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{{a|book review|}}{{br|The Death and Life of Great American Cities}}<br>{{author|Jane Jacobs}} | {{a|book review|{{image|Jane Jacobs|jpg|Jane Jacobs}}}}{{bi}}{{br|The Death and Life of Great American Cities}}<br>{{author|Jane Jacobs}} | ||
===Systems thinking 1960s style=== | ===Systems thinking 1960s style=== | ||
{{drop|J|ane Jacobs moved}} from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Greenwich Village, New York with her sister during the Great Depression. There she found freelance work writing about New York and later joined the staff of ''Architectural Forum'' magazine, which must have been the ''Computer Weekly'' of its day — a niche specialist publication that found itself unexpectedly at the vanguard of a public debate. | |||
Learning about, and being horrified by, Robert Moses’ grand plans for New York, Jacobs developed a deep scepticism of mid-1950s urban planning policy. | |||
Of Moses, quoth {{plainlink|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses|Wikipedia}}: | |||
{{quote| | |||
“Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid-20th century. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful and influential people in the history of New York City and New York State. The grand scale of his infrastructure projects and his philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States. | |||
Never elected to any office, Moses held various positions throughout his more-than-40-year career. He held as many as 12 titles at once, including New York City Parks Commissioner and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. By working closely with New York governor Al Smith early in his career, he became expert in writing laws and navigating and manipulating the workings of state government. He created and led numerous semi-autonomous public authorities, through which he controlled millions of dollars in revenue and directly issued bonds to fund new ventures with little outside input or oversight.”}} | |||
The order of the day, in a nutshell, was to reorganise communities from the top-down, bulldozing tenements and in their place building integrated, purpose-designed modern communities — known today as “housing projects” — and reengineering transit with bypasses, tunnels, bridges and parkways. | |||
Jacobs rightly saw that this would be a disaster. | |||
Though she had neither a tertiary education nor experience in urban planning her views quickly became popular. By 1958 she had been awarded a Rockefeller grant to study city planning methodology in the US. It took three years and in 1961, she published its result: ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities.'' | |||
It was an excoriating critique, and became instrumental in turning opinion against Moses’ proposed “Mid-Manhattan Expressway”. Had the expressway been completed, it would have destroyed much of the Greenwich Village then frequented by bohemians like the young Bob Dylan. | |||
While superficially counterintuitive, Jacobs’ argument was visionary, pluralistic and brilliant. | |||
Anyone interested in how distributed networks are best organised — or should be allowed to organise ''themselves'' — should read this, imaginative magnificent book which anticipates later developments in [[complexity]] and [[systems theory]]. If you take it with [[James C. Scott]]’s {{br|Seeing Like a State}}, [[Charles Perrow]]’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} and [[Donella H. Meadows]]’ {{br|Thinking in Systems}} you will have the bones of a grand unifying theory of everything: one that would caution against a patrician [[Reductionist|reductionism]] where top-down control is the only way of managing networks of people and mitigating the caprice of unreliable, inconstant individuals. | |||
In a lecture at Harvard’s Urban Design Conference in 1956 Jacobs would say that “unreliability” and “caprice” were features and not bugs: | |||
{{quote| | |||
“The least we can do is to respect — in the deepest sense — strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order”}} | |||
Jacobs’ contrarian, “bottom-up” thesis is simple: those on the ground generally best understand their own predicament, and are best placed, motivated and incentivised to make appropriate, quick, and proportionate decisions to improve it for themselves. ''Homo sapiens'' are naturally adapted to co-operate in unexpected ways if only given the chance and not presented with direct disincentives to doing so, and will go out of their way to do so if incentives run that way. | |||
==== Counterintuitive observations ==== | |||
{{drop|W|hy should this}} matter to us? Because much modern management theory shares Moses’ disastrous premises: an unrealistic faith in simplistic models, the conviction that human relations are homogeneous, predictable and may be described without loss of fidelity by simplistic models; and that if central authorities do impose such models on a supine population without the will or faculty to resist them, it will work. | |||
Among Jane Jacobs’ thundering observations, which we seem to have forgotten, are these: | |||
''Streets are good'': Streets, and not buildings, are the veins and arteries of the city. Where streets are clearly demarcated from private space, regularly occupied, of mixed-use, and where street activity is there for all to see — where there are “eyes on the street” belonging not to the authorities but to the community itself (they who are the “natural proprietors of the streets”) the conditions are right for a safe, dynamic and prosperous neighbourhood. Where these conditions are ''not'' met — where there are long blocks, deserted sidewalks, little diversity of function and especially where building entrances face ''away'' from the streets, as they tend to in housing projects, the security and vibrancy are lost. | |||
