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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=== | ||
There is so much that is breathtaking about this book. That its author, Jane Jacobs, had neither tertiary education nor experience in urban planning; that she published it ''sixty years ago'' yet its prescriptions depict uncannily the [[high-modernist]] attitudes that persist today; that Jacobs’ prescription, while superficially counterintuitive, is so visionary, pluralistic and ''brilliant''. Anyone interested in how distributed networks should best be organised —or should be allowed to organise ''themselves'' — should read this, imaginative magnificent book. | There is so much that is breathtaking about this book. That its author, {{author|Jane Jacobs}}, had neither tertiary education nor experience in urban planning; that she published it ''sixty years ago'' yet its prescriptions depict uncannily the [[high-modernist]] attitudes that persist today; that Jacobs’ prescription, while superficially counterintuitive, is so visionary, pluralistic and ''brilliant''. Anyone interested in how distributed networks should best be organised —or should be allowed to organise ''themselves'' — should read this, imaginative magnificent book. | ||
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''. | 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''. | ||