulously defined “ideas”—residents of many other cities could also claim the same. But the construct of the essay offers an interesting way to distill a sense of place through what it produces.

Cambridge’s main industry (as well that of its eponymous English namesake) is education. Detroit makes cars. Trenton, New Jersey makes condoms (oops--made). You could probably say that Paris makes romance, Venice and Orlando make tourism, and Los Angeles makes entertainment. These "products" shape the image of the place and contribute to its brand.

What does your city make? What does it "say"? (above, a well-known bridge over the Delaware River connecting Pennsylvania to New Jersey, via)

An echo of Graham’s sentiments about geography and intellectual power shows up in a piece by Elia Powers published recently on Inside Higher Ed, about the notion of the “college city.” Naturally Boston, home to some 50 colleges and universities, appears:

It’s not just the number of colleges or dot.com startups located in a given region that determine a place’s attractiveness to academics, according to Sampson. Cities that are “naturally diverse” in population and are able to offer a range of cultural amenities like theater and museums prove to be most appealing.

By that definition, New York and Washington would be at the top of the list of so-called college cities. They are immensely diverse and have an abundance of museums and performance venues. Mark Hutter, a professor of sociology at Rowan University and author of Experiencing Cities, said that while these cities certainly cater to the creative class and are filled with faculty and students, they aren’t classic college cities.

Put another way, New York and Washington are undoubtedly “college friendly,” but they’re hardly “college centered” like the quintessential college city—Boston...

“The cultural climate of Boston is defined by its universities,” Hutter said. “It seems to be so predominant, and there’s no counter identity unless you talk about the sports teams. That’s unique — the only similarities are small college towns.”

In essence Powers makes the same conclusion about the Boston/Cambridge area that Graham does, but spells it out differently. For the former, “cultural amenities and regional density” fuel Boston’s exceptionalism beyond its academic offerings; for Graham, it is people and their aspirations that color the place. Maybe it is all of the above.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as anchors. Norman Fainstein, chair of the sociology department and former president of Connecticut College, and an author of several books on urban affairs and policy, said that Harvard and M.I.T give Boston
an aura that can’t be matched — even by other cities with several prominent institutions. Combine the academic reputation of the colleges with the cultural amenities and regional density, and you have a formula that makes Boston the prototypical college city.