(2005-04-29) Hagel Reviews Kotkin

John Hagel reviews Joel Kotkin's The City. He uses this survey to make the case for the "universality of the urban experience", cutting across the enormous diversity of individual city experiences, and to argue that "urban areas have performed three separate critical functions - the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the host for a commercial market." In effect, Kotkin argues that cities prosper when they perform these three functions well and they inevitably decline when they fall short on one or more of these functions... My own view is that the three functions he cites are really secondary. The primary role of cities has been to provide robust concentration points (Critical Mass) for people and information flows in order to accelerate capability building... The reason people come to cities and stay in cities is to get better faster by exposing themselves to a much more diverse and rich set of interactions than they could in less densely settled areas. As uncertainty increases, I believe this role of cities will become even more valuable... Given this perspective, I believe that a key element of Business Strategy will be choices about how to most effectively participate in the economies of cities that have the greatest potential to accelerate capability building. Companies that decide to move their headquarters out to pastoral Suburb-s may be heading in exactly the wrong direction. (Urbanization)