Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  Jacobs tended to look at history the way she did a cityscape. She scouted around for promising examples of individual phenomena, situations in which city or economic life seemed to have been working, and then sought to understand the processes that organized these data into constructive systems. Large, amorphous categories, particularly those that carried with them guarantees about how people would behave, left her cold. Class, capitalism, the division of labor—in Jacobs’s view these have descriptive but not explanatory power. They are neither the driving forces of history nor the fundamental conundrums of human life. And for her they risk shackling us to preformed narratives that restrict our ability to understand how actual people make and remake the market in everyday life.

  At its core, one might say, Jacobs’s vision is one of markets without capitalism. It’s a theory not of historical development but of always existing possibility.6 Markets are a source not only of alienation but of exchange and contact, not simply building blocks of national productivity but wellsprings of new ideas and self-making in concert with others. She rested her conception of human social life not on the struggle between workers and capitalists or the laws of supply and demand but on the struggle of humans to forge new work from old in a society that favors established interests. Small, young enterprises and their employees, particularly those engaged in unglamorous work producing necessary goods and services that solve everyday problems behind the scenes—industrial adhesives, for instance, or a new kind of window frame—need protection from corrosive concentrations of bureaucratic power, whether corporate or governmental, private or public. And not only the “innovators” we fetishize today. While innovation often solves our pressing problems, Jacobs argues, all kinds of new local work drive our economy. Creative imitation, not innovation, in her words, is the major driver of economic expansion. This, in a way, was as close as she came to utopia, her vision of “power to the people.” The just city and nation is a place where anyone’s creative impulses to “dicker” and improvise and reinvent themselves would be unleashed, where everyone would have the opportunity to make their own “vital little plans.”

  —

  BY THE END OF HER LIFE, Jacobs had begun to think toward her own, unique account of the great transformations of the past several centuries. She even ventured some glimpses of possible futures. “The End of the Plantation Age,” in Part Five, sees Jacobs developing a theory of human history, one she did not have the chance to complete. A companion piece to Dark Age Ahead (2004), the speech finds her leavening the gloom of that book’s dire worries with the prospect of a profound, forward-looking transformation.

  The “Plantation Age” of her title is a long era of human history from which she believes we are only now emerging. For centuries, she says, human effort was organized on the top-down “plantation” model. The term invokes the horrors of slavery and forced labor, of course, but it also includes industrialization, with its armies of workers enduring routinized, “scientifically managed” tasks. Unlike other thinkers, whether radical, centrist, or conservative, she did not see the Industrial Revolution as a fundamental disjuncture in history. To her, the factory was little more than a machine-made plantation, as much an icon of the age as urban renewal, mass suburbs, or the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This era may have produced great wealth—culminating in the relatively shared prosperity of the mid-twentieth-century boom—but it was always a “monoculture” inevitably tending toward stagnation and waste. The plantation mentality used economies of scale and planned results to turn workers into little more than peons—each a potential “trader” betrayed and wasted. It was a form of production for production’s sake that eclipsed the far more vibrant worlds of exchange and everyday innovation found in cities enlivened by trade, with their small enterprises, diverse peoples, and mixtures of face-to-face uses.

  But now, she says, that era might be receding. What’s on the horizon? Jacobs never relished the role of prophet, but at the end of her life she hazarded two related but opposite guesses. One path was what she called, in Dark Age Ahead, “cultural collapse.” Jacobs found evidence of imminent decline in the erosion of family, community, science, education, governance, and professional integrity in North America. She even identified the danger of the housing bubble, just as it was inflating in the early years of the millennium. More than a decade later it’s hard not to remain dismayed. In a time of renewed inequality and recalcitrant structural racism, with lead staining the water of Flint, Michigan, the grim and ongoing exposure of police brutality, and the craven exploits of financial capitalism fresh in so many people’s minds, the “symbiosis” between “guardians” and “traders” Jacobs hoped for appears considerably out of whack. The guardians are asleep, inept, vicious, or on the take, the traders simply gone feral.

  More orthodox thinkers, on the left or right, might consider these outcomes endemic to their usual targets: capitalism or big government or privatization or the welfare state. Jacobs, however, offered a different story, a possible path out of the morass. In that last speech she spied signs of not a Dark Age coming but an “age of human capital.” Elsewhere, in notes for the book she hoped to write—tentatively titled “A Short Biography of the Human Race”—she called it the “second creative age.” Those notes suggest that racism and other plantation-age “concepts of industrial, spatial, and political order” linger as “hangovers” or “anachronisms,” but she also foresaw an emerging possibility that humans might find a way to return, by way of their creative impulses, to an era of revivified people power, when a newfound symbiosis between traders and guardians would push cities back into the business of producing “new work.”

