Jill is reading Steven Johnson's Emergence, and cites this:
Like-minded businesses cluster together [in a city] because there are financial incentives to do so - what academics call economies of agglomeration - enabling craftsmen to share techniques and services that they wouldn't necessarily be able to enjoy on their own. That clustering becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. potential consumers and employees have an easier time finding the goods and jobs they're searching for; the shared information makes the clustered businesses more competetive than the isolated ones. (108)
Jill's comment: ''This is a lot like blogs, isn't it?''
Much of the underbelly of New York City's economy derived from exactly this sort of agglomeration. Not just the flower and diamond sellers and the the book vendors and music store ghettos, but the clustering of arbitrageurs and bondsmen on Wall Street, the Russian mafiosi and urban archeologists and performance artists and longshoremen and button experts and and...the proximity of many kinds of expertise breeding a dense fabric of research and fertile invention.
[Off topic aside: One of the things most films miss is the suggestion that such a texture even exists. (Minority Report sets its potted plot in a barren urban environment of ciphers - an echo of the emptiness of Spielberg's suburban childhood?)]
The urban agglomeration is a university of practical knowledge - artisans, craftsmen of all sorts of things. More information than can be tracked, so it is serendipitous. As Jill says, this is something like an extension of networks of folks clustering on the Net.
