What publishers can learn from urban planners

Vikram Savkar, Publishing Director of Nature Education, made a terrific point in a recent meeting organized by Patty Seybold. He said that modern urban planners try to bring different groups of people together when designing a city because it stimulates innovation. His insight was that perhaps information is like people in a city: bringing different types of information together in a single place could stimulate innovation.

Perhaps Publishers could learn something from urban planners in designing information environments that help users to come up with new ideas. Could we design places for information to "meet" other apparently unrelated information? A kind of information singles-bar, with Publishers as the matchmakers.