Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

It is really ridiculous: we literally know more about the processes that go on in the sun than we do about the processes that go on in our cities. Mankind has lived in them for thousands upon thousands of years and we do not really know much about how they work.It is really ridiculous: we literally know more about the processes that go on in the sun than we do about the processes that go on in our cities.

  A few years ago, I became curious about why some cities stagnate economically (which means they stagnate in every other way too), and why some cities go on for extraordinarily long times without stagnating. I became interested in this because in America the stagnating cities, such as Pittsburgh, Detroit and many smaller cities, are a terrible problem. Their problems pile up faster than they can be dealt with.

  London I very much admire. In fact, I am practically awestruck by London, not only for the obvious reasons but because in historic (and probably prehistoric) times London has had a longer period of uninterrupted, self-generating, economic growth than any other city in the world. It has gone on longer without stagnation than Rome or Paris. Study of it, and of how it has generated new economic activities, would pay, not just for Englishmen but for all mankind.

  When I got into this question, I did not know where to begin. I knew that there was a question here, but the customary answers to it are superficial. If you compare them, you find there is no pattern; the answers are not known. I made a hypothesis that a city that is not stagnating economically is a city that is continually casting forth new kinds of economic activity. And it does not matter whether the enterprises are privately owned or publicly owned; it is more fundamental than the arrangement of who controls things and who supplies the money.

  The question arises, why do some cities produce these new things? Why are some cities creative only for a time, and then halt? If you think about these things in the abstract, you get nowhere, or else kid yourself. I decided that perhaps the best way to get a little light on the problem was to read the histories of successful businesses by early historians, especially those that were innovations at the time, in the hope that some pattern of what was important would emerge.

  I found out that there were patterns, and they were completely surprising to me. The dominant pattern that began to emerge was something I had never remotely anticipated. These business histories became awfully tiresome; it was like reading the same three historical novels over and over and over again. The characters wore different clothing and had different accoutrements around them, at different periods, but they were the same old three stories. As these were American business histories, I wondered if this was quite special to us, and decided to try a different place and time. What better place than London, in medieval times? Luckily for me, I read the wonderful account, written at the turn of the century by George Unwin, of the guilds and companies of economic importance in Tudor and Stuart times.*1 There, sure enough, were the same three plots. I looked further afield; Japan, Russia and China seemed to have the same three plots. I have not yet found a fourth. It may very well be there, but I have not found it.

  The strange pattern that I did not expect was that new economic activities come out of the internal economies of cities. Cities are not just great lumps of chaos. They are a form of very intricate, very wonderful order, and they seem like chaos mainly because we do not understand this order nor the processes by which it works. A city has an export economy, by which I mean not the things that it sells across national boundaries, but anything that it sells outside what we in the U.S. call a metropolitan area. If the exports of the city drop off, with an exception which I will come to later, its imports will drop off. If the exports increase, they will increase. There can be ways of evading this for a time (as in Pittsburgh, where exports dropped off so rapidly that even an out-migration of its people and welfare help from the rest of the country could not balance the loss of exports) but they are relatively immaterial. Over the long run, the city’s exports are an iron determinant of the value of its imports. Quite a few of the imports go directly and immediately into making its exports—they are pre-empted imports. In Pittsburgh, imported coal and ore go straight into steel, its big export, and form a large proportion of its imports.

  The internal economy of a well-developed city is very large in comparison with its export and import economy, and it is divided into two parts—the population economy and the feeder economy.*2 We are all familiar with the population economy: i.e., the barbers, the policemen, schools, retail stores—all the things that serve people of the city directly. We may not be so familiar with the feeder economy, which consists of enterprises that provide repairs, parts, goods and services for the export and the population economy. They also serve each other in long chains; the feeder economy is a tremendously important part of any city’s structure.

  In a city’s early days self-generating growth depends almost entirely upon the feeder economy. The population economy at that time is very small and very similar to that of other places. Its feeder economy may be unusual. What happens is that something in either the feeder economy or the population economy becomes an export. For example, Carnaby Street clothing, which was in the population economy of London, is now an export of London. You export to my children, for instance. This is the simplest type of something from the internal economy going into the export economy. I call it “slippage.”*3 Something that was produced for a market within the city has just slipped into supplying people outside. This is a very old historical thing. When scribes in Athens copied treatises to send to the Library in Alexandria, or the engineers of Rome worked out an aqueduct for some city in Iberia, this was a slippage from the internal economy into the export economy. Most of what we call the spread of civilization amounts to slippages from internal economies of cities into their export economies.

