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 liberal — really liberal as opposed to libtard liberal — pluralistic and imaginative.
It resonates with a series of other great books in adjacent fields over the last sixty years all of whom caution against executive, top-down direction networks of autonomous individuals who are better placed, motivated and incentivised to make executive decisions for themselves. Jacobs was there first, and she if she didn’t articulate complexity theory, systems theory then she anticipated it with spooky, eerie accuracy. 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.
Half a century before it became the fashionable pose it is today, diversity, and the richness and variety of everyday life, are the heartbeat of Jacobs’s observations. Real and not just cosmetic diversity, of income, occupation, outlook, stage in life. Jacobs observes that diversity and efficiency are, at some level, mutually exclusive. 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. 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 serendiptious, 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.