Who Are Seattle's Kindred Cities?

Fig. 4 from the study published at PLoS One

Today in nerd city planning, we turn to this paper (thanks, Troy) on "Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities."

A research team consisting of Jose Lobo of Arizona State University, Deborah Strumsky of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Sante Fe Institute (SFI) Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West, and SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt has been studying the advantages that accrue to cities, and in so doing, they have found that certain cities are much more like each other than neighbors close by:

These clusters do not generally correspond to geographic proximity, but reflect instead commonalities of economic choices and historical paths. Examples include the cluster containing San Francisco, San Jose, Minneapolis, Denver and Seattle as high-tech centers...

It's long been known that cities are hotbeds of something, you choose what. It's a statistical fact of population density, social interactions, and infrastructure. But what the researchers have been able to distinguish is a superlinear relationship between urban population and a number of key indicators: wealth, productivity, innovation, and crime. For every doubling of population, you get a bonus 15 percent increase in the latter.

That's interesting enough, but having a standard means you can find deviations. You can learn a lot from over- and under-performers, they say, most notably, that the dynamic contributing to that status is persistent over time. Simply adding or subtracting people doesn't create change, in itself. They offer the news that "apart from a relatively small bump in the late 1990s, the continued success of San Jose was already set well before the birth of Silicon Valley."

In this sense, urban policy that promotes population growth as a means to benefit from the effects of agglomeration leaves the character of a city, including most of its challenges, unresolved, and may, in fact, contribute to exacerbate them.

Further, their research indicates that geographic location has less to do with performance than the model a city falls under: "The non-local nature of the similarity among urban trajectories strongly suggests that policy-makers should not search for analogous challenges and solutions in nearby cities but should instead consider who their kindred cities are." As we learned at the outset, Seattle (along with San Francisco, San Jose, Minneapolis, and Denver) all fall into the "high-tech city" classification. 

And that is why, like San Francisco, we should tear down our elevated waterfront freeway and replace it with a boulevard. QED.