Mar 6, 2018 08:58 PM
Port cities are an ideal or fertile ground for riskier sociopolitical experiments as well as forerunners for any arguably successful or proliferating trends. Due either greatly or at least in part to the constant inflow and outflow of goods continuing no matter how economically bad / wrong an administrative project might go or any debt consequentially piles up from it. That force-feeding from around the globe (i.e., "You must exist, entryway to an _X_ big-player nation!") ensures some manner of recovery for the local powers and influences that be ... or just their long-term endurance despite the effects. (Albeit those location advantages not always applying to specific segments of the population and affected industries serving as test-subjects). Also, port cities historically attract and converge together a heterogeneous mixture of cultures and ideologies whose tensions, creativity, and interactions fuel and engender a native thought orientation geared for frequent mutability / economo-psychosocial engineering.
There are exceptions to that for the coasts, however (potentially even the rule for some geographical shorelines rather than a mere disruption of the other generality). Occurring whenever this catalytic impulse for exploratory changes, variety and eccentricity is instead either mitigated or shepherded by traditional community or an entrenched establishment into less iconoclastic or radical channels.
In middle or pejorative flyover country, metropolitan centers aren't seaports and thereby usually have to be more cautious due to the greater difficulty in recovering from or enduring failed experimentations. Thus also any wariness or resistance to ideas incubated on the coasts: "What worked for a seaport region or what that region survived, or what it is an abiding repository for, may not be applicable here because world commerce does not mandate our existence as so highly necessary." Exceptions can be cities beside large, inland bodies of water, along major rivers or shipping waterways; robust college/university towns, a key hub / nexus that an extraordinary number of transportation roadways unavoidably intertwine upon, etc.
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There are exceptions to that for the coasts, however (potentially even the rule for some geographical shorelines rather than a mere disruption of the other generality). Occurring whenever this catalytic impulse for exploratory changes, variety and eccentricity is instead either mitigated or shepherded by traditional community or an entrenched establishment into less iconoclastic or radical channels.
In middle or pejorative flyover country, metropolitan centers aren't seaports and thereby usually have to be more cautious due to the greater difficulty in recovering from or enduring failed experimentations. Thus also any wariness or resistance to ideas incubated on the coasts: "What worked for a seaport region or what that region survived, or what it is an abiding repository for, may not be applicable here because world commerce does not mandate our existence as so highly necessary." Exceptions can be cities beside large, inland bodies of water, along major rivers or shipping waterways; robust college/university towns, a key hub / nexus that an extraordinary number of transportation roadways unavoidably intertwine upon, etc.
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