The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Difference between revisions

It resonates with some other minor classics in adjacent fields over the last sixty years which caution against the folly of the [[reductionist]], disposition which sees top-down control as the only way of harnessing the networks and mitigating the caprice of unreliable, inconstant individuals. Of course that's very unreliability and caprice is a feature and not a bug. Contributors to this of this contrary position are impressive: {{author|Adam Smith}} and {{author|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 the likes of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, father of what might have seen as still a good idea at the time, the ''housing project''.  

This contrarian, “bottom-up” thesis is simple: those on the ground generally understand their own predicament better, and are better placed, motivated and incentivised to make appropriate, quick, and proportionate decisions to improve it for themselves; that ''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.