(2009-02-28) Boyer City Prototyping Engine

Bryan Boyer ponders the city as ProtoTyping engine. You’ll have to excuse the brutishness of this line of reasoning, but suffice it to say there are places which tend to prototype new ideas and others which tend to adopt pre-tested ideas from other places. New York City: prototyping engine. Paso Robles, CA: consumption engine. (Urban)

Feb'2011 - when I actually ran across this post. I Commented:

*Could it be that the problem isn’t the mid-scale of the “city” so much as the scale of its Neighborhood-s and the inter-neighborhood human-traffic levels?

I suspect that most prototyping happens not at the city level but at the more-local level. In NYC, a neighborhood-level event (a) has enough local mass to get off the ground (oops contradictory metaphors), and (b) there’s enough constant not-for-the-event flow going on that people from other neighborhoods experience the prototype and can then spread/adjust it in their own locales…*