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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A scene can become world class when it goes from doing things that are locally new to things that are globally new

People who aspire to  be world-class flock to do groundbreaking things  flock to Florences once they become well known

§Scenes

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

What made Florence a Florence?

Wide vs deep networks and Clusters with respect to DARPA

What makes a Florence stop being a Florence?

§Florences

Florences pull in people of multiple disciplines

What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’

Why do people go to a Florence?

There are concrete things that can be done to attract misfits

# A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes
There are many cities with single world-class scenes - Montreal for Deep learning, Honolulu for Surfing, etc. We could call these Scene cities. But it’s the *convergence* and *intersection* of scenes that makes for a Florence. The feeling of a Florence is one where Leonardo Da Vinci rubs shoulders with Machiavelli.  Where Howard Hughes rubs shoulder with Humphrey Bogart. 

Remember, [[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]]

This is a useful criteria because it suggests two things:
1. An algorithm for whether a place what a Florence in the past (for example, it made me realize that 1930’s LA was probably a Florence) 
2. A necessary condition for creating a Florence - you need to start with at least one scene.



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A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles

Florences are going to have a lot of inequality

Scenes push the edge of human capability

# Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline
One story is that the place needs to be built on a high-margin industry. That high-margin industry leads to people with a lot of money who then want to flaunt it. They flaunt it by patronizing artists and scientists and donating to universities.  People then come to that place both to try to become whales and to feed off of the scraps from the whales. 

Is this pattern dependent on non-violent profit disciplines? Even in the ancient world, the examples (Athens) seem to be places associated with trade instead of war (Macedonia and Sparta.)  [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]

Places where this pattern matches
- 15c. Florence (Banking/Art+Science)
- 16c. Amsterdam  (Trade/Art)

This requirement explains why early 21st century Berlin is not a Florence. It has a lot of world-class cultural disciplines but no world-class high profit discipline. 

If this is true, there is also an inherent tension around prices. World class cultural disciplines do not often pay well. The average artists, writers, inventors, etc do not traditionally make a lot of money. Therefore in order to be in a place they need inexpensive costs of living. On the other hand, if a place has a world-class high-profit discipline it means that there are going to be a bunch of people making a bunch of money. When people make a bunch of money in one place, prices tend to increase. These increased prices make it hard for the world-class cultural discipline to exist. 

This narrative has two consequences:
First is very practical: [[A Florence needs accessible low-cost-of-living lifestyles]]

Second is that  inevitably [[Florences are going to have a lot of inequality]]. 

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# What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’
# What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city-’
- [[Florences require a world-class high-profit discipline and a world-class cultural discipline]]
- [[A Florence is a city with multiple world-class scenes]]
While a top city doesn’t actually need to have any scenes  



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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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Benʼs working notes

What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city?’

What is the difference between a Florence and simply a ‘top city-’

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