ancient cities

living and that modern Western industrial economies
depend for their success on creative originality.
Intellectuals such as scientists, artists, entrepreneurs,
and venture capitalists lead a bohemian lifestyle,
deriving their identity from creativity. This has
replaced the organizational and instrumental ethos
that prevailed until the 1930s. Intellectuals are
regionally differentiated; can be correlated with
groups of bohemians, homosexuals, and other
relatively distinctive categories; and while being
regionally differentiated, in some estimates comprise
30 percent of the U.S. workforce.
Larger urban locations provide the necessary
quasi-anonymity, sociability, and weaker social ties
for stimulation and creative interplay and for the
forging of original identities and the reinvention of
the self. Intellectual groups capitalize on the irrational
aspects of creativity, acting outside the
norms of the wider society and following a distinctive
lifestyle that includes ignoring normal working
hours, dressing uniquely, and holding distinctive
moral and aesthetic values.
Attempts have been made to replicate Silicon
Valley in the context of the modern knowledge
economy. At Wellington, New Zealand, for example,
the growth of the film industry has attracted
many innovators, lured by the city’s technological
infrastructure, the relatively low cost of labor and
resources, and the quality of lifestyle. Other attempts
have been made to replicate Silicon Valley by
encouraging new economic spaces in other U.S.
centers, such as Philadelphia and Atlanta, and also
in Japan, parts of Germany, and some British
towns such as Cambridge (called “Silicon Fen”). It
is therefore possible that governments and local
urban communities can meet the challenges of globalization
by fostering the development of cities of
knowledge, although the continued success of
Silicon Valley has been the result of a complex
nexus of factors difficult to replicate elsewhere.
The impersonal, irrational, quirky, contingent,
and creative aspects of urban living encourage the
interplay between arts and sciences on which creativity
is founded. Sites of rationality cannot be
neatly separated from sites of irrationality, with
deliberate irrationality and emotionally founded
distinctiveness being, in fact, often at the heart of
intellectual originality. Urban centers can serve as
forums for intellectuals where new ideas, behaviors,
and identities are forged. Scientific, technological,
Isard, Walter
399
and artistic creativity are intermixed, influencing
each other through changing fads and fashions,
which are also most rapid and transient in the
relatively impersonal nexus of the urban melting
pot. Far from trying to re-create the vast postwar
technological military urban complexes of the cold
war, this suggests we should be looking more to
relatively informal coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs
of the Enlightenment as the models for cities of
knowledge.
Paul Elliott
See also Bohemian; Creative Class; Mumford, Lewis
Further Readings
Bender, T. 1987. New York Intellect. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Bourdieu, P. 1989. “The Corporatism of the Universal:
The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World. Telos
81:99–110.
Collini, S. 2006. Absent Minds. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New
York: Basic Books.
Furedi, F. 2004. Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?
London: Continuum.
Harding, A., A. Scott, S. Laske, and C. Burtscher, eds.
2007. Bright Satanic Mills: Universities, Regional
Development, and the Knowledge Economy.
Burlington, VT; Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Melzer, A. M., J. Weinberger, and M. R. Zinman, eds.
2004. The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy
and Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Michael, J. 2003. Anxious Intellects: Academic
Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment
Values. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
O’Mara, M. P. 2004. Cities of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Posner, R. 2001. Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rose, J. 2001. The Intellectual Life of the British Working
Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Is a r d, Wa l t e r
The founder of the field of regional science and
its most prominent scholar in industrial location