''Parks are bad'': Far from being calming influences, planned parks tend to be magnets for delinquency, crime and antisocial behaviour. The typical [[High modernism|high-modernist]] view has the relationship between parks and streets exactly ''backwards''. | |||
''Mixed uses'': A mixture of uses, residential and commercial, educational and recreational, together, ''adds'' cohesion, and ''reinforces'' positive feedback loops. This steadfastly flies in the face of modernist orthodoxy. Businesses open by day and bars by night, ensuring that the street is constantly over-watched by those natural proprietors. Schoolchildren should interact with shopkeepers and publicans. They will, soon enough! | |||
''Some dilapidation is good'': You need old buildings as much as you need ones: not just fancy old ones, but also humdrum, run-down, or even dilapidated old ones. For some members of the community, they will be all they can afford. If you have mechanisms to allow these people into the community in places they can with their limited means sustain, they have the opportunity for development. If the whole place gentrifies, there will be people who can’t afford to live there. | |||
''Homogeneity is bad'': The modernist disposition to organise, make efficient and eradicate redundancy and disorganisation in the organic community necessarily prioritises homogeneity and, at the limit, monopoly, and these accentuate ''fragility''. | |||
==== The city is the people you see ==== | |||
The “city” is comprised of people when and where you can see them, and they can see each other, and not when they’re behind closed doors and, as far as the city dynamic is concerned, out of circulation. | |||
This is a profound, but obvious, observation. | |||
It is hard not to analogise to our modern corporate sufferance: we [[Subject matter expert|specialist]]<nowiki/>s are penned together in carefully demarcated, [[Silo|siloed]], ring-fenced and security-controlled functional sub-teams, away from other units, in separate “housing projects”. Is that optimised for richness, diversity, and agility? It doesn’t feel like it. | |||
Jacobs observes that we naturally seek out humanity, and thrive most the more we have of it. The sight of other people in the street ''attracts'' people, and does not, as the modernists suppose, repel them. | |||
What does this tell us about our obsession with secrecy, [[confidentiality]], and [[proprietary information]]? | |||
Modern business management, above all else, values ''scale''. [[Scale]] afforded by technology, processing power and the amplifying effect of the distributed network. Scale emphasises ''efficiency'' and ''speed'' and the removal of cost, [[waste]] and [[redundancy]]: tightening margins, aggregating categories, standardising, commoditising, offshoring, compartmentalising, just-in-time producing and straight-through processing. | |||
These are ''exactly'' the dispositions of Le Corbusier, Robert Moses and the brutalist administrators of the post-war period. | |||
==== Diversity versus efficiency: pick one ==== | |||
Central to Jacobs’ argument is the inestimable, practical value of ''[[diversity]]'' — not just the cosmetic facsimile it has become today, but ''real'' diversity: the essential foundational quality of any vibrant community. The richness and variety of everyday life; the durability and vitality brought by a great mix of different people of different ages, different backgrounds, different perspectives, different ways and means — this is the heartbeat of Jacobs’s observations. A truly diverse collective can adapt to anything. The city is a dynamic ecosystem. It depends on the caprice, slack, [[redundancy]], oddness and idiosyncrasy of its inhabitants to respond to the unexpected vicissitudes and opportunities that life presents. | |||
Jacobs observes that diversity and efficiency are, at some level, ''mutually exclusive''. You can’t move with infinite economy ''and'' have a multiplicity of viewpoints. You can’t have everyone housed in homogenous boxes ''and'' cater for every shape and size. You must do one or the other. | |||
That is another profound idea. And so obvious, that it beggars belief no one is harping on about it today. You ''can’t'' homogenise, economise, compartmentalise, rationalise, standardise ''and'' embrace caprice, idiosyncrasy and divergence. The [[high-modernist]] who claims commitment to [[diversity]] — and they all seem to — is ''lying''. | |||
That is not the sort of diversity Jacobs is talking about at all. She is talking about a variety, a serendipitous, redundant, overlapping, scattershot ''clangour'' — it will not always be pretty — that generates all kinds of unexpected opportunities and challenges. ''This'' is the richness of the city. | |||
Jacobs continued to fight the high-modernists throughout the sixties. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was eventually mothballed in the seventies, but not before Jacobs had been arrested for inciting a riot! Not long after, she moved to Toronto. | |||
That Jane Jacobs, and others, laid it all out with such clarity so long ago and it has had so little lasting effect makes you wonder whether we’ll ever get there. We can but box on in hope. | |||
If, like me, you prefer your books on the go, buy with confidence, by the way: Penguin’s 50th anniversary audiobook is beautifully narrated by Donna Rawlins. | If, like me, you prefer your books on the go, buy with confidence, by the way: Penguin’s 50th anniversary audiobook is beautifully narrated by Donna Rawlins. | ||
| Line 15: | Line 77: | ||
