Benefits of Big City Life – Only for the Elite
hubie writes:
Urban inequality in Europe and the United States is so severe that urban elites claim most of the benefits from the agglomeration effects that big cities provide, while large parts of urban populations get little to nothing:
In recent years, researchers from across disciplines have identified striking and seemingly universal relationships between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. Cities create more interconnectivity, wealth, and inventions per resident as they grow larger. However, what may be true for city populations on average, may not hold for the individual resident.
"The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policy makers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is", says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linkoping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University.
[...] An individual's productivity depends on the local social environments in which they find themselves in. Because of the greater diversity in larger cities, skilled and specialized people are more likely to find others whose skills are complementary to their own. This allows for higher levels of productivity and greater learning opportunities in larger cities.
But, not everyone can access the productive social environments that larger cities provide. Different returns from context accumulate over time which gives rise to substantial inequality.
[...] Consequently, the initially successful individuals in the bigger cities increasingly distanced themselves from both the typical individual in their own city, creating inequality within the big cities, and the most successful individuals in smaller cities, creating inequality between cities.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.