Small Spaces

notes on building blocks

Our peasants love their villages. The Romans were ardent patriots, when Rome was a mere township. When it became more powerful, their patriotism was not so keen. A city that was mistress of the world was too vast for the hearts of its citizens. Men are not made to love immensity.

— Vauvenargues (1715 - 1747)

1.

It is tempting to think of culture — and new ideas, and all the spirits of genius — as something created in big places. The common map points out only the principal cities. It is also tempting to summarize the history of the world as the product of a handful of capital cities. These sentiments are, I think, a mistake. The largest cities do amass greatness, ideas, machines, culture, etc. But the materials necessary for these are often found, and created, elsewhere. To uncover the spirits of genius, it is worth looking farther.

To suppose this may seem like the conceit of a provincial person. There is, after all, no Roman Empire without Rome. But it was to the credit of Rome — unlike less vigorous empires before or after — that she granted the honor of citizenship and the distinctions of merit so widely beyond her walls. What came from the corners of Italy?

Virgil was a native of Mantua; Horace was inclined to doubt whether he should call himself an Apulian or a Lucanian; it was in Padua that an historian was found worthy to record the majestic series of Roman victories. The patriot family of the Catos emerged from Tusculum; and the little town of Arpinum claimed the double honor of producing Marius and Cicero, the former of whom deserved, after Romulus and Camillus, to be styled the Third Founder of Rome; and the latter, after saving his country from the designs of Catiline, enabled her to contend with Athens for the palm of eloquence.

— Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Pulling at the varied threads of history, we are led from the metropolis to smaller spaces. Jazz originated in New Orleans, but it did so by stitching together blues, folk spirituals, work songs, and the lineage of polyrhythmic cadences preserved from African heritage. These ferments were not a product of the city — they emerged in more remote places. I believe this is a pattern: culture is not created in cities so much as assembled and discovered there. It is created in smaller spaces.

If we want to understand the birth of new genius, this distinction tells us a little about where we might locate our attention. But we are a ways from finding it.

2.

When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn't much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here.

— Frederick Terman

Given the typical assumptions about the multiplicative effects of human capital, I find it interesting that one of these places has created four trillion-dollar companies within 10 miles, and the other has created none:

one of these places has routinely built the future for decades, and the other is NYC

A trillion-dollar market cap is of course an arbitrary distinction. New York is no stranger to wealth. But it’s worth stopping in Palo Alto for a moment to wonder why, if the largest metropolises ought to have all the advantages in the world, the tiny suburb of a tiny city¹ has been so successful at creating technology companies for decades, while New York has been a comparative failure. Population and density are benefactors to many things, but the denser cities seem uncompetitive, or even technologically stunted, compared to a few suburbs of San Francisco or San Jose.

~ ~ ~

Frederick Terman, born in Indiana in 1900, moved to Palo Alto when his father accepted a position at the relatively new Stanford University (founded in 1891). Terman determined to settle in Palo Alto himself, becoming a Stanford professor like his father, and eventually became dean of the school of engineering.

But Terman did more than settle: He encouraged his students to settle, and start companies instead of leaving for elsewhere after graduation. In 1937, David Packard and William Hewlett were the first to heed this, creating Hewlett-Packard in a garage, which is commonly considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

The HP garage — extra small spaces

This might be unremarkable, if it did not create its own virtuous cycles and ultimately its own culture², one strong enough that we see the story repeat for decades.

Many of the fathers of computing were not from, or working in, metropolises. They were largely a handful of Midwesterners — Jack Kilby (integrated circuits) was from Kansas, Robert Noyce (Intel) and many others were from Iowa — who happened to mostly congregate in sleepy California towns. Noyce became interested in the new invention of the transistor, encountering one by chance at his studies in Iowa. But attending MIT for grad school, he was dismayed to find that there wasn’t any interest in the new invention, even among faculty³. Technology, broadly speaking, was unfashionable among coastal elites at the time. Ultimately the transistor was the interest that lured Noyce to California.

3.

A few quick thoughts on this, connected but without order:

Sometimes it is difficult to see history as anything but a series of delicate portals, ones we tend to close, without ever quite identifying them. Or we do identify them, but cannot diagnose a way to open them again.

The history of these places matters, I think, if we want to identify the fledgling seats of cultural genius. It matters even more if we want to grow the new ones. It is a pastime of journalists to write monthly articles declaring cities all over the globe as the next Silicon Valley, or the “Silicon Valley of xyz industry”. But most of these mentioned cities, aside from beginning to look superficially similar, also have mostly come to share the same defects that the compelling small spaces do not (or did not).

