5 ms·
What would the modern day's equivalent of Florence be?
by Jarwain 3y ago
What would the modern day's equivalent of Florence be?
- detourdog 3y agoThe internet it has eliminated the notion of location.
- nequo 3y agoThat sounds good but it is not true. The distribution of income is not uniform on the face of Earth and that is not due to sheer choice. The places where people with lower incomes live are not always the places where they would prefer to live. Location still matters for many reasons, infrastructure, safety, public health, climate, and industry-specific agglomeration effects being among them.
- detourdog 3y agoNone of those are culture or intellectual pursuits all of those are local societal issues. I thought the question was regarding cultural developmet. Renaissance type things not code of Hamarabi type things.
- detourdog 3y agoIf on can find infrastructure, safety, public health, climate, industry, and the internet one can be in a Renaissance environment.
- nequo 3y agoFlorence was a financial and trading center of Europe during the Renaissance when Thomas Cromwell travelled there. That economic power and probably that cosmopolitan atmosphere were what lay the ground for cultural development, specifically for the resurgence in arts and in scientific thinking. Even with the internet we see that artistic and scientific output is uneven across the world. There are places where ideas thrive more than in others. For example, if you contribute to the research frontier in physics, chemistry, or computer science, you are very likely to be located in one of the few centers of thinking in your field.
- detourdog 3y agoI don’t see anything that obviates the internet as the leading cultural development exchange of our time. These centers use to be located along trade routes. This is no longer the case. Any group of people can gather anywhere in the world and create whatever.
- paxys 3y agoThe idea of a renaissance period happening in Europe in the 1400s-1500s only came about starting in the 19th century, so to find a modern equivalent we’ll have to wait a few hundred years for future historians to judge. Who knows what pop culture from today will stand the test of time.
- brandnewlow 3y agoThe SF Bay Area