The Curse of Complex Communication

Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us (2008) - - a must read for traffic and transportation engineers) has an excellent article in the Spring 2011 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.  His article, Long Live the Industrial City, makes the argument that today's successful cities are often regarded strictly as idea labs where creative types gather.  But as New York city's garment district illustrates, manufacturing is vital to the innovation that cities foster.

Vanderbilt writes the following:

The closer these hands are, the shorter the transit time, and the greater the control the designer can exercise over the final product.  Fashion is an intensely iterative process in which time becomes an obstacle.  "When you move into higher-end design, there is so much spontaneous creativity happening that you don't want to wait a month to see your garments," says Tina Schenk owner of the pattern-making company Werkstett.  "One design is based on another.  You want to keep the process going, you want to continuously look at the things that you've been designing."  Andrew Rosen, a third-generation garmento who founded Theory, a fashion company that now grosses half a billion dollars a year, remarks, "Just from an efficiency point of view, I can make clothes faster here.  Which is not to say we haven't shortened the lead times in China - - we have.  But there's a lot more logistics that need to happen from 12,000 miles away than from 12 blocks away."  As Edward Glaeser notes in his new book The Triumph of the City, one thing cities do well is eliminate the "curse of complex communication."

Innovation is often unpredictable without delineated boundaries.  Cities drive this unpredictability and creativity because of what Vanderbilt refers to as the three vital ingredients of the urban innovation laboratory - - mutation, error, and serendipity.  It is not surprising that cities, be it an Austin, Vancouver, San Fransisco, or a New York City, tend to be hubs of creativity - - there are more things and people to be inspired by, more knowledge transfer, and, importantly, more ways to bring creativity into actuality.