Why Crowded Cities Provide the Space for Creativity

One reason that women migrate into cities is because they are more free to create their own lifestyle. At the extreme, you can think of the girl raised in a Taliban village who would be free to choose whether to wear a veil or jeans and t-shirt if she moved into the anonymity of a big city in the West. To a lesser extent, even moving from a small rural area where people don't just know you but also know your grandparents will make it easier for a young girl raised Amish, say, to pursue a career and buy a BMW without accusation of being pretentious.

Curiously, this freedom leads to innovation, both technological and social. It's not just personal lives that get invented within the anonymity of a city: a handful of cities generate more patents than the rest of the country combined. 

20 cities generate 63% of all patents in the US.

The research universities that are within these regions help to provoke a great deal of the innovation. They also tend to cultivate a spirit of openness and tolerance for new ideas and dis-respect for authority that fosters innovation. People in these innovative cities are more likely to be individualistic and are less family oriented than folks in less innovative cities. Innovation isn't something that gets neatly contained to work.

When you socialize with folks you know well -and who know you well - you are less likely to encounter new ideas. Job leads tend to come from folks outside of your immediate circle of friends. More than that, loose acquaintances are people with whom we're free to try on new ideas and new ways of being. Someone from a  small town who knows that you get your half grin from your grandpa are less likely to let you become someone new than an acquaintance in a city who barely knows you. This freedom not only lets the Amish girl wear lipstick but it lets the inventor explore new ideas The more varied our interactions, the more potential for novelty.

I have spent considerable time in 6 of the top 10 cities in the list above. They are characterized by what I'd call personality. Santa Cruz, Boulder, and Austin share a very similar vibe and the folks living there certainly don't match the description conservatives would give of capitalists. These are places that aren't merely tolerant of diversity: they celebrate it. The 6 cities I know lean left - to a considerable degree. They are places that are more likely to support people than judge them, less likely to require drug testing for welfare recipients than to legalize pot. It is in these milieus from which creativity emerges. It's not just that conservatives have very little support among creative types in the arts; conservative cities and rural areas have very little patent activity. When I lived in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s, it was the only city in the US with an openly gay, communist mayor. Austin has a campaign to "Keep Austin Weird." Yesterday I ate in Native Foods in Boulder, a place that more traditional communities might chuckle at for its unabashed embrace of organic, vegan food. It's little wonder that these communities are cradles to new ideas. It is, to me, no coincidence that 3 of the top ten cities in this list are in California's Bay Area, a place where people seemingly feel little compunction about conformity - whether in thought, dress, or lifestyle - a home to the Free Speech Movement that helped to usher in "the 60s." 

All cities - and some more than others - provide space for the individual to step outside of tradition. Unsurprisingly, being open to novelty is a package deal: whether you first open the door to social invention or technological invention, the disrespect for tradition is likely to spill into all walks of life. 

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Graphs are from a Brookings report here. Claims about how people in different cities poll on topics like family or individualistic tendencies come from p. 143 of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort.

Top 10 signs that you’re in Santa Cruz

1. Walking downtown – in the heart of the city – you look around for the source of the pot smoke wafting towards you. Is it the indigents? No. The disenfranchised youth? No. Oh. It’s the two silver haired, respectable looking gentlemen on the corner.

2. Still downtown, about every 20 yards you pass by someone who makes you feel uneasy. (And I’m not easily made uneasy. For instance, I am merely amused and not the least discomfited by the fact that behind the angry looking guy with Mohawk, nose ring, and short (as in micro-mini length) kilt is a guy strolling with his girl in arm and his guy in hand).

3. In the Saturn Café, the vegetarian diner that offers 50s style cuisine like faux burgers and vegan shakes, the two restrooms are no longer labeled “us” and “them” but are, instead, labeled “robot” and “alien.” Out of chocolate fudge and thus unable to serve the “chocolate madness” dessert that features fudge, chocolate ice cream, chocolate mousse, chocolate brownies, whip cream, and chocolate chips, a debate ensues with the server about whether the fudge-less result is “chocolate mildly annoyed” or “chocolate aggravated.”

4. The city’s elite are gathered for an orchestral tribute to the Grateful Dead. The only thing that seems more widespread than tie dye is gray hair. The hippies are the establishment.

5. At the grocery store they don’t ask “paper or plastic.” Instead, they ask, “why didn’t you bring an eco-friendly bag of your own today?”

6. The most significant donation to the University of California’s local (USSC) library was made by the Grateful Dead, who donated 30 years of their archives.

7. One gets the sense that two concepts that remain rather elusive to many of the folks here are cash and causality. A local bookstore is having an event on (and I'm pretty sure I'm going to mangle this) how the Mode rising in Capricorn should influence one’s career goals for the next 18 months.

8. Mothers telling their girls to go ahead and take off their clothes at a (sort of) remote swimming hole along the river because “It’s Santa Cruz and nobody cares.”

9. At the local university (UC Santa Cruz) on the 20 minute walk from one class to the next, you disappear into redwoods, unable to see buildings or roads, about a half dozen times, pop out into a meadow that looks down on Monterrey Bay once, and walk past deer a couple of times. And this through the busy part of campus.

10. You find yourself repeatedly exclaiming over how gorgeous it is and how much you love the place.

As you might guess, I just got back from a trip back to the Bay Area. As always, I was delighted by how gorgeous and unique is Santa Cruz.

My Roots in the Redwoods

I love the redwoods. My great grandfather settled up in the redwoods in Northern California more than a century ago. I was born in that area and then, after graduating from high school in San Diego, found myself wanting to live amongst the redwoods again - but without giving up on the beach culture. I landed at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

I still miss the UCSC campus. It sits on a hill over the Pacific - the northern part of Monterey Bay. The campus has 22 distinct ecosystems - from the Oak trees and grassy hills you usually find around Sacramento to the thick copses of trees. When I went there I think we had about 6,000 students on more than 2,000 acres. The walks between classes could entail a walk through the woods, buildings disappearing behind trees. One quarter, I had a twenty minute walk between classes with only a fifteen minute window. I might pass by deer, would pass through various copses of woods that blocked all roads and buildings, and then get a glimpse of the ocean below on one section of the trail. I was always late for my next class yet never felt stressed. I loved jogging through the fire trails, even though the continual climbing never let me move very fast. A few years ago, I brought my family to campus and again found myself transfixed by its beauty. My wife turned to me and said, "Tell me again why we don't quit work and go to school here for a few years?" We passed by one guy who looked like the kind of fellow who might never have seen beauty in anything that didn't wiggle when she walked, and I heard him say to another student, "I'm going to tell my kids that I went to the most beautiful, f***ing school in the world." I almost stopped to say, "Well, you won't put it quit like that but, yeah."

With all that said, here are two videos that brought back memories. The first is a slow moving trip through the redwoods at Orick, CA, where my great grandpa settled and my father grew up. In fact, Davison Ranch is now a part of the Redwood National Forest. It's gorgeous country, where the residents pay for the beauty by living in a fairly isolated rain forest. (It's more than 13 hours of driving to get from the part of California where my dad grew up to the part of California where my son has grown up; Santa Cruz is about halfway between those two points.) The second video is from a Kenny Loggins concert filmed on campus at UC Santa Cruz. You get some sense of what the campus is like as the video shoots the band and audience from different angles. Enjoy your trip into the redwoods.