Amazon's QG2 will take advantage of New York City. But what does New York get?

It is not that young technology workers, more and more immigrants, want to live in the suburbs. They have increasingly demanded the diversity and benefits of urban life. It was the same for innovative companies that succeeded, following the example of the workers.

Another way of saying this is that companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have become attracted to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, as these cities have already made transformative public investments in assets such as culture, parks, universities and public transportation.

The question for city dwellers is to know what these companies are doing. I'm not saying that businesses are moving or should be relocating for a reason other than earning money. Amazon promises tens of thousands of new jobs in New York, with all kinds of workout effects, besides the use of more coders, sales managers, baristas, governesses and yoga teachers. . All of a sudden, she is trying to take advantage of 20 years of the whole post-Manhattan narrative.

But this is not the only balance sheet. "Urban life relies on a social pact," said Vishaan Chakrabarti, a professor from Colombia and founder of the PAU architecture firm. The creation of economic value in large cities like New York feeds a feedback loop in which businesses and cities want to rely.

What does it mean? For starters, this means that the city and the state now have even more reasons to invest money in subways, buses and a new tunnel under the Hudson River and to fund the project blocked BQX trolley connecting Brooklyn and Queens, all of which would serve. Amazon.

In turn, Amazon, which dominates the book market, could, from the outset, make commitments of particular interest in local school curriculums and, as Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, advocates in libraries our most vibrant and versatile community centers. .