Interactive map popup explains Minneapolis view (click for larger view)
New Scientist magazine has an interesting article about Stubborn US cities rated in personality test (interactive map is here). Stating that, “Cities have ingrained characters that are stubbornly hard to change – and they’re not necessarily what you expect them to be. New York, for instance, is really quite average.
The findings come from a new way of ranking cities, based on one of the largest and most detailed sets of data on the world’s metropolitan areas.”
Seems that a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, Luis M.A. Bettencourt and colleagues “…have now recalculated the violent crime, personal income, GDP and patent rankings for more than 350 US metropolitan areas. The new results reveal that some supposedly exceptional cities, such as New York, are in fact quite ordinary. Other less-heralded places, like Minneapolis, emerge as unusually successful.”
Conjecture by the team is that factors like top-flight universities encouraging creative thinking makes these areas special and they ask the question, “So what is the magic ingredient that makes a city successful?” My gut tells me that Minneapolis has an overwhelming number of creatives, artists, graphic designers, and innovators in many disparate fields…
…or like my San Francisco buddy always says, “It’s so damn cold there you guys have to be creative!” What do you think the magic ingredients are?