The front-page story on urbanization in China that The New York Times published on Sunday June 16 shows how the same facts and quotes can suggest different narratives. Here is the narrative suggested by this story: The Chinese government is forcing farmers to move to cities. A few small changes in wording could equally well supported a very different narrative: The Chinese government is experimenting with ways to pay farmers more money to get the land that it needs to make room for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who still want to move to cities.

New communities add variance to the outcomes from social interaction. The probability of a big positive interaction goes up. So does the probability of a big negative one. Progress seems to come both from increases in this variance and from social systems that trim the lower tail. Together, they mean that we get the benefits of a big upper tail without the costs of the lower tail. In the history of physical communities, the most dangerous negative interactions came from infectious disease.

Former Toronto Mayor David Miller, currently the Future of Cities Global Fellow at NYU Poly, spoke about Urbanization with Paul on March 7, 2013.

Treating the city as a distinct unit of analysis inevitably raises questions about how the city is similar to — and different from — the business. The first question is whether there is any fundamental difference at all. A common way to pose this question runs something like this: Given that consumers are free to choose the businesses where they buy their food, but do not get to vote on the decisions that those businesses make, wouldn’t it make sense for us to let businesses run entire cities the same way?

Much of what we do in a university is organized around units of analysis. In biology, the unit is the organism; in architecture, the building; in international relations, the nation-state. Some of the most important academic innovations, therefore, have emerged when scholars identify a new unit of analysis and come together to understand it. The field of chemical engineering was pioneered at MIT in the 1920s when chemists turned their attention to the chemical plant as a unit of analysis.