The Urban Tail

A section out of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (link to his quick overview of the long tail theory). I just finished reading the book and while most of it focused on the internet and digital goods, he had an interesting take on cities and the economics behind it. Since the book isn't online, I just transcribed the section titled The Urban Tail, page 149-151:


Another sort of "hit" is major cities. If you chart population clusters around the globe, you'll get a powerlaw. A small number of places, from Shanghai to Paris, have huge populations, while many more places have smaller populations. As Richard Florida, in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, puts it, "he world is spiky":

People cluster not simple because they like to be around one another or they prefer cosmopolitan centers with lots of amenities, though both those things count. The and their companies also cluster because of the powerful productivity advantages, economies of scale, and knowledge spillovers such density brings. Ideas flow more freely, are honed more sharply, and can be put into practice more quickly when large numbers of innovators, implementers, and financial backers are in constant contact with one another, both in and out of the office.

The population spikes - the great cities of the world - exist because the cultural and economic advantages of being around lots of other people more than compensate for the costs of urban living. One of those advantages, ironically enough, is massive variety in every possible niche.

Places like New York City, Long, Paris, and Tokyo offer practically everything. Want international foot? It's all there - from Eritrean and Bengali to Mongolian hot pots. There is entertainment of every possible variety, services to cater to every need, and if you know which side street of hole in the wall to explore, a bounty of products to rival even Amazon.

Why? Because cities have such a dense population that the usually widely distributed demand becomes concentrated. In a sense you can think of cities as the Long Tail of urban space in the same way the Internet is the Long Tail of idea space or cultural space.

As the writer Steven Johnson puts it:

A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district. Subcultures thrive in big cities for this reason as el: if you have idiosyncratic tastes, you're much more likely to find someone who shares those tastes in a city of 9 million people.

The urban theorist Jan Jacobs observed many years ago that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. She wrote :

Towns and suburbs... are natural homes for huge supermarkets and for little else in the way of groceries, for standard movie houses or drive-ins and for little else in the way of theater. there are simply not enough people to support further variety, although there may be people (too few of them) who would draw upon it were it there.

Cities, however, are the natural home of supermarkets and standard movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign groceries, art movies, and so on, all of which can be found coexisting, the standard with the strange, the large with the small. Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large.