Vital Little Plans

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by Jane Jacobs


  Readers tend to cherish Jacobs for a series of scenes from this period: Death and Life’s opening “attack on current city planning and rebuilding”; the “eyes on the street” that make cities safe; her four “generators of city diversity” (density, mixed uses, short blocks, and cheap old buildings); and of course the much-beloved “sidewalk ballet.” But this volume shows that the episodes and ideas for which she is still best remembered are the prelude to a much greater body of work. She spent the rest of her long life, in six other books, dramatically expanding the ideas she had debuted in Death and Life. In the process she forged a unique take on the interrelated life of cities, economies, and morality, one that readers can watch evolve in the pages of Vital Little Plans.

  Much of that work was jumpstarted by another of her unique observations, one that is sometimes overlooked. What planners viewed as chaos she had come to see as a “complex and highly developed form of order.” The city, she surmised at the close of Death and Life, was an always-unfolding problem in handling this “organized complexity.” Rather than a simple two-variable problem as in the physical sciences or a million-variable problem of statistics, Jacobs saw the city as something akin to an ecosystem with many moving parts, each with its own relationship to the others. This idea would become a touchstone of her later work, informing all her investigations of economic and social life, but it had its roots in her earliest interests in the workings of cities at the micro scale.

  In fact, readers of Vital Little Plans will discover that she had been on the trail of this idea from the very beginning of her career. Her earliest writings for Vogue and other magazines, collected in Part One, may appear insubstantial at first, but linger a bit and they shed the guise of conventional magazine reportage to come alive as limpid little gems of close noticing. In “Caution, Men Working,” for instance, she investigates the manhole landscape of Manhattan, uncovering the vast networks of underground “spaghetti” beneath the city streets. The essay gives us the indelible image of Jacobs, “the city naturalist,” standing at Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue feeling the mail shunting by in pneumatic tubes under her feet at thirty miles an hour. Like the other 1930s pieces collected here—on the diamond trade and the flower market—it reveals her setting out to find clues to the way individual elements of her surroundings are linked by larger processes hiding in plain sight.

  What we are seeing in these pieces is the original spark for her trademark inductive method and her discovery of the city’s “organized complexity.” She follows anecdotes and observations up from the street, scale by scale, to discover the systems that make them go. Later she would call such bits and pieces of data “fractals,” renditions of a broader pattern in miniature. At the center of these stories are the relationships within particular industries; each florist and jewel merchant is a node in the self-inventing, self-organizing network of the city. It’s a first glimpse of what, two decades later, in her celebrated essay “Downtown Is for People” (included here) she’d call “the small specialized enterprise,” strung in a web of interdependencies with other diverse yet complementary undertakings. Imagine Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker city reporter, turned loose in the city to find odd occupations rather than odd characters. Where Mitchell discovered solemn urban nocturnes and disappearing ways of life, Jacobs found interlinked economic niches, messy meshes of city work and trade giving rise to cosmopolitan verve and bustle.

  Jacobs’s long-standing curiosities were brought to a head in the decades after the publication of Death and Life, when, like so many others, she wondered why cities and nations in the West were in decline. She had shown that modern planning schemes were misguided attempts to revive city life. But she felt that something deeper, something more pervasive and odious, was afoot in these years. What had gone wrong? In true Jacobs fashion, she flipped the question on its head. The quandary was not why cities stagnated but why they grew in the first place. Poverty has no causes, she believed; only prosperity has causes. Figure out how economic growth worked, and the causes of the era’s problems would become clear.

  Her essays and speeches from the 1960s to the 1980s see her returning to the scenes and concepts that informed Death and Life—she was often asked to “play the hits”—but always with an eye to asking the broader questions she pursued in her two major works of the period: The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). Across Parts Three and Four of this volume, “How New Work Begins” and “The Ecology of Cities,” readers will find Jacobs distilling the chief lessons of her years spent thinking about city economies. She considered these ideas the most important of her career, and near the end of her life she returned to them in Uncovering the Economy, a book she hoped would fully explain her vision. She never finished it, but the opening section of that book, published here for the first time (in Part Five) reveals her final understanding of how economic growth unfolds. In short, Jacobs argues that healthy cities are where new work springs up. Their dense fabric of interdependencies incubates economic expansion and innovation at large. Cultivating vibrant urban centers with small, diverse commercial and industrial enterprises is the linchpin of any meaningful strategy to combat decline.

