A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes

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

World-class cities do not necessarily have world-class scenes

A place is world-class in a discipline if people who want to be world class in that discipline feel like moving there is the best thing they can do for their career prospects

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

# 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
There are two preconditions here: 
1. The scene needs to be doing things that are worth joining from around the world.  [[A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new]]
2. People need to *know* about what the scene is doing from around the world.

Precondition #2 may not be necessary. It may be possible that we only recognize the scenes as world-class after the fact. [[How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?]]



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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

What made Florence a Florence?

# How often do people realize a Florence while it is still a Florence?

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# 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 explanatory dark matter]]
- 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
- [[Minimum viable scene can be created by two people]] and the idea of scenes in general. 



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