  I call the second way in which this movement from the internal economy to the export economy occurs “mutation,” which is a sudden variation. A tiny firm called Lesney Products that started in London after the war was in the feeder economy, making dyes for other London firms that produced lighting fixtures. When they produced a product of their own, the first of the Matchbox toys, they were not producing just for London. The parent work in the feeder economy had a sudden variation added to it, and this went into export. Unwin tells of exactly the same kind of thing happening in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when people in London making brass parts for London merchants began making brass bells for priories outside London. A mutation begins in the internal economy, and adds to itself a very logical other activity which is sold both outside the city and inside it. It arises out of that internal economy.

  The third way that this happens is by “floating,” which starts in the export economy, but only because the city has already developed enough feeders to do this division of labor. A spectacular example is the Ford Motor Company. When Henry Ford began producing motor-cars in Detroit, the only thing he did at first was assembly. Every single, solitary thing was done by feeders in the Detroit internal economy. If they had not existed, the Ford Motor Company could not have started. As time went on, he replaced the things that were manufactured for him by things he manufactured himself.

  Slippage, I believe, is the most important, although mutation has often produced innovations that could not come in any other way. Floating is usually an imitative process. But fundamentally they are all the same in their effect.

  Take a great United States company called National Packaging. How did it arise? It came out of a company that made paper milk bottle tops in Chicago, and was a feeder to the population economy. It added packaging for meat, which was logical, for Chicago is a meat packaging center. Then it sold its packages to people outside Chicago. It moved from the feeder economy into the export economy. As a result the city had a bigger export economy. The import economy of the city grows automatically, and some of its imports have to be pre-empted by the new plant. What is not pre-empted goes into the internal economy, which grows.*4 Something has been removed from it, in
effect, and yet it is bigger than it was before. The chances that this same thing will happen again are not only as great as before, but are increased.

  This, if I am correct, is a very fundamental process of self-generating growth. This is how cities keep producing new reasons for being, right out of their own internal economies. It is like a wonderful reservoir—in effect, two reservoirs. One keeps pumping things into the other but it never diminishes itself by doing it. Instead of diminishing itself, by the very act of pumping, it grows larger, and there is more of the reservoir to go into the other. The larger a city gets and the more various the things in its internal economy get to be, the more rapidly and the more various are the things coming and going round and round….What we call faults of cities are really bringing problems to a head where they can be solved.

  Every kind of problem comes to a head in cities. The problem of disease: that was just the same in the country as in cities in one way but it came to a head in cities because there epidemics could affect so many people, travel so swiftly and so on, so that is where it had so urgently to be solved. Air and water pollution, transportation, or even any of our social problems, are not as difficult to solve as those that were solved in overcoming epidemics in cities. If we look at problems in this way, we can see that they are opportunities for cities. A city that begins actually solving, not evading, the air pollution problem, will begin to export devices for controlling air pollution in other cities that have not managed to solve this for their own internal economy.

  So far from our denigrating cities because of the problems they create, we should recognize that these problems are opportunities. What we call faults of cities are really bringing problems to a head where they can be solved. The only terrible thing is when cities fall down on the job that only cities can do, and stop solving these problems within their own internal economies and then exporting their solutions to other places. A great deal of the notion that is so current in planning, that large numbers of people collecting in one place are unwholesome, should be discouraged. The countries that have these great cities have made the most progress at many times. Countries that are mainly villages have not. Life keeps casting up new problems, and the cities have been, and certainly will continue to be, the places where they can be solved.*5

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  *1 George Unwin (1870–1925) was a British economic historian. Jacobs is referring to Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904), which rested its account of the period’s development on the division between traders and industrialists, not the conflict between workers and capitalists.

  *2 In The Economy of Cities, Jacobs refers to these two parts more often as “consumers’ goods and services” and “producers’ goods and services,” respectively.

  *3 Although similar concepts regarding how local enterprises become exports appear in The Economy of Cities, the terms slippage, mutation, and floating do not. Jacobs does, however, use mutants as a kind of shorthand in The Question of Separatism to avoid the lengthy explanation included here. In short, she says, “Mutants are the most important form of division in economic life….Existing enterprises are often open to new ideas, but most innovations take place in small, new companies” (68).

  *4 What Jacobs omits from this early account of the economic processes of cities is her concept of “import replacement,” in which cities replace former imports with improvised local production. A description of the process is described briefly in “Strategies for Helping Cities,” in this volume.

  *5 Jacobs’s argument for viewing cities as the vanguards of both problems and problem-solving forms a bridge between Death and Life and The Economy of Cities, appearing in both the final chapter of the former, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” and chapter 3 of the latter, “The Valuable Inefficiencies and Impracticalities of Cities.”

