Busy

It’s a sad day. I’ve become one of those people who makes excuses for not blogging.

I have got some good reasons though. These are:

1) I’ve been getting some papers into journals.

A version of my PHD intro chapter has been accepted by European Urban and Regional Studies.

And my paper with Neil Lee on cultural diversity and business performance has been accepted by Economic Geography.

I’m pretty happy about both of these. Fingers crossed for a third which is still out for review.

2) I’m finishing up a couple of other projects.

One is a paper on proximities and collaboration, with Riccardo Crescenzi and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose. We’re interested in how physical, institutional, social and other ‘closenesses’ might shape how people work together (or not). You can see an early version of this here [pdf], from a  presentation I gave in Leuven the other week.

The other is some research on Tech City, which I’m doing for the Centre for London. This is joint work with Emma Vandore and Rob Whitehead at CFL. We’ve been talking to a lot of East London tech firms, and crunching microdata to trace the cluster’s long term growth and dynamics.

You can hear some early thoughts on the Future Human podcast – look for the ‘Liquid City’ episode. The report itself will launch on 2 July at Hackney House.

On which note, back to writing …

Future chat

I’m giving a couple of seminars in the next few weeks.

First up, on 5th March, I’m at LSE London talking about cultural diversity and the London economy. This will draw on some of my PHD research on the economics of diversity. It turns out diversity and co-ethnic networks are good for London businesses; the broader effects of immigration on labour markets more mixed. I’ll talk about these results and the policy lessons. Details here.

Next, on 7 March I’ll be giving a talk on Tech City at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. I’ll be discussing emerging findings from a project on the East London technology cluster, which I’m leading at the Centre for London. Only a few people are looking at this stuff, so I’m excited to be working on it. I’ll be looking at international experience, what the numbers tell us, and feeding back some of our conversations with local firms. Details here.

If you’re around, come and say hello!

Three years, 11 months, 15 days, 56 minutes, 12 seconds

Posts have been a bit sparse recently. Here’s why. Normal service should slowly resume in the months to come.

Londonism

 Die Zeit has just published a big feature on London as high-powered, on-trend, chaotic world city. There’s a quote from me, plus a cinematic passage in which the journalist and I wander around Hackney Wick before stopping off for a latte.

Also featured are Boris Johnson, Mark Kleinman from the GLA and a grumpy-sounding Hanif Kureishi. You can read the whole thing here. Or for non-German speakers, there’s Google Translate.

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ps more fame: in case you missed it, the Guardian have done a nice writeup of my Munich / Silicon Valley report.

The Triumph of the City

The Ed Glaeser roadshow has rolled out of town. Last week the great man spoke at LSE, ippr, Demos, Centre for Cities and Policy Exchange, also finding time for a Guardian podcast, CfC video and an FT op-ed. Phew! He didn’t even change blazer - here he is on the Daily Show wearing it again (at about 14:30).

Until now Glaeser has been a bit of an academic’s academic. With his new book, The Triumph of the City, he’s making a bid for public intellectual territory. Saskia Sassen, Peter Hall and Richard Florida have had this space to themselves for the past decade, so it’s good to see someone else step up.

 Here’s the podcast and video of his LSE lecture. Below, my quick notes.

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 1) Cities still matter because they’re ideas engines. In a knowledge-driven economy, products and services are getting progressively more complex. Cities help manage this by bringing people face to face, helping ideas spread, and cross-pollinating new ones. As the returns to skills increase, cities help people get smarter.

This is actually a very old argument, dating back to Jane Jacobs (1970) and Alfred Marshall (1918). Glaeser brings it to life with some terrific examples of ‘urban ideas chains’ – such as the birth of Detroit’s auto industry from shipbuilding (engines) and carriage works (wheels and bodies), and the growth of financial services in NYC.

2) Technology is making cities more important, not less. Rather than killing distance, social media and the internet are producing more immersive, interactive urban environments. Again, plenty of evidence (Bill Mitchell, Castells) says that online and offline are complements, not substitutes. Glaeser rightly plugs this into the development of smart cities and the internet of things. Adam Greenfield’s incoming book will tie a lot of this together.

3) We need to build cities up, not out. Glaeser thinks Jane Jacobs was right about cities, but wrong about neighbourhoods. Long term, planning controls in urban cores tend to price poorer people out of the city. Similarly, high density cities tend to be greener, but if they restrict space, people relocate to lower-density, car-dependent communities. The answer is to allow denser development and more high-rises. 

