Firehose #168: 🏙 Urban flight. 🏙

Cities emerged to solve a set of problems that no longer exist. Physical goods are already made and traded elsewhere. Information and intellectual property can now be produced and exchanged online.

Zoning is losing its power. New ventures are able to reach a meaningful scale before regulators (and competitors) react. The boundaries between different uses are blurring, with people lodging in apartment buildings, living in hotels, working in restaurants and retail malls, and sleeping or socializing at the office.

As Matt Clancey points out that “the benefits of knowledge spillovers from being physically close to other knowledge workers have been falling and may no longer exist in many domains of knowledge.” This is a controversial claim, but Clancey provides a detailed review of multiple studies that address this matter from different directions.