“She saw the city not as a mass of buildings, but as a vessel of empty spaces, in which people interacted with other people.”
—— Jonah Lehrer on Jane Jacobs, via Richard Florida in The Atlantic Cities
Lehrer continues, “I just find it slightly ironic that even the researchers inventing all these wonderful tools that allow us to interact remotely, such as email and Skype and Facetime, still organize themselves into local clusters. They know that they need to constantly interact in person, which is why they pay the exorbitant rents of Mountain View or San Francisco or Brooklyn. The city, it turns out, isn’t obsolete. Not even close… Absolutely [will the growing expense of living in cities affect their ability to spur creativity]. If I might quote Jacobs one last time: ’Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.’”
