memex

Cities are the greatest serendipity engines of all. They began life at crossroads as places to exchange goods and later ideas with others you would never encounter on the farm.

Only recently, we’ve come to recognize great ones for what they are — not as collections of skyscrapers (which China can build but can’t fill), but as the sum of their dense, rich, and overlapping networks of people. “They’re not a set of people, they’re not a set of roads; they’re a set of interactions,” says Luis Bettancourt, a physicist who describes cities as “social reactors.” Like the sun, they’re places where strangers collect, collide, and fuse — releasing tremendous heat and light in the process. What makes a city great, in other words, is how well its people are connected — to the city itself and to each other. And to make a city better, you have to engineer serendipity.

Which is what Tony Hsieh is trying to do in Las Vegas. Much has been written about the Zappos CEO’s flailing efforts to terraform downtown into a desert facsimile of Brooklyn or the Mission district, but his instincts are correct. He envisions every bar and coffee shop around the company’s downtown campus as an extension of its conference rooms, inviting strangers to work alongside his employees. He fervently believes blurring the line between the city and his company will make people in both smarter, happier, and more productive. “If you accelerate serendipity,” he says, “you’ll accelerate learning.”