Richard Florida argues that cities are, and have always been, incubators for revolution. What has recently been brewed in Cairo was once brewed in London and Boston:
Cities push us ever closer, enabling the rapid spread of new ideas. This accelerates the flow of new technology, increases the rate of new business formation, and makes for vibrant artistic and cultural scenes. And those very same mechanisms that unleash our innovative and artistic energies also make cities veritable cauldrons, in which political energy and activism are pressurized and brought to a boil.
Consider the Boston Massacre of 1770, the Paris Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917 in St. Petersburg, the Chicago Convention in 1968, the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, Cairo's Tahrir Square last month, and many more--all of them were events of global consequence, but they were each the product of individual cities. "These uprisings aren't just accidentally urban," noted economist Edward Glaeser. "They would be unthinkable at low densities. Cities connect agitators, like Sam Adams and John Hancock. Riots require a certain kind of urban congestion; police power must be overwhelmed by a sea of humanity."
