North American cities are fiercely vying to secure Amazon's second headquarters, but will the retail giant really improve the culture and infrastructure of the area it finally chooses" Aaron Betsky doesn't think so.

As the competition for the second Amazon headquarters heats up and the Republican's war on cities intensifies, we have to wonder whether attracting that investment will actually be good for whatever city wins the race.
The question the preliminary results raises: What makes a city attractive" Is it their landscape, or is it what humans have made out of that place" Does the actual physical city matter less than the physical and information infrastructure, the financial and regulatory systems, and the political state of the place" Or, is it ultimately the people who live there, their experience, levels of education, and ability to work together" What is remarkable to me about the choices Amazon made is how little the attractiveness of nature or climate seem to matter. Whatever else Columbus, Indianapolis, or Toronto might have going for them, it is not a sublime landscape. For that you would have to turn to San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, or Phoenix, none of whom made the list.
Instead, the common denominator among the largest group of finalists is that seven of them are along the so-called Acela Corridor: they are part of the 500-mile-long Boston-New York-Washington metropolis. The next largest grouping is cities in the plains of the ...