Our first human settlements kind of grew up around areas that
the soil was fertile and you could plant crops.
Or around natural waterways and ports and harbors.
And that's the way we settled, and we built these bigger and bigger communities.
And we developed trading routes.
And then we had this sort of massive event called the Industrial Revolution.
We took raw materials and we combined them with human labor power.
And we built these giant factory centers.
They often said industrialization went hand-in-hand with urbanization.
That's surely what I learned when I was in undergraduate school.
And so our cities, say since the year 1870 or 1880 or
certainly since the 1900s, grew up around industries.
Our whole theory of cities is, there was a central area of offices and towers.
And around that developed an area of factories and warehouses and
around that came kind of working class housing and the after.
I guess in the 1950s and sixties, we had the development of more roads, cars,
suburbs got bigger and certain industry moved out.
But for all that time,
our cities really were bounded, created by these kind of hard assets.
Either where there was raw materials, or where these giant ports and
factory complexes were located.
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But you probably know, certainly if you lived in the advanced countries,
that over the past 30 years or so, we've seen de-industrialization.
Our economy's no longer powered by factories.
Factories have moved not only to the suburbs, they've moved to other countries.
They move to Mexico or China or wherever.
In fact, in a place like the United States,
this is kind of an interesting statistic.
Only about 20% of the workforce today is engaged in blue-collar work of any kind.
And only about 5 or 6% of the work actually makes thing in factories.
And you have to think about, well, what kind of happened to cities?
And what happened is that cities became less powered by these physical attributes
and much more powered by knowledge, by ideas, by where people located.
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I was actually on sabbatical leave at Harvard.
And I went to my office one day and I picked up the copy of The Boston Globe,
the local paper.
And the headline in the business section was that one of the companies that was
a Carnegie Mellon startup.
It was a company called Lycos, early internet search company.
This was about the late 90s or early 2000s.
Why it had moved.
It had moved from Pittsburgh to Boston, and for
the life of me, I couldn't figure that out.
So I called people I knew at the company back at Carnegie Mellon, and
the answer that came back really surprised me.
Lycos was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston not because Boston was cheaper.
In fact, Boston was more expensive.
Real estate was more expensive, people were more expensive, taxes were higher.
There were no bribes or incentives that were used to attract this company.
In the words of the people at Lycos,
the reason they were moving is because the people they needed to grow the business
were more readily available in Boston than they were in Pittsburgh.
And that's when I decided really to write this book and begin to try to think
about why economic development in cities were not just powered by companies,
and by transportation routes and by infrastructure.
Why cities were powered by people.
And I remember, almost as if it was yesterday.