Stage 5 Changing Places

Parks, squares, street corners, libraries, schools—these are the important social places in many cities. They are the public spaces where we relax and meet friends; in short, the places that we all share. But there is another kind of shared space that often goes unappreciated as a community hub in today’s convenience-oriented cities: the public markets where we buy our food.

While markets were historically important threads of a city’s social fabric, sanitation concerns and a cultural obsession with convenience led to their demise in many western cities in the 1950s. The “super” markets that replaced these vital public spaces were some of the first of what we now know as big box stores, and today, many millions of people around the world rely on these fluorescent, air conditioned megastores.

But in some cities, even in the developed world, traditional public markets still reign supreme!

Via Lauren Moss

Throughout human history, people have long found unique value in living and working in cities, even if for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. Put people together, and opportunities and ideas and wealth seem to grow at a more powerful rate than a simple sum of all our numbers. This has been intuitively true for centuries of city-dwellers.

"What people didn’t know," says MIT researcher Wei Pan, "is why."

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Pan and several colleagues argue that the underlying force that drives super-linear productivity in cities is the density with which we're able to form social ties. The larger your city, in other words, the more people (using this same super-linear scale) you’re likely to come into contact with.

"If you think about productivity, it’s all about ideas, information flows, how easily you can access ideas and opportunities," Pan says. "We believe that the interaction mechanism is what drives the productivity of the city."

Via Lauren Moss