  Jacobs never finished her own new work, and she was, until the end, quite mindful of the possibility that any innovative tendencies could be betrayed by the lure of plantation-style bigness. It’s fitting, though, that in her final speech she would not accept that the future was foreclosed. Her radical pragmatism, in this as in all things, led her to look for the ways people might live in the flow of their own time and, in making do with what they have, also make their world anew.

  Whatever one thinks of her diagnoses and prognostications—and they certainly rely on a robust faith in the essential goodness and industriousness of people—the promise of even a bit “more Jane Jacobs” is surely welcome. Beset as we are by any number of trials, whether it’s the threat of climate change, the dovetailing of globalization and automation, persistent poverty and inequality, the twin perils of terrorism and nationalism, or just misguided urban projects and the creep of gentrification, longtime followers of Jacobs will relish returning to her for fresh problem-solving inspiration. And if a new generation of readers find it galvanizing to discover her bracing, plainspoken talent for revealing the interwoven problems of cities, economies, and morals, we can all take heart knowing that even in her last years she was still pushing on, offering us a new vision of death and life.

  NOTES

  1. See “More Jane, Less Marc,” Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, October 16, 2009, vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/​2009/​10/​more-jane-less-marc.html. Accessed March 7, 2016. Jane Jacobs’s memory, however, received a boost that very same summer when the stretch of Hudson Street where she lived was renamed Jane Jacobs Way.

  2. Jacobs’s vision of the city has sometimes been blamed for the gentrification of neighborhoods like the Village or the Annex. In Death and Life, however, before the term “gentrification” had even been invented, she herself saw that too much neighborhood success resulted in the “self-destruction of diversity,” and offered potential policy solutions, too. In this volume, see “Reason, Emotion, Pressure” and “Time and Change as Neighborhood Allies” for some of her ideas about forestalling gentrification.

  3. For more on Jacobs’s early history and the formation of the ideas that would go into Death and Life, see Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

  4. She did make two significan
t exceptions to her disapproval of government service provision. She saw healthcare and education as guardian functions and therefore fair game for an active government role. See “Efficiency and the Commons” in Part Five.

  5. See Timothy Mennel, “Jane Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and the Kind of Problem a Community Is,” in Max Page and Timothy Mennel, Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago: Planners Press, 2011), 119–28, for further thoughts on Jacobs, the Sixties, and norms.

  6. For an elaboration of this idea, see the work of the philosopher Manuel De Landa, who likens Jacobs to historians like Fernand Braudel who have written about the “meshwork” of early market economies. De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 1997), 25–99.

  * * *

  * See Jane Jacobs, “Systems of Economic Ethics, Part 2,” Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference, 1989, p. 269.

  Jane and Bob Jacobs and their son Jim undertake a renovation of their home at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, circa 1950.

  Jane Jacobs was forty-five years old when she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. By the time she sat down to write her best-known book in the late 1950s, she’d already spent half her life as a journalist, student of economic geography, wartime propagandist, and expert in modern architecture. Although she became a public figure in the 1960s, the story of her writing life begins in the depths of the Great Depression.

  Jane Jacobs (née Butzner) arrived in New York City in 1934 as an “obstreperous” eighteen-year-old writer and sometime poet, intent on seeking her fortune.1 Although the city offered better prospects than her hometown, the declining mining center of Scranton, Pennsylvania, she spent the next four years scrounging for work, taking on odd jobs at factories and offices, and trying to scare up writing gigs wherever she could.

  Her early freelance articles show Jacobs trying on a host of writerly flourishes she would later use to great effect. Quirky, detailed lists, unusually hyphenated words, liberal use of alliteration—all are in full force here. More important, they give us an early glimpse of her future incarnation as an urban and economic thinker. For a series of articles in Vogue magazine, Jacobs painted four literary portraits of the working districts of New York City, which she had discovered during her never-ending job hunt. Fur, leather, diamonds, and flowers may have been the preferred luxuries of Vogue readers, but in her articles (two of which are included here) Jacobs shows them to be much else besides: animators of street scenes, mediums for diverse city livelihoods, the threads that connect makers and distributors and sellers in an economic network. What makes these pieces particularly remarkable is how, even during the lean times of the Depression, she discovered vibrant, small-scale city economies clipping along on their own energies, scenes so different from our shared vision of the 1930s.

  This Depression-era work finds Jacobs inventing a new intellectual vocation, too. The “city naturalist” attentively observes the minute details that make places tick, like the marvelous mess of wires, tunnels, and tubes that rush people, information, electricity, water, and waste around New York. However, she also notices evidence of how things stop ticking. Describing Matinicus Island off the coast of Maine in “Islands the Boats Pass By,” included here, she captures a way of life in mysterious decline. Although the piece is more portrait than analysis, she might have already had an inkling of what was afoot. In the months before her arrival in New York, Jacobs had visited a missionary aunt in Higgins, North Carolina, a tiny impoverished hamlet tucked in the Appalachian Mountains.2 There, much like in Matinicus, as the generations wore on, the residents had begun to lose the traditions and skills that were not connected to their bare-bones subsistence economy. Not only had they forgotten these practices, Jacobs would later argue, but, as if in a miniature Dark Age, they had forgotten what they had forgotten. The suggestion that the inhabitants should build their new church out of masonry, a skill their colonial ancestors had arrived with, was met with incredulity: How would the stacked stones not fall over? According to Jacobs, it took the services of a mason from a nearby city to revive their belief in stone construction. Jacobs’s depiction of Matinicus suggests a community at the beginnings of the same trajectory—unless the enlivening forces of an urban economy intervene, that is.

