City mayors are often trying to emulate the success of their rivals,
especially when it comes to creating dynamic and innovative cities. Take
venture capital, start ups and the phenomenal success of Silicon
Valley, for example. Rival cities in places as diverse as Kuala Lumpur
and Singapore to Cambridge and Paris have tried, almost always in vain,
to emulate California’s world-beating hot-bed of technology innovation.
But start ups aren’t the only useful things to think about. Innovation and science are just two others, both of which have been the subject of city rankings. And in both measures, alternative cities, such as Boston, rank highly, given its happy convergence of world-leading universities, good quality of life, and coastal location. Innovation Cities, a ranking from 2thinknow, puts Boston number one in a list of 100 cities globally, for its “strong innovation economy” (the site doesn’t clarify exactly what it means by this, unless you buy the full report). And the latest list, from Nature, attempts to calculate which cities around the world are best for science (or see here for interactive versions, such as the Google Earth mashup pictured above). At one basic level, it seems that size matters: Tokyo-Yokohama tops the list (the ranking tracks all published research that is done within 40 minutes travel time of any given city centre), followed by London, Beijing (which has shot up the list over the past decade) and then San Francisco’s Bay Area. Boston lies in 7th place. But this is mere quantity. When quality is considered, in terms of citations, a rather different calculation is arrived at. Here, Boston tops the list, with cities such as Austin, Singapore and Sydney creeping up into the rankings.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Nature: Science and the city | Better Cities Now
