If an elephant was just a scaled-up mouse, then, from an energy perspective, a city was just a scaled-up elephant.

Howard Gruber describes his “networks of enterprise” in his essay “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.”

In fact, if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Darwin, Charles. Voyage of the Beagle. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002.

a “veritable bevy of hues and depth.” “To concentrate so much color information within the frame of a small screen,” the Times wrote, “would be difficult for even the most gifted artist doing a ‘still’ painting. To do it with constantly moving pictures seemed pure wizardry.” Alas, the Rose Parade “broadcast” turned out to be not all that broad, giv

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life. The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these

low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations. For reasons we will see, high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also s

But, in a crucial sense, the pattern of Renaissance innovation differs from that of the first cities: Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were emerging from a medieval culture that suffered from too much order. If dispersed tribes of hunter-gatherers are the cultural equivalent of a chaotic, gaseous state, a culture where the information is la

A dense network incapable of forming new patterns is, by definition, incapable of change, incapable of probing at the edges of the adjacent possible.