Benefits of big city life - only for the elite

Marc Keuschnigg , photo: Verena Seibold Urban inequality in Europe and the United States is so severe that urban elites claim most of the benefits from the agglomeration effects that big cities provide, while large parts of urban populations get little to nothing. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Linköping University and Leipzig University show that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. In recent years, researchers from across disciplines have identified striking and seemingly universal relationships between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. Cities create more interconnectivity, wealth, and inventions per resident as they grow larger. However, what may be true for city populations on average, may not hold for the individual resident. -The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policy makers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is,- says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University.