Geoffrey Borchhardt and Olav Sorenson

Interactions primarily occur between those living and working in close proximity to one another. This essay explores some consequences of that fact for places. It offers three principle propositions: (1) Compact buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, and denser places, should promote higher rates of entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth because they reduce the costs of interaction. (2) More integrated places should also promote entrepreneurship and innovation because the average person in those places interacts with a more diverse set of others. (3) In more segregated and unevenly distributed places, people diverge more, as a function of where within the place they live and work, in their propensities to innovate and to found firms.

Published in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Cities & Regions