  But how to actually do this on the ground, in existing cities? Little seemed to be working. Like many of the so-called free market advocates, those devotees of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman who rose to public prominence in the wake of the economic downturn of the 1970s, Jacobs believed in the self-organizing capacities of economic life. “Organized complexity” could produce order without orders from above. She was also dubious about the forms of aid offered by various national or international plans for economic development—the War on Poverty, World Bank lending programs, massive federal spending on the defense industry—seeing them as just more prescriptive dictates unleashed from on high, sure to deaden urban economies. But unlike the “neoliberals” whose market fundamentalism has, until recently, dominated public life in the United States, she understood how these strategies tended to plow subsidies to already entrenched interests. In that sense, she saw a more active role for government as what she called a “third force” in the market, ready to protect young enterprises from established players. Instead of obsessing over stabilizing the business cycle, she advocated for policies that would enable self-organizing networks of small producers to solve problems in new ways and overturn the socioeconomic status quo (see “The Real Problem of Cities,” included in Part Three).

  Jacobs’s ideas went largely unheeded in the halls of power, but they led her to think more deeply about the classic tussle between commerce and government. Cities, she told an audience of Amsterdammers in 1984, lived or died by the “web of trust” between people in their everyday working lives (see “The Responsibilities of Cities” in Part Four). In order to preserve the open-ended possibility inherent in vital cities, societies had to recognize that this trust depended on a system of morality—she came to call it the “commercial moral syndrome”—and carefully delineate its relations with government and other watchdogs, which were guided by a different, opposed set of morals, the “guardian syndrome.” As she says in her 1992 book Systems of Survival (and here in “Two Ways to Live”), guardians value loyalty, tradition, and the right to use deception and force, while those who work under the “commercial syndrome” prize honesty, novelty, and collaboration with “strangers and aliens.” These syndromes, Jacobs argues, govern society at every level, from public policy to individual decision-making. Not all businesspeople are honest, nor are all police officers loyal, but to violate these tenets—or worse yet, mix them in a “moral hybrid”—is to court disaster.

  While she thought government should intervene in the market as a nimble regulator, she also believed it was perverse for it to engage in commerce and industry itself.4 Given that much public policy by the 1980s and ’90s—particularly in cities—was carried out by way of public-private partnership, it’s no surprise that she found the prospects for vibr
ant city growth in these years wanting. What was lacking, she argued, was a proper vision of the “symbiotic” relations between the two “moral syndromes.” They had to remain separate but mutually beneficial. To her, that balancing act was the very “art of civilization” that we all negotiate in our everyday public lives.*

  Beyond the lifelong quandaries she pursued in her books, Vital Little Plans reveals that Jacobs had a host of incisive things to say about issues she’s not often remembered for. In “Metropolitan Government” she delivers one of the first popular exposés of the “cross-purpose jackstraw heap of local sovereignties” that continue to hamstring cities today. “The Sparrow Principle” sees her thinking aloud about the linked histories of imperialism and globalization. Elsewhere in this volume she takes on any number of topics that still resonate: civil disobedience and the dynamics of social movements, the perennial predicament in public finance of ample “money for building things” and little “money for running things,” the future of suburbs and skyscrapers, the politics of cycling in the city, the coming boom in urban agriculture, the trouble with zoning, and many more besides, including feminism, environmentalism, and immigration, not to mention the gentrification troubles so vexing to city lovers today.

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  THERE IS A MUCH-LOVED photograph of Jane Jacobs sitting in jail, awaiting booking. She is side by side with the writer Susan Sontag, who looks characteristically defiant. Jacobs appears calmer, and a bit world-weary, as if she were barely enduring the regular idiocy of bureaucratic authority. They ended up there, along with more than 250 other demonstrators, after an antiwar protest at New York’s Whitehall draft induction center in December of 1967. The picture puts her at the heart of her times—it’s a snapshot from our collective idea of “the Sixties.” And it’s all the more poignant when we know what is on the horizon: A year later the Vietnam War would bring to a boiling point the frustrations Jacobs first felt at the onslaught of modern planning a decade before and push her family to flee the United States for Canada.

  Jane Jacobs sits in a jail cell next to Susan Sontag after being arrested during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at an armed forces induction center in New York, 1967. They were arrested alongside more than 250 others, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsberg.

  Death and Life remains a great predictor of the era’s upheaval, one of the first in that remarkable early Sixties run of seismic books—Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man—that would start to rearrange the minds of a whole generation. Like so many writers and thinkers in those years, she made her name skewering received wisdoms. By the end of the decade, when she found herself sitting with Sontag in central booking, her distress with New York and America had reached a tipping point. In 1970 she would find herself, in “The Real Problem of Cities,” endorsing battles against urban freeway construction with that trusty Sixties slogan, “Power to the People!”

