Thanks to Archinect for this Psychology Today article on the importance of diversity in cities. Today, the conventional wisdom points to the unpredictability and creativity that one finds in cities as essential for network culture. Outsourcing may work, but not for work demanding innovation.

Alas, as I've been suggesting for quite some time now, we have a new kind of urban blight emerging in places like New York, San Francisco and Boston. In "The Embers of Gentrification" at New York Magazine  Adam Sternberg suggests that the fires of gentrification may be self-perpetuating, but they may also be self-extinguishing.

Blogged with Flock

The Economist Magazine looks at "America, the Creative." The lessons of the Creative City and the Bilbao Effect have not been lost on small-town America.

To attract tourists and settlers, small towns are turning to storytelling festivals and giant killer-bee statues. I've seen this first-hand as, over the last quarter century the town I spent my teenage years, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, pioneered this sort of change. The hardware store, then the pharmacy, the grocery and the elementary school disappeared one-by-one as the community refigured itself in the image that resident Norman Rockwell created for it. I still remember the lunatic old ladies from the city asking if we had toilets or outhouses. At some point we become a world of tourists, all looking in vain for just the right place that fits our demented sensibilities.