The Internet and the City Advantage

Cities have been central to the human civilization. Their dense population provides a platform for the serendipitous interactions and cross-pollination of ideas from different domains, their abandoned portions provide cost-effective real estate to struggling artists and entrepreneurs, their riches provides jobs, sometimes, side-jobs for the innovators to experiment. No wonder innovation in a city grows super-linearly (~(size)4/3) with its size. But the Internet was supposed to destroy all advantages a city has over the rural areas....