4) In the West, urbanisation is basically done. The cities of the future are happening elsewhere. 50% of the planet now lives in cities – but the biggest urban transformations are happening in South and East Asia. This is also where the need for sustainable urban development is highest. LSE’s green cities project for UNEP echoes much of this.

5) Cities are good for poor people. But we shouldn’t save failing cities. Agglomeration economies benefit everyone. Like Stewart Brand, Glaeser sees slums as hives of enterprise – but where public infrastructure and planning has failed. Glaeser also argues that in declining cities, policy should focus making the population more skilled and mobile – rather than improving decaying urban environments. 

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A few reflections. First, is there anything bad about cities? At LSE, Glaeser suggested diminishing returns don’t really matter. I’m not so sure. Above is a classic urban economics ‘net wage’ curve. Up to point B, agglomeration effects rise with city size. Diseconomies like congestion and pollution then start to kick in. At point C, in theory, everyone leaves. In practice, this doesn’t happen – but plenty of real world cities are probably between the two (Bangkok, Lagos, LA?).

Second, Glaeser’s prescription for struggling cities might be internally robust, but in the real world it’s a very hard sell – as he found out when encouraging the US Government to move people out of New Orleans post-Katrina. Glaeser’s right that declining places can’t be preserved forever. But as I’ve argued, it’s the job of elected city leaders to make these choices – not national government. 

Which brings me to devolution. Glaeser was surprisingly lukewarm on this. He argued that when central government is weak (e.g. in a failing state), then devolution is essential. But only central government can handle redistribution, or economies of scale in service provision. This chimes with my reading of the literature. Devolution doesn’t translate directly into economic growth – although it helps indirectly, by allowing city leaders more flexibility and room to innovate. As the Coalition pushes localism ever further, Ministers should keep these caveats in mind.

More new stuff

I’ve put out a bunch of new academic and policy stuff in the past few weeks. Fresh from the ideas workshop, here it all is …

LSE’s Spatial Economics Research Centre has just published three of my phd papers in their working paper series. They are:

1) The Economics of Superdiversity [link]

2) The Long Term Impacts of Migration in UK Cities: Diversity, wages, employment and prices [link]

3) Does Cultural Diversity Help Innovation in Firms? Evidence from London (with Neil Lee) [link]

I’ll be presenting paper no.2 next month at the big NORFACE/UCL migration conference in London and at the RSA’s 2011 conference in Newcastle.

I’ll also be talking through all three papers (and discussing Richard Floria) at the AAG 2011 conference in Seattle in mid-April. If you’re there come and say hello!

More importantly, the UN Environment Programme launched a huge piece of work on the green economy a couple of weeks back, with a globally-streamed event in Nairobi and much other fanfare. This includes a report on Cities in the Green Economy [pdf], published by an LSE Cities team (including yours truly). LSE also did a sister report on Green Buildings [pdf].

You can read the whole lot, and some summary papers, on the Green Economy microsite.

How did London get away with it?

A lot of people predicted London would be hit hard during the recession. In fact, London did better than the rest of the UK. Why?

Henry Overman, Director of SERC, delivered the answer at the first LSE Works lecture last night (with some help from me on numbers, trends and jokes). In case you couldn’t make it, here’s a post on LSE’s Public Policy blog which gives the main story.

LSE should be putting up a podcast in the next couple of weeks. Watch out for that here. Meanwhile, the next event in the series is CEP Director John Van Reenen, on ‘Where is Future Growth Going to Come From?’ That’s on 17 February.

In March we have both Lord Stern (on the low carbon economy) and Bruce Katz from Brookings Metro Program (on the ‘next urban economy’, some joint work with me and colleagues at LSE Cities).

Speaking in Manchester

I’m presenting a couple of papers at a Regional Studies Association Conference at Manchester University on Tuesday 2 November. The conference is titled Regions in a Shifting Global Landscape, and both my presentations will look at connections between cultural diversity, innovation and urban/regional economic development.

