What comes to your mind when
you think about the word “city”?
Rush-hour Traffic? Dust and dirt?
Dense human settlements?
Water scarcity?
You are not alone then, most
often that not, only the negative effects of a typical urban environment like
increased crime-rates, pollution and chaos is widely thought about. This is not
a new or a recent way to look at cities. Even many times in the past,
mathematicians and economists have had a pessimistic take on cities and their
expansion.
Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth-century economist
published an essay in 1792 on “Principle of Population” arguing that an excess
of people and a scarcity of resources could be a lethal combination leading to
epidemics, famine and extermination. But looking at most of the cities of the
world today, you could easily realise that Malthus was not completely right. Be
it London, Toronto, Stockholm or Bangalore, neither of these cities are
brimming with epidemics or people fighting for food. In fact, many people
aspire to live in these places. Things have happened the other way round as
these cities have flourished as important centres of economic growth and
incubators of cutting edge innovations. But, how is this happening?
It is because of a hidden
magic – “Mingling of Diversity”.
Urban environments bring
together people from different walks of life, sections of the society and
irrelevant fields of work to share spaces and randomly interact with each
other. There is a massive epidemic of ideas and information sharing resulting
from casual sidewalk conversations between strangers bumping into each other and
other such unplanned forced encounters in a train or a bus.
This may sound strange, but these forced
interactions could make a person working on a problem gain an outsider’s perspective,
at times, even enabling him to solve it. Such serendipitous insights are
valuable to innovate and come up with new ways of thinking. This is one good
reason as why most of the innovations happen in cities (based on the number of
patents that they churn out over a period of time).
These encounters which were
once considered to be happy accidents in the past are now being studied and
experimented by architects and urban planners to intentionally foster
innovation. Gone are the days when buildings and works spaces were more
segmented and disjointed from one another. The present day office spaces and
public buildings are filled with more common spaces to initiate conversations
that wouldn’t have happened before and eventually enable people to explore
ideas they couldn’t have explored on their own. Pixar Animation Studios is an
excellent example for how a company could reap excellent benefits out of this
concept. When going through a sluggish phase during the making of Toy story 2,
most of the workforce consisting of engineers, animators, story-tellers and
directors were all crammed into small cluster of cubicles to make this magic
work. It did work wonders for them resulting in an amazing restructuring of the
entire plot.
Can you understand the other side of the
cities now? So, the next time when you run into a stranger, try starting out a
casual conversation rather than taking a plunge into your WhatsApp inbox. A new
way to look at things is waiting for you !
(This article is inspired from a
controversial book named “Imagine” by
Jonah Lehrer on how creativity works)
