To:
From: Vanessa Layne
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 01:44:19 -0400
> >> I wonder why it is that urban environments foster creative
> >> minds much more than rural places.
> >
> >Sandy, is this a rhetorical question, or should I put on my amateur
> >anthropologist hat and venture some answers? :)
>
> Well, Vanessa, I'd be interested in any ideas you have on this topic.
Well, let's see.
By way of preamble, any anthropological phenomenon worth its salt is "over-determined". That means it has multiple, sufficient reasons. Any one reason might be sufficient, but actually there are a bunch of reasons. So this list may not be complete.
First of all, while creativity may have a (large, even) inborn aspect, the practical application of creativity (e.g. art, engineering) are *skills* and *disciplines of study*, and as such are transmittable from person to person. The more creative people you have floating around in your population, the more young creative people will be taught to apply their creativity. A town with 3 piano teachers can have more piano-playing students than a town with one piano teacher.
However, more interestingly, is this phenomenon: If one out of a thousand people is a musical instrument teacher and you live in a town on 10,000 people, you have 10 different teachers to choose from. You probably have more diversity of instruments to choose from, and if the teaching style of one instructor doesn't match yours, you have nine other people to choose from. If you live in a town of 1000 people, and the one music teacher is a pianist, and you're only called to play saxophone, you are SOL.
I call this the "engagement" problem. The smaller a population, the less likely that someone's specific creativity/art/talent will be engaged.
Secondly, creative endeavours often require broad bases of support economically. If only 1 out of 100 people want piano lessons, a piano teacher that needs 20 students a week to make ends meet had better not move to a region of fewer than 2000 people.
That's obvious enough. But what is less obvious is that a region of (using the above numbers) 1500 people also doesn't have any need for a professional piano tuner, won't have someone to hire once a year to accompany the school christmas paegent, etc. And the 15 people there who *are* interested in pursuing music aren't getting to do that.
So the town of 2000 not only has 5 more people willing to pay for piano lessons, it has 20 more people studying an art, talking to their friends about how cool it is, holding recitals they invite their families to, buying CDs of their heros to emulate; 20 people hiring a piano tuner in from out of town, and gossiping with him. Furthermore, the activity of 20 people taking piano lessons may drive up the demand ("All the cool kids are doing it!"), causing more people to want piano lessons, thereby making it possible for an additional teacher to earn a living there. In addition, non-piano-students start adjusting their behavior. The local saloon has a piano brought in because sing-alongs are now all the rage. The High School decides to do a musical, because some of the advanced students are OK accompanists; and now there are another 30 kids making music, and 20 building and painting sets, and 20 sewing costumes.
The point being, that the difference between a town just too small to support an artist and a town just big enough to support an artist can mean a staggering difference in how much popular art there is.
That's all just economic sociology. To get back to the anthropology, there are social effects on art and creativity. They're sort of like an ideal gas: they heat up and get more excited if you compress them into a small volume. :)
Creative people and their efforts bounce off one another and reinforce/support creative behavior. For instance:
The higher a population density of creative people, the more these effects happen, which causes a self-propagating feedback loop of attracting and making more creative people, and making them more productive.
Nor is this just art stuff. Science and engineering and programming all work the same way. The Open Source Movement was the natural result of ther just being enough geeks in one (virtual) place -- the 'net. Similarly, I gather the 'net has gotten the population density of dance historians high enough to begin to see some really interestng effects.
And to mention economic sociology again, in the same way having just enough people to have a piano teacher can make an enormous difference in many more people's exposure to and participation in artistic endeavours, a city which can support a whole *bunch* of artists can also support an art supplies store -- which opens up possibilities to many more people than just those artists. A city which can support 200 pianists through teaching gigs, can also support some jazz clubs that need lounge pianists, and dance studios that need accompanyists, etc. A town with only one aspiring poet isn't going to be holding any slams; a city with 30 aspiring poets not only will hold slams, it will cause many more people to take up poetry.
All these things make it *easier* to be creative in urban centers. It nurtures the creativity of people who might not otherwise have explore that part of themselves, and it attracts people who have difficulty being creative elsewhere.
Also, there is what I think of as the "minority emergence effect". Let us ignore all of the above and pretend that 1 out of 100 people have trait/interest/inclination X regardless of where they live (I think I've shown that that's exactly not true, that the N/100 of creative people will be higher in higher population environments, but let's ignore that.) So in a population of 1000 people, you have 10 people of minority status X. In a population of 1,000,000, you have a whole bloddy *district* of 10,000 people.
That means that people of minority status X can exclusively socialize and do business with their own kind, they can assert their own cultural values, they can hold their own celebrations, they can vote their own representatives into the legislature and in short, in all ways thumb their noses at the 99 out of 100 people who tell them they are weird, wrong and incorrect.
If we were to say 1 out of 100 people are creative-minded (I think that's too low, but it makes the math easy), and 99 out of 100 people see no particular value in being creative, in population of 100, our one creative-minded person will get 100% negative feedback. Moved to a population of 1000, our creative-minded bloke will find 9 other people to share his experience, but still most of the people he deals with on a day-to-day basis will not share his values.
Move him to a 10,000 person creative ghetto in a population of 1 million, and he don't ever even have to say hi to someone who doesn't share his perspective. More to the point, any non-creative-minded person doing business there will be very careful to act respectful towards the view point of creative people, because their local population maximum make them a force to be reckoned with.
Someone growing up in a city of one million is going to be exposed to a much greater variety of role models and possibilities and expectations than someone going up in a town of 1000. They will have a different attitude about what is "normal", or appropriate behavior, or what values are good. Someone has more of a chance to find someone else who supports their natural inclinations, whatever they are, and reinforce them.
This reduces the social pressure to conform to a single standard of behavior or conduct.
In a village of 100, each other person has, let us call it, 1/99th of your social standing in their care. (This ignores the fact that some people, e.g. family, have a greatly disproportionate effect on you.)
If you interact daily with 1000 people, each other person has 1/999th the impression on you.
The more people in your life, the less the opinion of any one of them matters.
In a village of 100, if 10 people disapprove of a lifestyle choice of yours, you can't much avoid them. In a town of 1000 people, if 100 people disapprove of a lifestyle choice of yours... well, frankly you'd have to do something pretty direct to get a 100 people to notice you enough to care to the point of specifically disapproving of you. But there's 900 other people out there you can hang out with instead.
In a population of 100,000, you can be as invisible as you like, and go off and be whatever sort of weirdo you like.
Meanwhile, in other anthropological effects, people in a low population-density, low-population region can *get away* with being more judgemental and censorious. If you know the 100 people you're going to see for the next two years, and you know all about them, you can make cracks about certain ancestries and know exactly who is the butt of your jokes.
But in an urban environment you don't know whom you'll be rubbing elbows with, you don't know whom you'll offend by mouthing off. Tolerance of difference -- at least in conduct, if not in thought -- is a basic survival skill in big cities. You learn not to share your unsolicited opinion and values too freely. Urban environments often evolve cultural norms of politeness around the necessity of keeping smoothly functioning a highly diverse population. All this boils down to: in big cities, it is usually considered impolite to express disapproval of things which in small towns it might not be impolite to express disapproval of.
Anyway, it's late and I'm going to stop brainstorming now and go to bed. Hope this is amusing.