The important aspects of these places are difficult to pin down. It is easier to hear the doors closing than to know what was on the other side. If you search for what made Silicon Valley particular, people will mention Terman, or defense funding, or Stanford, or the VC model. But they rarely mention its smallness. Though some of the hagiographies do hint at it, by mentioning facts like this: When Noyce landed at the San Francisco airport in 1956, he drove to Palo Alto that morning, found a house for sale, and signed a purchase contract before noon on the same day. He did this before he had even secured employment.

The ability to repeat that today is scarcely possible, anywhere in the US, for a number of reasons: Sellers would want proof of funds, lenders would want income guarantees (at minimum, an offer letter), inventory is low enough that buyers might wait for other offers, and of course prices are simply too high. That is a repeating pattern, it’s true for instance of Greenwich village in NYC when it was on the path to becoming a Bohemian epicenter. Rent in the early 1900s was between $7-$37 per month ($230-$1,200 adjusted for inflation), with the average $13.50 a month ($438 inflated) for a 3- or 4-room unfurnished apartment.⁴ Superstar cities may court talent, but a much more compelling crucible is found when there’s drop-dead rents, too.⁵ Greenwich Village still exists today, as one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States, and unsurprisingly it is more of a museum than a bed of living culture. A portal has closed.

~ ~ ~

Large places may be culturally successful not because they are large, but because they are capable of drawing out the exceptional from smaller places. What Rome, jazz, and Silicon Valley have in common is that they had the sensitivity to sample from the country. One has to wonder how repeatable that action is. It is supposed that Rome’s fertility was negative in ancient times, that it needed the countryside to refresh its population. Perhaps cities and the country can work well together in this regard, if they can find a way to enrich each-other. I worry that modern urbanization is a lot more one-way, and many countries are experiencing a one-time sort.

Remoteness, in some sense, seems to be an advantage. No one disagrees that people in metropolises are more fashionable. But it must also be the case that people in such places are much more concerned with mental fashion, too: spending a lot of time thinking about what everyone else thinks about. This was the problem Noyce ran into, but I think it repeats often. And I think everyone actually agrees with this sentiment, culturally. We see this repeated, at least intuitively, with culture. When the traveler wants a big experience, he goes to a big city to see big things. But when he wants an “authentic” experience, he must eschew the most well-trodden places, possibly the cities themselves, to find it. He must seek out places that have not yet been touched by “tourism”, he must find the people and places that still have remoteness — places that continue to live in a world of their own. Big places and small places each have their own insularity, but they look to very different things.

Ecologically, remote places produce rare specimens. The inverse is also true: as biomes become less remote, we tend to see biodiversity loss, sometimes rapidly. With very high connectivity, a few species—sometimes invasive—tend to dominate. I suspect this is true culturally, too. As the country becomes more connected, as culture shifts to media made elsewhere⁶, we may lose some of the ferment that we have relied on in the less-connected world.

As a cultural and technological locus, Silicon Valley began very small, and 80 years later it still isn’t a top-10 metro area. An amount of scale is often found alongside success, but I think it is much less necessary than commonly suggested. Terman, in his triumphant quote, notes that Now a lot of the rest of the world is here. But culturally, I think it remains successful because it retains many of the advantages, at least culturally, of smaller spaces.

If we care about any of this, we should strive to be sensitive to the sound of doors opening and closing. New doors cannot be created, but they can be grown. We can never demand significant places and culture. But if we are careful enough, we can let them grow.

Off to garden,

s s

1. When people from New York want to insult San Francisco, they call it “barely a city.” But this only makes the discrepancy worse, that barely-a-city outshines NYC so brightly in technology. New Yorkers do not, as far as I know, think about San Jose at all.

2. I assume most of my readers are familiar with the cultural aspects that make Silicon Valley special — the VC model and give-employees-equity model, the generosity to newcomers, to uncooked ideas, etc. Though maybe imitators do not appreciate these as widely as they should.

3. This is mentioned in the Tom Wolfe piece on Noyce, written for Esquire, which makes a good supplement, if you need more examples.

4. From Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918, by Gerald McFarland

5. Rents were not low because a place was immensely undesirable (as is the case in many areas today), but because both inventory and trust were higher. One of these doors is more difficult to open than the other.

6. A topic for another time