For what it's worth [], I'm pretty sure CERN(/LHC), ESRF, SLAC Nat. Accelerator Labs, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Bekeley, Sandia, Princeton Plasma Phys. Lab, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Argonne Nat. Lab, TRIUMF, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Oak Ridge, Research Triangle Park, various institutions within the Max Planck Society, Institute for Advanced Study, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, RAND Corporation, (and likely many others...), all have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people. Several of these institutions are within commuting distance of major world cities.
In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
> have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people.
I mean, yeah, everywhere is basically within walking distance if you change the definition around enough.
I've actually spent a bit of time at towns near big labs, and for the most part these are not the kinds of big cities solving problems the article is trying to assert. They're sleepy little towns, many of which barely have a building over 2 stories. In fact, I live 20 minutes from a major biomed lab. I definitely do not live in a major city. 20 year ago people would have called this entire area "farms".
The article is positing that Cities, BIG Cities, are the places hard problems get solved. Not places withing an hour drive of a big city. CERN, ESRF, SLAC, etc. aren't in major cities of their respective countries. 150,000 people is not a big city. If the supposition was correct, it would make sense to set these kinds of hard problem solvers in your densest, most populated cities. NYC would be thick with labs, Paris, Tokyo and London would all be centers of major Research facilities.
I think the Soviets got it right with not being coy about what these places are: наукогра́д "science cities". For example, Tri-cities, WA is a "farm" town that only exists because one of the biggest U.S. nuke labs was built there. It was built there because it's out in the middle of nowhere. ORNL is a 2.5 hour drive from Nashville. Brookhaven, 1.5 hours.
My point is that cities don't solve hard problems. Cities merely bring efficiency that can be a useful tool in aiding this process. It'd be hard and more expensive to build something like the LHC without good infrastructure in place to move all the equipment in, so of course you're going to have good transit links and communications infrastructure etc. But the LHC wasn't built in downtown Paris was it?
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
yeah basically. Let's be real honest here, the kinds of "problems" the Bay Area seems to spend most of it's time solving appear to be mostly figuring out how to extract the maximum amount of money out of fairly uninteresting technical implementations designed to let people chat and share cat pictures. In other words, money for engineering, not problem solving.
In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)