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{{a|book review| | {{a|book review|{{image|Jane Jacobs|jpg|Jane Jacobs}}}}{{br|The Death and Life of Great American Cities}}<br>{{author|Jane Jacobs}} | ||
}}{{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. | |||
The | 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|''Seeing Like a State'']], [[Charles Perrow]]’s [[Normal Accidents|''Normal Accidents'']] and [[Donella H. Meadows]]’ [[Thinking in Systems|''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 the same disastrous conditions: an unrealistic faith in simplistic organisational 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. | |||
Of the thundering, plainly right, observations Jacobs made in 1961, and which we seem to have forgotten, are these: | |||
''Streets are good'': Streets, and not buildings, or critically, parks, 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 members themselves (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 and where building entrances face ''away'' from the streets, as they tend to in housing projects, the security and vibrancy is 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, bars by night, ensure that the street is constantly over-watched by those natural proprietors. School children 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 has gentrified, there will 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 a richness, diversity, and agility? It doesn’t really 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]]? | |||
==== Scale uber alles ==== | |||
The very thought that we should leave the great unwashed to sort themselves horrifies the [[high-modernist]]s, of course. Partly because it would leave them with so little to do. And this perspective infuses the prevailing [[dogma]] of modern business that, 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, straight-through processing. These are exactly the dispositions of Le Corbusier, Robert Moses and the brutalist administrators of the post war accord. | |||
==== Diversity ==== | |||
Central to Jacobs’ argument is the inestimable, practical value of ''[[diversity]]'' — not just the cosmetic facsimile it has become today, but ''real'' diversity, an essential foundational quality of any live community. The richness and variety of everyday life; the durability and vitality afforded 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. This collective — as long as it really is diverse — can adapt to anything. The city is an ecosystem. It depends on the caprice, slack, [[redundancy]], oddness, idiosyncrasy and multiple facets to respond to the unexpected vicissitudes, and opportunities, that life presents us. | |||
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 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''. | |||
This is the great, huge irony of the modern [[diversity and inclusion]] agenda: it ''is'' an agenda: it’s so ''homogenous'' — so ''[[legible]]''. We are all expected to wear the same badges, hold the same values, [[virtue signalling|signal the same virtues]], declare ourselves each others’ [[Ally|allies]] as if there is a war on, or we are Stepford wives. | |||
That is not the sort of diversity Jacobs is talking about at all. She is talking about a variety, a serendipitous, redundant, overlapping, scattershot fripperousness that generates all kinds of unexpected opportunities and challenges. ''This'' is the richness of city. | |||
That it was laid out with such clarity so long ago and with so little lasting effect has to make you a little pessimistic as to whether we will ever get there, but we can but battle on 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 29: | Line 64: | ||
*{{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 17:48, 5 June 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.
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 the same disastrous conditions: an unrealistic faith in simplistic organisational 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.
Of the thundering, plainly right, observations Jacobs made in 1961, and which we seem to have forgotten, are these:
Streets are good: Streets, and not buildings, or critically, parks, 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 members themselves (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 and where building entrances face away from the streets, as they tend to in housing projects, the security and vibrancy is 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, bars by night, ensure that the street is constantly over-watched by those natural proprietors. School children 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 has gentrified, there will 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 a richness, diversity, and agility? It doesn’t really 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?
Scale uber alles
The very thought that we should leave the great unwashed to sort themselves horrifies the high-modernists, of course. Partly because it would leave them with so little to do. And this perspective infuses the prevailing dogma of modern business that, 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, straight-through processing. These are exactly the dispositions of Le Corbusier, Robert Moses and the brutalist administrators of the post war accord.
Diversity
Central to Jacobs’ argument is the inestimable, practical value of diversity — not just the cosmetic facsimile it has become today, but real diversity, an essential foundational quality of any live community. The richness and variety of everyday life; the durability and vitality afforded 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. This collective — as long as it really is diverse — can adapt to anything. The city is an ecosystem. It depends on the caprice, slack, redundancy, oddness, idiosyncrasy and multiple facets to respond to the unexpected vicissitudes, and opportunities, that life presents us.
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 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.
This is the great, huge irony of the modern diversity and inclusion agenda: it is an agenda: it’s so homogenous — so legible. We are all expected to wear the same badges, hold the same values, signal the same virtues, declare ourselves each others’ allies as if there is a war on, or we are Stepford wives.
That is not the sort of diversity Jacobs is talking about at all. She is talking about a variety, a serendipitous, redundant, overlapping, scattershot fripperousness that generates all kinds of unexpected opportunities and challenges. This is the richness of city.
That it was laid out with such clarity so long ago and with so little lasting effect has to make you a little pessimistic as to whether we will ever get there, but we can but battle on 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