  But look again and the overall picture becomes murkier. For all her disgust with the abuse of power, incandescently apparent in “On Civil Disobedience” in Part Three, her intellectual work sits uneasily next to the radical thinkers of the moment like Sontag and Fanon or Baldwin and Marcuse or Norman Mailer or Shulamith Firestone or Michel Foucault. While others were exposing hierarchies and celebrating the seditious rush of excess, making strange the normal and questioning the given order of things, Jacobs set her sights on revealing the beauty and necessity of underlying norms. Her work is cousin to critical theory and social history and the other radical visions of the era, but Jacobs was ultimately working to reinvent the principles by which we understand urban and economic life. She was not afraid to shatter settled thought, but she was set on fitting the shards back together, too, with ideas some of those other Sixties icons would have found altogether bourgeois.5

  Her politics, like her urbanism, tended toward the pragmatic. She distrusted most visions of utopia. For her, the rallying cry of the 1968 Paris general strikes—“Under the paving stones, the beach!”—wasn’t likely to inspire. Beneath the city streets, she might have retorted, was nothing more than the dirt to which we will all return. Another world isn’t possible, certainly not if it’s some eden of plenty and ease, reachable only by revolution or the utopian imagination. A better world is here already, in the streets themselves, waiting to be discovered and brought forth by all of us, not just a radical vanguard.

  Jacobs looked askance at any situation in which people were spoken for, rather than allowed to speak for themselves. Like many who came of age during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, she had watched the authoritarian drift of the Soviet Union with dismay and feared that orders, violence, and censorship from on high were endemic to utopian plans of that sort. She was even wary about the social movements she joined and led and for which she is now often remembered and revered. In “The Responsibilities of Cities,” she worries that too often, popular movements “have to claim that they speak for people who, in fact, have never given them a mandate to do so.” Protest was a necessary hassle—and she always resented the way campaigns to stop what she called “absurd” plans disrupted her writing life—but the very need for demonstrations, she thought, was a symptom of institutional bankruptcy.

  The truth is that Jacobs offers little comfort to established political traditions, whether radical or conservative, or to official scholarly pursuits. She inspires and frustrates in equal measure. The left loves her community rabble-rousing and her democratic spirit but distrusts her faith in the private sector; the right thinks her a closeted ally, keen to promote privatization, but ignores her concessions to government. Mainstream economists have assimilated her account of the added benefits of competitive, diverse clusters of industries to economic productivity—“Jacobs externalities,” they call them—but they also fault her for her willingness to flout (some say misinterpret) long-established economic principles and practices, like supply and demand or statistics-driven analysis. Architects and planners have taken her critiques to heart but sometimes feel that she threw the baby of planning out with the bathwater of modernist city building. Historians and sociologists appreciate her close attention to the details of everyday city life, but fault her for a failure to understand the way that the social power of race, class, and gender has shaped both public policy and private markets. Stratified social relations, they argue, will always undermine the self-organizing networks Jacobs hoped to uncover and nurture.

  Jacobs delighted in irking all the specialists and ideologues, from planners and sociologists to libertarians and Marxists. She was wary of traditions of political thought and suspicious of rigid modes of disciplinary academic knowledge production. Despite her interest in the systems by which life organizes itself, she nevertheless kept systems of organized thought at arm’s length. As a result her work often feels sui generis, crafted from her various enthusiasms, her eye for details and processes, and her wide-ranging, unstructured reading in history, philosophy, economics, science, and literature. One thing, however, underpinned all her work: a basic faith that the market is not inherently exploitative. Inequality and economic crises are problems to be solved. They are bugs, not features, of capitalism.

  In fact, reading Jacobs, some may feel that the last three hundred years never quite happened. Where, some might ask, in her world of streets and sidewalks and plucky small firms, is the rise of capitalism and its twin products, great wealth and great inequality? Where is industrialization, with its steam engines and railroads and smokestacks plunging the day into sooty dark? Where is the rise and fall of slavery, the formation of the working class, the commodification of human labor, the power of race to immiserate whole classes of people due to the color of their skin? Where are finance and credit as instruments of accumulation or the political and legal fabricatio
n of the corporation as an entity akin to a person? Where is the great consolidating sweep of modernity, rushing ahead to forge an economy of great power and violence, an economy in which, just as Jacobs was coming of age, industrial unions were facing off against bosses over the conditions of work in the great assembly-line factories? And what about the world-altering forces that shaped the troubled cities she surveyed during her own career: deindustrialization and the mobility of capital, globalization, and outsourcing?

  Of course, many of these great processes were present in her work. She had read Karl Marx and Adam Smith; she wrote about Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, General Motors, and the rise of Detroit. She told the story of Eastman Kodak and Xerox in the making and unmaking of industrial Rochester; she analyzed the way new technologies could devastate whole regions and “make people redundant.” But these case studies never quite formed up on the page in any of the usual historical narratives of industrial growth or inequality in the modern age. In fact, Jacobs favored an ahistorical take on economies, looking for principles that stretched across all of human history. Many of her models, for instance, were drawn from antiquity or the Middle Ages. As sources of telling patterns she favored the digs at prehistoric Çatal Hüyük in what is today Turkey, or the story of ancient Rome, or the rise of the medieval trading towns scattered along the rim of the emerging Atlantic world. And when it came to the big factory cities of the past two centuries she looked for inspiration in what she called the “unaverage clues” offered by places where small firms rather than giant assembly plants predominated: Birmingham not Manchester, New York not Detroit.

 

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