  On Civil Disobedience

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  CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 1, 1967, UNPUBLISHED

  An act of civil disobedience is justified—in fact becomes necessary—when an individual makes the following judgments: his government is behaving wickedly or stupidly beyond the bounds of what he perceives as tolerable; dissent, having been earnestly tried, has proved of no avail; selective resistance to the law is preferable to various slyer or more violent alternatives.

  These are subjective judgments, as all decisions based on conscience must be subjective. If war is an extension of diplomacy, civil disobedience is an extension of self-government.*1

  Vietnam demands disobedience. However plausible or implausible our presence there may have been, however rational or irrational for us to have tried to “fight Communism” there, the fact is that we lost. We defeated neither the Viet Cong nor, subsequently, Hanoi, sufficiently rapidly and with sufficient Vietnamese support to permit us to proceed with effective political and economic programs; our chances of doing so are gone.

  Having lost the war, we have proceeded for the past two and a half years to engage instead in an enterprise sicker and uglier than war itself: an enterprise of slaughtering, starving, destroying and uprooting, to no purpose except to postpone acknowledging failure. This is now the only point of our presence in Vietnam. Dissent has clearly been useless in deterring this monstrous exercise.

  Because the whole enterprise feeds directly and insatiably upon the bodies of our own young men, as well as upon Vietnamese, it is directly vulnerable to acts of resistance against the draft. The burden of resistance by disobedience thus falls disproportionately upon young men for a wholly practical reason. But practical disobedience is not limited to draft law resistance; we have yet to see what its limits are: they will be determined only by the ingenuity with which people discover ways to interfere concretely in the schemes of the authorities.

  To be sure, not all civil disobedience consists of practical obstruction. Some is symbolic. Practical acts like draft resistance begin as symbolic acts of resistance; there is overlapping. The uttermost limit of symbolic resistance to the law is death, as in the cases of Buddhist monks and others who have set themselves afire or as in some instances of fasting.*2

  Merely by happening, civil disobedience affirms that outside the corridors of power are men and women who make judgments, possess courage, form intentions, captain their souls, and act on their own. To those who habitually (often unconsciously) regard most other people as objects to be manipulated or ignored, the evidence of self-propelling integrity out there seems to translate to anarchy, hence is appalling. That, I think, is precisely why innocuous acts of symbolic disobedience—crossing a line at the Pentagon, say—are described as loathsome and why the perpetrators of acts so innocuous are beaten so brutally.*3Merely by happening, civil disobedience affirms that outside the corridors of power are men and women who make judgments, possess courage, form intentions, captain their souls, and act on their own.

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  *1 With this phrase, Jacobs references Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), a Prussian general and writer on military matters. Known for his realist bent, his contention in the posthumously published On War (1832) that war is the continuation of politics by other means is his most famous contribution to the theory of warfare.

  *2 In June 1963 in Saigon, South Vietnam, a Buddhist monk, Quang Duc, burned himself to death to protest the American-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem, which persecuted Buddhists. Over the next few months several other monks in South Vietnam followed suit. In the coming years a handful of Americans would immolate themselves to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, most famously a Quaker named Norman Morrison, who in 1965 set himself afire outside the Pentagon just under the office window of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The tactic lives on in our time, too, as in the case of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation in late 2010 was widely heralded as having touched off the Arab Spring.

  *3 This was the famous March on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. Jacobs was arrested, along with 650 others.r />
  Strategies for Helping Cities

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  THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, SEPTEMBER 1969*1

  Americans, at present, use two national strategies that are presumed to help cities. One, which is impartial, is to dispense federal grants to them, either directly or through the states, for specified physical and social programs. The other is to award war and space contracts to enterprises in this or that locality, frequently a city; while this is a byproduct of other purposes, the contracts are regarded in recipient cities as aids to their economies and are highly valued for just this reason. I propose to question, from the point of view of cities’ growth mechanisms, both these approaches and to suggest another strategy.If [cities] do not maintain self-generating economies, they will ultimately stagnate and decline.

  The overwhelming fact about cities is that if they do not maintain self-generating economies, they will ultimately stagnate and decline. This is not true of rural areas or towns. New export work is often bestowed upon towns by enterprises that have transplanted their work out of cities. Rural areas prosper when their products are directly drawn upon by growing city markets and their productivity increased by city-created products and technologies. But, as for cities—even when a city receives a transplanted factory or office, the spin-off is from another city and has been “earned” by the growth of the receiving city’s market or its array of input items, usually both. Rural technologies do not provide answers to unsolved practical problems in cities, nor does any city prosper and grow because of the markets provided by rural hinterlands. Cities, individually, must generate their own economic bases; and cities, taken collectively, must generate the innovations that make developing economies possible.