How To Grow The Next Silicon Valley

"Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?...What it takes is the right people...That's a striking departure from the past. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities...Now you could make a great city anywhere, if you could get the right people to move there. So the question of how to make a silicon valley becomes: who are the right people, and how do you get them to move?...

Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities...[they] like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of cookie-cutter suburbs, and locally-owned shops and restaurants instead of national chains. Like the rest of the creative class, they want to live somewhere with personality...Most towns with personality are old, but they don't have to be...Just have building codes that ensure density, and ban large scale developments...

What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling. This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, where people walk, but not smiling...It would be a waste of time to try reverse the fortunes of a declining industrial town like Detroit or Philadelphia by trying to encourage startups. Those places have too much momentum in the wrong direction...

Without exception the high-tech cities in the US are also the most liberal. But it's not because liberals are smarter that this is so. It's because liberal cities tolerate odd ideas, and smart people by definition have odd ideas...

To attract the young, a town must have an intact center...My guess is that no city with a dead center could be turned into a startup hub. Young people don't want to live in the suburbs."