A hundred times, this. Granted, with current technology remote is much less efficient than face-to-face collaboration. But then there is also the all-to-important courtiering side to it, which might be rather awkward to do with a telepresence robot (I guess).
I guess today you could call the Internet the city/town.
There is also something to be said about what seems to be serendipity. When there is a high concentration of people doing the same thing, you are more likely to bump into people who can help you turn your vision into a reality. This is why you hear the joke "Go to jail with a bachelor in theft, come out with a PHD in insert_high_level_crime_here."
I'm highly skeptical of this claim. Can you back it up?
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster
Sorry for the late reply. I picked up a coffee table book titled "100 of the World's Most Beautiful Paintings," reading through it, I would quickly Google artists, and found a few lived close to each other and during the same era. I would have to go through it again, but surely I will add it here once I do.
Something more obvious would be Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle.
Also Einstein's influential TOR work on the Atomic bomb when highly capable scientists advanced the same work in the United states at the same time.
It's always amazing to me that as tech entrepreneurs we largely sell to others the idea that technology enables us to do anything from anywhere, but simultaneously believe that there is exactly one place on earth where we must phyiscally be to get anything done. The ideal place to start a startup is anywhere that your day-to-day life issues can take a backseat to working on your startup.