Where is the best physical place for PARPA?

# §Florences
- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]]
- [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]
- [[Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines]]
- [[A Florence is a location in time and space]]
- [[Florences are sticky]]
- [[Singapore could become the Florence of the 21st Century]]
- [[There are concrete things that can be done to attract misfits]]

### Questions
- [[What made Florence a Florence?]]
- [[Why do people go to a Florence?]]
- [[What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’]]
- [[What makes a Florence Sticky For People?]]
- [[What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?]]
- [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]
- [[What makes a Florence start being a Florence?]]
- [[Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?]]

### References
- [[Taste for Makers - PG]]



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What made Florence a Florence?

§Florences

# A Florence is a location in time and space
Florence the City is no longer a Florence the Concept. 

Paris in the late 19th century was a Florence but Paris is not a Florence now nor was it a Florence in the mid 16th century. However, Paris may also have been a Florence in the 13th century, which suggests that [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]].

There are several consequences of this assertion. 
- When you’re talking about A Florence, you must say time and place - “15c. Florence” not just “Florence” even if the time is implicit. Similarly you can’t just say a period - “The Renaissance” because the Renaissance didn’t happen everywhere.
- You should be able to draw increasingly tight bounding boxes on both the time and place. The tighter the bounding boxes, the easier it should be to find causality. These tight bounding boxes can help answer [[What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?]] and [[What makes a Florence start being a Florence?]]



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A Florence is a location in time and space

# A city can become a Florence multiple times
You can point to NYC as a Florence for people who wanted to build new governments in the late 18th century and then as a Florence for artists in the 1970’s.

Abstractly, this makes sense because cities wax and wane but have a permanence about them. Therefore there are basically a finite number of options for potential Florences.



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Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other

# What made Florence a Florence?
# What made Florence a Florence
What made Florence so absurdly productive during the 15th century?
ie. What made Paris the center of culture during the 19th century?

- [[People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known]]
- [[A Florence is a location in time and space]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
- [[Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines]]
- [[Florences are sticky]]
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A city can become a Florence multiple times]]

There’s also a sense that places are primary in something and secondary in other things. For example, LA and NYC feel secondary in tech industries but equally primary in fashion. 

### Case Studies from the present
Let’s think about the exceptional places in the world today and why people wanted to go there.
- San Francisco is the center of the software industry and weird discursive projects. World class people who want to build software, fund software, and collaborate with weird people do. Locally, Berkeley and Stanford both pull in world-class academics who has an interest in commercializing things. 
	- It pattern matches against the high margin industry leading to people donating to universities
	- The tech billionaire version of patronizing might be angel investing
- Los Angeles pulls in world class people who want to be part of the fashion industry (is this true?) and movie, tv, and content production industry generally.
	- Do world class technology people go there?
- New York pulls in world class people in Finance, Writing, Theater, Music, Art (is this still true? Probably in Brooklyn), Fashion, 
	- How important are the colleges 
	- Julliard seems important 
	- It pulls 
- London pulls in world class people in Finance, technology, cooking, 
	- It  feels like the proximity
- Boston for people in biotech, academic minded research people 

### Case Studies from the Past
- Amsterdam in the 17th century?
- Tokyo in the 1980’s?
- Prague at some point?
- Vienna in early 20th century
- Edenborough during the 18th Century
	- Smith
	- Hume
	- Hobbes
- Athens in 2nd Century AD

### Observations from cursory Case Studies

- None of these places seem to pull in people for manufacturing but many got their start doing that
- Being centers of trade seems really important

Is the fact that these places tend to center around industries a cause or an effect or both? The industry clusters may also be an artifact of how I’m defining “world class” because I think of world class as people who want to be the best at what they do.  Thinking more it’s how I perceive these people’s decision making process around somewhere being “the place to be” without sacrificing their careers.

In the early 21st century, it feels like there are many world-class cities but San Francisco

- [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]
- [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]

### Research Questions
- [[Has anybody studied what made Paris Paris?]]
- [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]
- [[Why do people go to a Florence?]]
- [[What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’]]
- What are other historical examples of places?
	
- Is there something in the nature of the high margin industry? ie. Silk was probably a high Margin industry but you didn’t see a cultural center there
- I wonder if the people who did the research for civilization V would know more
- Are there necessary cultural preconditions or does it change? [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]
- Are they always coupled to a specific new thing?
- Has anybody mapped the top cities over time?
- Could you strictly look at net immigration to a city? High-skilled immigration?

### Related
- [[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and the idea of scenes in general. 



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# What makes a Florence start being a Florence?
# What makes a Florence start being a Florence

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# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?
# What makes a Florence stop being a Florence
Two hypotheses are the classic stories about being killed by your own success.  One has to do with increased risk aversion and one has to do with dilution.

### The Risk Aversion Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]] and [[Scenes push the edge of human capability]] so Florences at first are coming out with crazy new things.
2. These scenes will necessarily be experimenting, taking risks, and failing. [[To make new things you need to take risks]] ([[Safi Bahcall on Why You Need to Take Crazy Risks]]) 
3. Once the scenes become *recognized* as world class, the expectations on them will increase.
4. The intense pressure to produce amazing things will cause risk aversion and kill new-thing creation.  The Florence will become a franchise. ([[Innovators and franchisees]]).
5. Once a Florence becomes a franchise, it is no longer a Florence - it’s just a world-class city. ([[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]])

### The Dilution Story
1. [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]   - at first these scenes are small ([[A minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and [[Effective scenes are smaller than Dunbar’s number]].) 
2. But [[A scene is world-class if people who want to do new ambitious things in a discipline try to join it from around the world]] so obviously more people will continue to join the scenes. 
3. This can go on for a while - the scenes can split and create new scenes, the core scene can ignore the extra people.
4. At some point though, the scenes may get overwhelmed by scenesters and the city stops being a Florence but instead is just a World-class city. [[World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes]]

### The External Factor Story
There’s also a story where factors external to the nature of The Florence are what cause it to stop being a Florence. If [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]] is true, Economic forces that kill the world-class high-profit discipline will also kill the Florence. 

These need case studies 



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A Florence is a location in time and space

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