*{{author|Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} | *{{author|Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} | ||
*{{author|Donella H. Meadows}}’ {{br|Thinking in Systems}} | *{{author|Donella H. Meadows}}’ {{br|Thinking in Systems}} | ||
*[https://g.co/kgs/DBPBJr New Town Utopia] a British equivalent, about Basildon. | |||
*[[Complexity theory]] | *[[Complexity theory]] | ||
{{Book Club Wednesday|27/1/2021}} | |||
{{c|Systems theory}} | |||
{{ref}} | |||
Latest revision as of 16:41, 5 November 2024
|
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs
Systems thinking 1960s style
Jane Jacobs moved from Scranton, Pennsylvania to Greenwich Village, New York with her sister during the Great Depression. There she found freelance work writing about New York and later joined the staff of Architectural Forum magazine, which must have been the Computer Weekly of its day — a niche specialist publication that found itself unexpectedly at the vanguard of a public debate.
Learning about, and being horrified by, Robert Moses’ grand plans for New York, Jacobs developed a deep scepticism of mid-1950s urban planning policy.
Of Moses, quoth Wikipedia:
“Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid-20th century. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful and influential people in the history of New York City and New York State. The grand scale of his infrastructure projects and his philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States.
Never elected to any office, Moses held various positions throughout his more-than-40-year career. He held as many as 12 titles at once, including New York City Parks Commissioner and chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission. By working closely with New York governor Al Smith early in his career, he became expert in writing laws and navigating and manipulating the workings of state government. He created and led numerous semi-autonomous public authorities, through which he controlled millions of dollars in revenue and directly issued bonds to fund new ventures with little outside input or oversight.”
The order of the day, in a nutshell, was to reorganise communities from the top-down, bulldozing tenements and in their place building integrated, purpose-designed modern communities — known today as “housing projects” — and reengineering transit with bypasses, tunnels, bridges and parkways.
Jacobs rightly saw that this would be a disaster.
Though she had neither a tertiary education nor experience in urban planning her views quickly became popular. By 1958 she had been awarded a Rockefeller grant to study city planning methodology in the US. It took three years and in 1961, she published its result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
It was an excoriating critique, and became instrumental in turning opinion against Moses’ proposed “Mid-Manhattan Expressway”. Had the expressway been completed, it would have destroyed much of the Greenwich Village then frequented by bohemians like the young Bob Dylan.
While superficially counterintuitive, Jacobs’ argument was visionary, pluralistic and brilliant.
Anyone interested in how distributed networks are best organised — or should be allowed to organise themselves — should read this, imaginative magnificent book which anticipates later developments in complexity and systems theory. If you take it with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents and Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems you will have the bones of a grand unifying theory of everything: one that would caution against a patrician reductionism where top-down control is the only way of managing networks of people and mitigating the caprice of unreliable, inconstant individuals.
In a lecture at Harvard’s Urban Design Conference in 1956 Jacobs would say that “unreliability” and “caprice” were features and not bugs:
“The least we can do is to respect — in the deepest sense — strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order”
Jacobs’ contrarian, “bottom-up” thesis is simple: those on the ground generally best understand their own predicament, and are best placed, motivated and incentivised to make appropriate, quick, and proportionate decisions to improve it for themselves. Homo sapiens are naturally adapted to co-operate in unexpected ways if only given the chance and not presented with direct disincentives to doing so, and will go out of their way to do so if incentives run that way.
Counterintuitive observations
Why should this matter to us? Because much modern management theory shares Moses’ disastrous premises: an unrealistic faith in simplistic models, the conviction that human relations are homogeneous, predictable and may be described without loss of fidelity by simplistic models; and that if central authorities do impose such models on a supine population without the will or faculty to resist them, it will work.
Among Jane Jacobs’ thundering observations, which we seem to have forgotten, are these:
Streets are good: Streets, and not buildings, are the veins and arteries of the city. Where streets are clearly demarcated from private space, regularly occupied, of mixed-use, and where street activity is there for all to see — where there are “eyes on the street” belonging not to the authorities but to the community itself (they who are the “natural proprietors of the streets”) the conditions are right for a safe, dynamic and prosperous neighbourhood. Where these conditions are not met — where there are long blocks, deserted sidewalks, little diversity of function and especially where building entrances face away from the streets, as they tend to in housing projects, the security and vibrancy are lost.
