The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs

Systems thinking 1960s style

There is so much that is breathtaking about this book. That its author had neither tertiary education nor any experience in urban planning; that is was published in sixty years ago yet seems to depict uncannily the high-modernist attitudes that James C. Scott skewered forty years later in Seeing Like a State, but which seem to persist today; that its prescription, in is so counterintuitive, visionary, clear and brilliant, and that it is so pluralistic, imaginative and liberal — really liberal as opposed to libtard “liberal”.

It resonates with some other minor classics in adjacent fields over the last sixty years which caution against the folly of modernist, reductionist, disposition which sees top-down control of as the only way of harnessing networks of otherwise unreliable individuals.

The contrary, “bottom-up” thesis is simple: those on the ground generally understand their own predicament better, are better placed, motivated and incentivised to make appropriate decisions to improve it for themselves, and the self-direction that emerges from the aggregation of their micro-decisions can hardly fail to be more effective than the imagined by a public-spirited homunculus sitting in a corner office pulling levers.

Contributors to this of this contrary position are impressive: Adam Smith and Charles Darwin hashed out the basic template, and then a series of brilliant works in the middle of last century, of which Jane Jacobs’ was one of the first, gave these remote principles vivid articulation in specific fields. Jacobs’ was urban planning — wait: bear with me — and she targeted her ire at Robert Moses, father of what might have seen as still a good idea at the time, the housing project. In doing so Jacobs articulates — or at any rate spookily anticipates — complexity theory, systems theory . So read American Cities with Seeing Like a State, Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents and Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems and you will have the bones of a grand unifying theory of everything.

Central to her argument is the inestimable, practical value of diversity — not just the cosmetic virtue-signalling it has become today, but what it actually is, 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.

Before you take me for some unreconstituted dinosaur — which, to be sure, I may well be, but not on this account — let me explain: the prevailing dogma of business today, above all else, is scale. Scale afforded by technology, data-processing power, and the amplifying effect of the distributed network. Scale emphasises efficiency and speed and the elimination or waste and redundancy: tightening margins, aggregating categories, standardising, commoditising, offshoring, compartmentalising, just-in-time producing, straight-through processing. These are exactly the dispositions advance by Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, and the High-Modernists of the new deal. Jacobs makes it stark: at the extremes to which these values inevitably tend, they ae utterly inimical to real diversity.

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 a wallopingly 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 that claims commitment to diversity — and they all seem to be is lying.

This is the great, huge irony of our modernist diversity agenda: it’s so homogenous — so legible. We all wear the same badges, signal the same virtues, declare ourselves each others allies as if we are Stepford wives. That is not what 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.

So, of the thundering, plainly right, observations Jacobs makes are these:

• The streets, and not the buildings, are the vital part of the city, which is largely comprised of people when you can see them. When they’re in their houses, from the city dynamic they’re largely out of circulation;
• 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. If the whole place has gentrified, there will people who can’t afford to live there.

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
• Complexity theory