Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Jacobs’s point was that the frenetic energy of a large city, the urban version of creative destruction, creates a natural supply of older, less-desirable environments that can be imaginatively reoccupied by the small or the eccentric, the subcultures that Fischer found so essential to urban life. Artists, poets, and entrepreneurs are the vibrant fish swimming among the coral of the Keeling Islands: they find it easier to live in an exoskeleton that has long since been abandoned by its original host. As Jacobs observed: As for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.