Does your city make you more productive?

also: hip-hop at 50; and anime love

Friends - happy Labor Day weekend. As a holiday, it always feels like a bit of a deep breath before the plunge.

In Week 2 of Clusters class, we used a close-to-home example - the San Francisco Bay Area broadly, and Silicon Valley more narrowly - to explore the themes of:

• regional advantage

• measuring innovation clusters; and

• “new work” and the city

Where “new work” derives from the intersection between sectors and between existing sectors and new technology.

Enrico Moretti, in The New Geography of Jobs, cites web design as a form of new work that while well-known in 2000, wouldn’t have shown up on a census form in 1990.

In class we used Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City, which opens with an ode to knowledge transfer facilitated by the proximity of the city, whether in Baghdad or Bangalore or the Bay Area. That the city is where people who were already inclined to be productive go to become more productive, by seeking out and spending time with other motivated people.

Urban economists measure this all sorts of ways - increased patenting activity when moving to the same location as other patent filers being a favorite - but the underlying logic of the positive reference effect and positive social capital (or knowledge transferred at the speed of conversation, as Saxenian put it) is seen in many contexts, such as the workplace. This is, of course, the premise behind having an office in places where both offices and talent are expensive - the costs are justified by the productivity leap that happens when talent is in proximity of other talent.

At a time when media seems (still) fixated on the San Francisco doom loop, it was refreshing to revisit why it is we gravitate to cities in the first place - for the allure; for the prospect of meeting other bright, motivated people; so that we ourselves can get better at our chosen craft; and in sum, become more productive and inspired.

I asked Dall-E for help visually expressing this concept.

Thinking of the city as a place where productive people should become more productive is constructive. Is your city helping you become more productive? How to measure the costs (time, fees, friction), versus the gains (encounters, opportunities, ideas)? And what exactly is the work of the city that enables its residents and workers to be more productive?

This logic can be applied in various contexts, some pretty fundamental, e.g.:

• infrastructure and service provision (here, I will always think of Chicago Mayor Bilandic not plowing the streets enough during the Blizzard of 1979)

• civic interfaces (two-way, i.e., data provision to citizens and receipt of data from them);

• responsiveness, both immediate (permit requests or new entity formation) and to more planning-intensive requests (housing, transit, etc);

And then there’s the question of adaptation, such as to changes in technology or new industries.

My faculty colleague Molly Turner, in her Tech and the City class, uses a permission-forgiveness spectrum to express the decision technology providers make in choosing whether to work with city regulators.

I broadened this tension below into Preservation versus Renewal, which broadly captures a civic tension between adaptation and resisting change, one we see in many contexts. The scooter hub shown below shows this tension. How much civic real estate to allocate to new forms of mobility?

The recent decision on August 10 by San Francisco City Council to allow expanded service hours by robo-taxis (e.g. Waymo and Cruise) exemplifies this tension. It made for interesting bedfellows - the IBEW was in favor, for example, perhaps seeing “new work” for members in building docks and other infrastructure for self-driving cars. As a thought exercise, what if the city had waited longer? How much longer would Cruise and Waymo keep testing in San Francisco? Or keep offices there?

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It has been fun reading the coverage of hip-hop reaching its 50th birthday, which ostensibly took place August 11th, 2023. (Here I will note: hip-hop is now eligible for AARP membership! A milestone I celebrated last year.)

• the AP, in addition to marking the day, compiled in-their-own-words interviews with various artists young and old(er).

• even The Economist got into the act, and went on a walking tour of 1520 Sedgwick, held to be the birthplace of hip-hop (gift link), and noted that a genre that may have originated in the US has become progressively more global (gift link). And yes, the Economist has a Spotify playlist to support its point.

The coverage has inspired numerous re-consultations of Shea Serrano’s fantastic rap yearbook, published in 2015 (Apple Music playlist).

But then an unexpected opportunity came along - to see the artists of memory, from Rakim to Salt-N-Pepa to Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick, bundling their supplier power and touring the country as the FORCE (Frequencies of Real Creative Energy) Live tour. Which we did, as a family unit. All acts were backed by The Roots and DJ Jazzy Jeff, which, by itself, was really impressive. (Does Questlove not get tired??) LL Cool J, owner of the Rock the Bells trademark, was ostensibly the headliner. The show brought nostalgia, some surprises, and some inspiration about what it means to age gracefully.

I was most moved by Rakim, who, at age 55, is still punishingly precise in his prose. (To get the idea: listen to My Adidas from Run-DMC in 1986, and then listen to Paid In Full, from Eric B and Rakim, in 1987, or Follow the Leader, from 1988. It’s night and day.)

I still have the original mixtape that first exposed me to Eric B and Rakim and a host of other artists back in high school.

My favorite unintentionally funny moment - Slick Rick sitting down to take a breather (alas, no one handed him a beer, or a cup of coffee) while Doug E Fresh showed, decades later, he can still beatbox.

There’s another topic in here, which is the influence of sampling and advances in sampling technology on music and more broadly on the culture. 1980s-era works like Paul’s Boutique and 3 Feet High and Rising were sample-heavy pastiches, and part of the joy of listening back then was figuring out what had been sampled and then seeking out the original.

De La Soul’s catalogue finally emerged on streaming this year, just in time for the 50-year celebration. Perhaps as evidence of what was being negotiated, Otis Redding (who posthumously and unknowingly provided the whistle from Sitting on the Dock of the Bay) now gets a credit on Eye Know.

My better, wiser half, Kakul Srivastava, is CEO of Splice, which provides samples and production tools to audio creators. Splice provides a video on the history of sampling here.

Here’s to the next 50 years!

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Last but not least, further evidence that anime fandom is truly global, from a trip to southern Spain in July.

First, the El Senor Miyagi merch store, seen in Sevilla.

And this this very amiable cab driver in Cordoba, who took a group of Americans back to the train station in time for their train.

In 2022, I had opportunity to serve as an application reviewer for MEXT scholarships supporting study in Japan. What struck me was how many applicants had been inspired by what they had encountered through anime. Truly a display of soft power, and one that makes me wonder whether applications to study in Korea are on the rise, given the increased popularity of K-Pop and Korean pop culture.

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Onward and upward! As always, I appreciate the feedback.

Jon