  After Jacobs settled into her life in New York, she took classes in Columbia University’s Extension program (renamed the School of General Studies in 1947). Between 1938 and 1940 she fed her omnivorous mind with studies in geography, history, law, philosophy, and the physical and natural sciences. It was here that she would first read the writings of historian Henri Pirenne, whose account of the rise of urban culture in medieval Europe would become one of the greatest influences on Jacobs’s ideas about cities, economies, and the possibility of another Dark Ages. Meanwhile, her classes in law gave her the opportunity to write her first book. Published when she was just twenty-five, Constitutional Chaff reveals an early glimpse of her unorthodox mind: The book interprets the U.S. Constitution by compiling the failed alternative proposals made for each and every line of the document at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Unfortunately, due to a bureaucratic foible, the university forced Jacobs out of the Extension program and attempted to reclassify her as a student at Barnard College. When her poor high school grades led the women’s college to reject her “application,” she realized that she had effectively been expelled. This bitter moment planted the seeds of a deep skepticism toward academia and the faulty correlation between credentials and genuine education. In fact, she would go on to refuse every honorary degree presented to her throughout her successful career and write at length about the failures of academia over sixty years later in her final book, Dark Age Ahead.

  If Jacobs’s greatest joys can be detected in her explorations of human life at street level, she made the bulk of her living in this period writing about issues of national concern. When she took a position as a secretary at a metals industry trade journal called The Iron Age in 1941, World War II was already in full swing in Europe, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was on the immediate horizon, even if nobody knew it. Quickly rising from secretary to associate editor, she found herself with some leeway to take on stories of interest. In 1943, she embarked on an investigation into the failure of the national War Production Board to establish factories in Scranton despite shortages of labor and housing elsewhere (see “30,000 Unemployed and 7,000 Empty Houses in Scranton, Neglected City”). The article was the culmination of what was likely Jacobs’s first community organizing effort, a letter-writing campaign that successfully secured war work for Scranton, and the un-bylined story was picked up by more than three hundred newspapers around the country.3 But most of what she wrote was dry reporting for a highly technical audience, and her editor resisted her attempts to broaden the appeal of her articles. By the end of 1943, she was at odds with her boss and out of a job.

  Luckily for Jacobs, the war was hungry for writers. Between 1943 and 1952, she found work in the U.S. government’s propaganda mills, first for the Office of War Information, targeting nonaligned nations during World War II, and later for the State Department, where she contributed to a publication called Amerika directed at the people of the Soviet Union. In both positions, her primary task was to communicate American values through tales of the nation’s history, government, geography, economy, and people. By all accounts Jacobs excelled at her job and believed in the work, but her eccentric, rabble-rousing personality and her growing knowledge of the Soviet Union got her in trouble with the FBI. In 1948, in the midst of the second Red Scare, the bureau opened an investigation into Jacobs and her ostensible communist ties. When interrogated she defended herself eloquently, writing that there is “no virtue in conforming meekly” to the majority beliefs of the day, but government surveillance only ended in 1952, when Jacobs left her post at the State Department.

  As Jacobs herself told the State Department’s loyalty board, her lifelong skepticism toward convention and au
thority was exactly what made her a patriotic American and not a Soviet sympathizer. Her early writing may reveal little of that native skepticism, but her ongoing encounters with the federal government and other callous bureaucracies in the Cold War years—from McCarthyism to urban renewal to the Vietnam War—would eventually lead her to turn her skeptical eye upon America itself.

  NOTES

  1. For more on Jacobs’s childhood as “an obstreperous young girl,” see Genius of Common Sense (Boston: David R. Godine, 2009), an illustrated biography for youth by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch. Although Jacobs wrote poetry regularly in high school and continued to dabble for years afterward, she found her calling as a journalist and nonfiction writer soon after moving to New York.

  2. Jacobs provides a full account of the town under the pseudonym Henry—as in Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady—in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, 124–29. Jacobs argues that such “passive economies,” if they aren’t bypassed altogether, are shaped by one of five powerful forces of urban economies: markets for goods and services; jobs that attract people to the city; transplants of factories or other city work into outlying areas; technology, especially the kind that increases rural productivity; and capital in the form of aid or investment.