David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes today that fused together a teaser for a book written by Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist, with a shadowing of Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emmanuel. He mentions Detroit and gives a hypothesis of why the city has been unable to revive itself after so much effort. Brooks wrote:

This is a point Edward Glaeser fleshes out in his terrific new book, “Triumph of the City.” Glaeser points out that far from withering in the age of instant global information flows, cities have only become more important.

That’s because humans communicate best when they are physically brought together. Two University of Michigan researchers brought groups of people together face to face and asked them to play a difficult cooperation game. Then they organized other groups and had them communicate electronically. The face-to-face groups thrived. The electronic groups fractured and struggled.

Cities magnify people’s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them.

For years, cities like Detroit built fancy towers and development projects in the hopes that this would revive the downtown core. But cities thrive because they host quality conversations, not because they have new buildings and convention centers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/op...s.html?_r=1&hp
So is he right? Is Detroit's major flack the lack of human interaction that goes on? Can it survive without building a more hospitable environment to "host quality conversations"?