More on cities

To follow up on my post yesterday on Kotkin’s new book, The City, I just came across a great blog posting by Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Radar on a talk that Stewart Brand recently gave for the Long Now Foundation on urbanization.  I wish I could have been there – it is filled with classic Brand insight.  Here are some of the notes:

I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates. Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.

I found the same diagram applies to cities. Indeed, as historians have pointed out, "Civilization is what happens in cities." The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn. Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they "teach" society at large.

This is consistent with my view that cities are powerful concentration points for flows of people, goods and ideas to accelerate capability building.

Stewart Brand has a related article that was just published in Technology Review.