By Bradd Libby

“Wherever cities grow at all, they experience growth explosions of astonishing power”, urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote in her lesser-known 1970 book ‘The Economy of Cities’. “Even small cities that have grown only briefly, and then have stagnated decisively, have had at least one period of extraordinarily abrupt and rapid economic growth tucked into their histories.”

Jacobs gives the example of Tokyo, which by the late 1800s, just a few decades after Japan had opened to the Western world after two centuries of isolation, “was importing large numbers of bicycles. When these bicycles broke down or wore out, repairmen in Tokyo began making new parts for them.”

The growth of the bicycle repair industry and then, of a bicycle manufacturing industry, both drove and depended on the growth of adjacent industries like modern steelmaking (which enabled railways and shipbuilding) and the automobile (which later helped drive the rise of electronics), all of which converged to turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse. Bicycles, steel, trains, cars, electronics - the Japanese did not invent any of these things. Instead, the Japanese were outsiders who were first purchasers, but then became producers and, eventually, pioneers in these fields too.

Much has been written about places where famous inventions happened, like the printing press in Mainz, Germany, or paper currency in Hangzhou, China, both of which were profiled in Chelsea Follett’s ‘Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World’. (For that matter, Follett covers Tokyo, too.) Books have covered humanity’s general hotbeds of innovation, like Florence, Italy, during the Renaissance, or Rome, Athens, Baghdad, or Amsterdam during their respective golden eras, as Johan Norberg described in ‘Peak Human: What We Can Learn from History’s Greatest Civilizations’.

But Jacobs’ Tokyo example was different. She was not talking about which inventions happened in particular cities (where the bicycle, train, or transistor was invented), but rather which cities boomed because of particular inventions (which places benefited from the invention of the bicycle, train, or transistor).

We might call these ‘boomtowns’ - places that experienced at least one period of rapid economic and population growth, often over just a couple of decades when they were bustling epicenters of activity, usually unlocked by innovations from far away. That is, places that were great adopters of a technology, not the technology’s original inventors.

In a previous post I talked about how steamboats and railroads helped to turn Chicago into a boomtown, as the steamboats enabled easy north-south travel while the railroads did the same for east-west travel. Jacobs wrote that Chicago “multiplied itself almost by seven in a single decade, growing from a population of 12,000 to 80,000 between 1845 and 1855.” By 1870, it was four times larger still. Today, it’s the third-largest city in the US, behind only New York City and Los Angeles, based initially on this boom in using new forms of transportation to ship flour, timber, cattle and other commodities to other parts of the US.

Jacobs offers her own hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, as another example of a boomtown, showing that a town does not need to be a world-class city to be a place that experienced a time of great prosperity and progress. Sitting atop the world's richest anthracite coal veins, the city boomed twice: first as an iron hub and then as 'The Electric City’. It introduced electric streetcars, “among the first in the United States”, funded by the massive wealth of the Lackawanna Valley coal barons, and by the electric power enabled by readily available coal.

Throughout history, even if they are not commonly known today, many places have been the Scrantons of their day, sitting atop great energy and material wealth, the Tokyos that shamelessly imported and improved foreign technologies, becoming centers of manufacturing and innovation, or their Chicagos, ‘flow cities’ that were crossroads for transport and trade. 

We can find examples from the ancient past. The town of Hadibo on the island of Socotra off the eastern coast of Somalia, boomed as the world's exclusive source of the crimson red resin from the Dracaena cinnabari tree. This so-called 'Dragon's Blood' was a critical commodity for Roman gladiators (as a coagulant) and Renaissance varnishers, turning this isolated island into a heavily guarded pharmacological bank for over two millennia. Theodosia, Crimea, in what is now Ukraine, was founded by Genoese merchants who did not develop the Silk Road or long-distance credit instruments, but by the 14th century their city was the largest city in Eastern Europe, applying shipping, banking, and legal ideas from Italy to goods and production knowledge that came from Central Asia, China, and the Near East. Jacobs herself identifies Bizerta, Tunisia, as a historic boomtown that prospered by engineering a channel connecting the massive Lake Bizerte to the Mediterranean, creating a perfectly sheltered deep-water naval base that remained strategic from the time of the Phoenicians until World War II.

And we can find examples from today of efforts to create new boomtowns based on information technology, manufacturing, and materials. We are now seeing efforts to consciously create ‘smart cities’ like Arkadag in Turkmenistan and Neom in Saudi Arabia, ‘sustainable cities’ like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, ‘network states’, regions united by a common interest or ideology, like Dunia Cyber City in Zanzibar, and transport manufacturing centers like California Forever and Starbase in Texas. There are even efforts to rekindle the magic of former boomtowns, like Detroit, to bring about a new era of prosperity.  

Though the names are different, ‘smart city’, ‘sustainable city’, or ‘network state’, the concepts are broadly similar: harnessing new technologies and ideas to enable new ways of living. But like the fable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant by separately grasping its trunk or legs, they each are focusing on only a portion of a massive convergence of multiple new technologies and ideas, what RethinkX co-founders Tony Seba and James Arbib in their book ‘Stellar: A World Beyond Limits and How to Get There’ call the "Stellar core". And with the Stellar core - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries (SWB), precision fermentation production of molecules, autonomous electric transport, and AI-based robot labor - soon any place can become a “Stellar” boomtown.

For the first time in history, due to SWB, we are now able to produce electric power, cheaply, without purchasing fuel or putting up with air pollution. As RethinkX Director of Research Adam Dorr described in ‘Understanding Stellar Energy: How SWB Superpower will create clean energy superabundance’ (starting on page 31), deriving electric power from SWB inverts much of what we have experienced to-date with producing power from fossil fuels. For example, once clean power-producing assets are built, it is in our best interest to use them as much as possible, rather than to conserve power by using as little as is needed. With abundant, clean power, a transportation system that based on autonomous, electric vehicles or a labor system based on AI and autonomous robots likewise become ones of superabundance. (I have shown in my own book ‘The Pattern of Progress: How radically cheaper, easier, faster, better technologies and ideas rapidly change the world’ many examples of how new technologies can rapidly shut down an incumbent system based on extractive inputs and create a new system that generates power, transport ability, communications, food, and labor at near-zero marginal cost.)

In a world where multiple new technologies are converging - SWB-based power, autonomous vehicles, AI, humanoid robots, precision fermentation, and others - existing locations with outdated and costly centralized infrastructure of the extractive era are at a disadvantage. The places most likely to become the Stellar cities that Seba and Arbib describe are those that are ‘at the edge’ – places that now seem peripheral or even total greenfield locations that can leapfrog legacy technologies and legacy thinking. Residents of such cities would be liberated from the need to "work for a living" as the production system would instead work for them. The question now is simply which places will choose to become the boomtowns of the future, the “Stellar” nurseries that will be the first to harness these new possibilities.