Parks are bad: Far from being calming influences, planned parks tend to be magnets for delinquency, crime and antisocial behaviour. The typical high-modernist view has the relationship between parks and streets exactly backwards.
Mixed uses: A mixture of uses, residential and commercial, educational and recreational, together, adds cohesion, and reinforces positive feedback loops. This steadfastly flies in the face of modernist orthodoxy. Businesses open by day and bars by night, ensuring that the street is constantly over-watched by those natural proprietors. Schoolchildren should interact with shopkeepers and publicans. They will, soon enough!
Some dilapidation is good: You need old buildings as much as you need ones: not just fancy old ones, but also humdrum, run-down, or even dilapidated old ones. For some members of the community, they will be all they can afford. If you have mechanisms to allow these people into the community in places they can with their limited means sustain, they have the opportunity for development. If the whole place gentrifies, there will be people who can’t afford to live there.
Homogeneity is bad: The modernist disposition to organise, make efficient and eradicate redundancy and disorganisation in the organic community necessarily prioritises homogeneity and, at the limit, monopoly, and these accentuate fragility.
The city is the people you see
The “city” is comprised of people when and where you can see them, and they can see each other, and not when they’re behind closed doors and, as far as the city dynamic is concerned, out of circulation.
This is a profound, but obvious, observation.
It is hard not to analogise to our modern corporate sufferance: we specialists are penned together in carefully demarcated, siloed, ring-fenced and security-controlled functional sub-teams, away from other units, in separate “housing projects”. Is that optimised for richness, diversity, and agility? It doesn’t feel like it.
Jacobs observes that we naturally seek out humanity, and thrive most the more we have of it. The sight of other people in the street attracts people, and does not, as the modernists suppose, repel them.
What does this tell us about our obsession with secrecy, confidentiality, and proprietary information?
Modern business management, above all else, values scale. Scale afforded by technology, processing power and the amplifying effect of the distributed network. Scale emphasises efficiency and speed and the removal of cost, waste and redundancy: tightening margins, aggregating categories, standardising, commoditising, offshoring, compartmentalising, just-in-time producing and straight-through processing.
These are exactly the dispositions of Le Corbusier, Robert Moses and the brutalist administrators of the post-war period.
Diversity versus efficiency: pick one
Central to Jacobs’ argument is the inestimable, practical value of diversity — not just the cosmetic facsimile it has become today, but real diversity: the essential foundational quality of any vibrant community. The richness and variety of everyday life; the durability and vitality brought by a great mix of different people of different ages, different backgrounds, different perspectives, different ways and means — this is the heartbeat of Jacobs’s observations. A truly diverse collective can adapt to anything. The city is a dynamic ecosystem. It depends on the caprice, slack, redundancy, oddness and idiosyncrasy of its inhabitants to respond to the unexpected vicissitudes and opportunities that life presents.
Jacobs observes that diversity and efficiency are, at some level, mutually exclusive. You can’t move with infinite economy and have a multiplicity of viewpoints. You can’t have everyone housed in homogenous boxes and cater for every shape and size. You must do one or the other.
That is another profound idea. And so obvious, that it beggars belief no one is harping on about it today. You can’t homogenise, economise, compartmentalise, rationalise, standardise and embrace caprice, idiosyncrasy and divergence. The high-modernist who claims commitment to diversity — and they all seem to — is lying.
That is not the sort of diversity Jacobs is talking about at all. She is talking about a variety, a serendipitous, redundant, overlapping, scattershot clangour — it will not always be pretty — that generates all kinds of unexpected opportunities and challenges. This is the richness of the city.
Jacobs continued to fight the high-modernists throughout the sixties. The Lower Manhattan Expressway was eventually mothballed in the seventies, but not before Jacobs had been arrested for inciting a riot! Not long after, she moved to Toronto.
That Jane Jacobs, and others, laid it all out with such clarity so long ago and it has had so little lasting effect makes you wonder whether we’ll ever get there. We can but box on in hope.
If, like me, you prefer your books on the go, buy with confidence, by the way: Penguin’s 50th anniversary audiobook is beautifully narrated by Donna Rawlins.
See also
- Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents
- Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems
- New Town Utopia a British equivalent, about Basildon.
- Complexity theory