The first is work in progress, and looks at the role of ‘ethnic inventors’ in the UK. It’s the first UK work of its kind, so I’m excited to be doing it. In the US, ethnic Indian and Chinese communities play a huge role in the science and technology sectors, especially in places like Silicon Valley. I’m interested in whether anything similar is going on here – in cities like Manchester, or our own Silicon Fen. My initial results suggest we may have a similar diaspora of British-Indian high-tech inventors emerging. More on that on the day …

The second paper, done with Neil Lee, looks at whether London’s cosmopolitanism helps the capital’s firms to innovate. We find small but pretty robust ‘diversity effects’ for London businesses. That raises the question of whether other big and diverse British cities – like Manchester or Birmingham – might benefit in the same way. We hope to crunch some more data on this in the coming months.

Here are the conference details. Hope to see you some of you there.

ps. I realise the picture is only loosely related to diversity, innovation or Manchester. But I like it, so it’s going up.

The secret life of Shepperton

Some new art stuff.

First up, Mat and I have finally completed our photo essay on Shepperton, where JG Ballard spent most of his adult life. We’ve combined our pictures with text from Ballard’s own novels, autobiography, interviews and other text about the town and its history. In the process we’ve shamelessly taken inspiration from Patrick Keiller, Chris Marker, Iain Sinclair and many others. We hope they, and you, like it.

A shorter version of the essay appeared in Shadows Have Shadows, a limited-run newspaper published earlier this year by the mysterious SFHAA. It’s a nice collection of pieces on street-level urbanism – spanning London, San Francisco, Caracas, fictional cities and cities of the future. The paper itself is an A4 object of beauty, produced with the help of Newspaper Club. Sadly there’s only 100 copies, but you can also read it online here.

Finally, here are my pictures of the astonishing Red Sand sea forts, which I visited with Reuben a few weeks back. More about the forts and how to reach them at the Project RedSand website.

Now, back to the PhD …

On yer Boris Bike

Who actually uses Boris Bikes? Commuters, civil servants and city types. Who doesn’t? Shoppers and posh people. That’s the story so far, as suggested by data from the London Cycle Hire Explorer – flagged in Londonist, and recycled in Wednesday’s Evening Standard.

The Explorer app is simple but powerful: it shows the 10 most and least popular docking stations across the capital. Obviously it’s early days, and usage will change (see below). And I’m just eyeballing the data – no fancy analysis here. First impressions:

1) Commuters are the main users – the most popular spots are mainly around the major stations – Waterloo (354 bikes yesterday), King’s Cross (305), London Bridge (256) and Liverpool Street (226). This is why TfL already wants to spend another £81m on new bikes and docking stations.

2) Biking to meetings and running errands also seem popular – viz heavy daytime (and lunchtime) use during the week in Covent Garden, (196) Strand (189) and Fitzrovia (187).

3) Weekend biking is on – judging by the past week at least, there’s no obvious drop-off on Saturdays or Sundays in the most popular spots. That suggests some tourists might be venturing out too.

4) There’s a bit of an East/West divide – six of the least popular docking stations are in West London, mainly Kensington (28 bikes) and Chelsea (25-29). I would have expected some use around Paddington and White City, but perhaps the Westway is putting people off. Support for scary road theory comes from other cold spots around Elephant and New Kent Road (26 each).

5) Alternatively, bike use is low in well-off neighbourhoods where residents prefer to drive, such as Kensington and Chelsea, Bayswater (27) and St John’s Wood (20). Or where serious shopping is going on (all of the above).  Obviously that’s just postcode stereotyping, but still – I bet there’s something in it.

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The open data is incredibly helpful, and not just for urbanists. At one level the bike scheme is a gigantic social experiment – give people new tools for getting around the city, step back and see what happens.

There are useful parallels here with new technologies, especially portable gear like mobile phones. The lesson from these is that technology changes us, but we change it too, and unpredictably. In the jargon, use is endogenous to the user.  Texting is the classic example of user-driven innovation for mobiles: open platforms like Android are doing something similar for smartphones.

A lot of this happens through experimenting and messing about, and this is already happening with blue bikes – via mashups like the Explorer, or Barley-ish attempts at stunt riding. More interesting stuff is bubbling up at this user forum.

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In turn, that suggests Boris Bike dynamics might look very different in a year’s time. So far, riders are currently making 19,000 journeys per day, not put off by bikes variously described as ‘like flying Ryanair’ (Jon Snow) and ‘like driving a tractor’ (anonymous friend).

That number could rocket up when Pay as You Go rates are introduced, and the early adopters are joined by loads of tourists and casual users. We could see new hotspots around St James’ Park, Baker Street and Tower Hill. And even bike snobs like me might get round to trying the thing …