Sidewalks making better cities? (revisited)

O.K., now I get it. Cities get better and better because of the interactions between people (on the sidewalk). Johnson writes: “Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. [...] Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation.”

Reading this I came to think of a former colleague who now works for a large insurance company, where they have an in-house restaurant where everybody eats. I thought about whether this is “dangerous” for exchange of ideas. Isn’t there a risk of the company turning into a monoculture? Then again, large companies like this often have high staff turnover.

Johnson writes about how, upon the formation of the first large-scale human settlements, inventions flourish. In this light it is interesting to see the attempts of big American companies to gain control over their content, through means that work to stifle creativity. Here we have a medium that has a chance of being more effective in this regard – as a medium for the exchange of ideas between people – and they want to destroy it for their own selfish purposes.