Is Boston the most intellectual city in the U.S.? (Cambridge: neighborhood, vs.)

[massnative71]

Originally Posted by BOORGONG

Boston is basically Cambridge on steroids.

I don't know how anybody could draw that conclusion. Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington, etc. are kind of their own thing, always have been.

[AllenSJC]

*Ahem....*

Silicon Valley, CA resident here, and I might have something to say about this topic...

[tysmith95]

Cambridge would be a neighborhood of Boston if Brookline did not end the practice of Boston annexing neighboring neighborhoods. Today it acts as a neighborhood of Boston in basically all aspects other then politics. Most of Cambridge is closer and more accessible to downtown compared to many parts of Boston.

If you look at google maps and shut off all of the labels a large part of the dense urban core of the Boston area is not actually part of Boston. By that I mean Cambridge/Somerville/Medford/Malden/Revere/Everett. Even places like Waltham/Watertown/Arlington/Belmont/Quincy/Lynn/Brookline and others have dense neighborhoods that if mapped like other cities would be part of Boston, but aren't because they started as separate entities and Boston never annexed them.

If you look at the area of Boston it's smaller then basically every major city (other then SF). That's why places like El Paso, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, and others are technically larger (population wise) then Boston. But the Boston region is definitively larger and more influential then all of those cities, basically because the city boundary of Boston doesn't include many of the regions city neighborhoods in the urban core.

[mwj119]

Basically is basically

[turf3]

Than.

[BOORGONG]

Originally Posted by massnative71

I don't know how anybody could draw that conclusion. Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington, etc. are kind of their own thing, always have been.

Take a deep breath. It's all in jest.

[Calvert Hall '62]

Originally Posted by such sweet thunder

This feels like a reach.

The Boston area has 7 universities ranked in the top forty nation-wide by US News and the World Report, who controversy aside, seem to be the standard bearer for this type of thing.

Harvard, 2
MIT, 7
Tufts, 27
BC, 31
Brandeis, 34
BU, 39
Northeastern, 39

That's an absurd collection of schools, the best in the world, and anomaly for a city Boston's size.

Moonbat-ademia.

[MassVt]

Originally Posted by Calvert Hall '62

Moonbat-ademia.

Conservative idiocy.

[New Englander]

Boston is definitely an intellectual city. As a former Cantibridgian, I consider Cambridge to be part of the same ecosystem as Boston. The universities, academic events, even the University linked start up scene definitely makes Boston an intellectual city. Perhaps its magnified due to the population size, relatively compact geography.

Love my city!

[OutdoorLover]

I am not sure what "the most intellectual city" exactly means, but along those lines, the Boston area, if I'll cast the net wider, has two world-class universities and a handful of very good ones, and there is a big concentration of technology and healthcare-sector businesses in this area that's also rare (for biotech/pharma - my industry, I think we are world-leading), then you have excellent museums and arts; and as a state, Massachusetts is always at or near the top for rankings of primary and secondary education, so at least in the broad sense, this area stands out, that is for sure.