Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  One of Energy Probe’s biggest victories was the privatization of Ontario Hydro, the province’s electric utility and an example of what Jacobs called a “monstrous moral hybrid” between commercial and guardian work. In 1984, Energy Probe produced a report recommending a clean break between the utility’s commercial and guardian roles. The government, it said, should open power generation to the private sector while still maintaining ownership of power distribution and a strong regulatory role. Given the criticism plaguing Ontario Hydro during this period for cost overruns and mismanagement, which Jacobs saw as endemic to commercial organizations operated by guardians, Energy Probe’s plan was not seen as a pet project of the political right. In fact, while the ruling right-wing Progressive Conservatives killed the proposal, the two opposition parties, the centrist Liberal Party and the left-leaning New Democratic Party, both endorsed the plan. However, it was not until Premier Mike Harris, a Reagan-style Progressive Conservative, took power in 1995 that privatization began to gain traction. Under the banner of Harris’s Common Sense Revolution, the administration passed the Energy Competition Act in 1998, putting many of Energy Probe’s recommendations into action.

  Meanwhile, in a testament to the complexity of her political beliefs, Jacobs participated in the fight against another arm of the Common Sense Revolution: the amalgamation of Toronto. While working on Cities and the Wealth of Nations and puzzling over Québécois separatism, she had come to believe that urban sovereignty was crucial to accountable and nimble governance. As the cradles of technological innovation and the milch cows of nations, cities had to have the power to control their own destinies. As Jacobs said in a speech in Amsterdam in 1984, included here, “the first responsibilities of cities are to themselves.” In late 1996, these views became more than merely speculative. Under Premier Harris, the Province of Ontario declared its intent to amalgamate the City of Toronto with its five surrounding municipalities, ostensibly looking to reduce the size and cost of government.4 Jacobs joined a group called Citizens for Local Democracy to try to stop the plan, lending her voice to the cause in speeches and testimony (see, for instance, “Against Amalgamation”). However, despite widespread opposition and a referendum in which 76 percent of Metro-area voters rejected the plan, the province forcibly amalgamated the megacity of Toronto on January 1, 1998.

  Where some interpreters saw Jacobs’s writing on ethics, regulation, and governance as a departure from her previous work on cities, she herself saw continuity. As she suggests in her 1992 foreword to the Modern Library edition of Death and Life, included in this section, these new writings complemented her prior insights. Together they can be understood as one unified field of study: “the ecology of cities.” Much as an ecosystem is composed of “physical-chemical-biological processes,” Jacobs observes, a city is composed of “physical-economic-ethical processes.”5 In other words, considering economic or city-building matters in isolation from the social norms that drive them ignores an integral piece of the puzzle of city life. After all, how could our great cities harbor so many strangers in such close proximity without a symbiotic ethical system, a “great web of trust” connecting them?

  NOTES

  1. See endnote in Systems of Survival, 218.

  2. The Energy Probe Research Foundation is a non-governmental environmental policy organization founded in 1980. Besides its campaign to privatize Ontario Hydro, discussed on this page, the organization also took strong stances against nuclear power and foreign aid, and promoted market-based solutions to environmental problems. In 1997, Jacobs cut ties with the organization, which she believed was becoming more dogmatically associated with the political right.

  3. See Richard Carroll Keeley, “An Interview with Jane Jacobs,” Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) 18.

  4. In The Shape of the Suburbs, past Toronto mayor John Sewell argues that the province’s hidden agenda was to dilute the power of Toronto City Council, which regularly jousted with the province on various fronts.

  5. Jacobs’s second Socratic dialogue, The Nature of Economies (2000), offered the most sustained exploration of the analogy of economy as ecology, an idea she’d been pursuing ever since her first forays into the niche economies of Depression-era New York City.

  The Responsibilities of Cities

  * * *

  SPEECH AT THE ROYAL PALACE, AMSTERDAM, SEPTEMBER 12, 1984

  Like others lucky enough to visit Amsterdam, I am enchanted. It is a joy to be in this splendid city, and in this splendid palace.

  Besides enjoying Amsterdam, I revere it because this is one of the European cities of which it was said, “City air makes free.”*1 Amsterdam, like other cities of the Netherlands, played its great part in overcoming feudalism in our ancestral societies, supplanting with its city ways the old social rigidities, economic restrictions and intellectual limitations of feudal life.

  I also revere Amsterdam for its workaday innovations through the centuries. By solving its own practical problems of drainage, dredging, canal construction, ship building, manufacturing, marketing, and by seeking supplies near and far, all in its own practical ways, Amsterdam continually pioneered equipment, methods and knowledge that have immensely benefited the world at large.

  Time and again, warlords and imperialists have coveted this city. Yet here it is, having withstood and outlasted assaults, seizures, tyrannies and alien ambitions. Perhaps even more remarkable, it has survived its own nation’s possession of empire, and loss of empire, without losing or diminishing its own function as an important and up-to-date place of work. The city has guarded the ancient, enduring identity and beauty of its core by resisting schemes and visions which, in our time, might very well have terribly debased or obliterated it. Amsterdam is a great survivor, and I revere its vitality with some of the same awe one feels for the integrity and persistence of life itself.

  Many years ago, the first time I traveled in Europe, I was given what was, for me, a large check, which I took into a bank entirely foreign to me, and handed over to a stranger to send to a bank in New York. With a receipt in my pocket, I walked out unworried and light-hearted, and then thought how extraordinary this was—that I could feel so secure and protected within a great web of trust, of which my own trust was a tiny part. Without that web of trust and its routine safeguards we couldn’t engage in most of the exchanges that make up our economic life and that underpin so many of our other social arrangements as well.*2 The merchants of Amsterdam, along with those of other Netherlands cities, played major parts in evolving this infinitely precious web of trust and inventing its fundamental instruments and techniques.

  I mention these things not to tell you what you already know better than I do. My point, rather, is to remind you of the primacy of cities as creators of technology, trade, arts, markets and cultural practices—creations of city life that, by spreading from cities, become possessions and attributes of national and international life. The nation serves as protector, but cities serve as the creators of so much that a nation protects. In its own small way, this royal palace in which we are gathered symbolizes that very relationship.

  Unfortunately, nowadays we need to be reminded of how profoundly we depend on the peculiar energy and creativity of cities. We have been living through a period when it has been intellectually fashionable to trivialize cities as mere conveniences or social luxuries, or even to despise them as social afflictions.The internationally influential town planning movement has regarded cities much as if they were empty-headed young ladies whose main duties were to see that their nails were clean, their curves properly distributed, and their behavior seemly.

  If one knew nothing more about cities than what one could learn from this country’s city planning proposals and reports, or from the usual conferences about cities’ deficiencies and needs, one would suppose that the chief responsibilities of cities were to move traffic efficiently and provide orderly, regimented housing estates. The internationally i
nfluential town planning movement has regarded cities much as if they were empty-headed young ladies whose main duties were to see that their nails were clean, their curves properly distributed, and their behavior seemly.

  Advocating the dismantling of cities into dispersed New Towns, anti-urbanists argued that modern communications, transportation and electric power generation made cities obsolete and unnecessary. Development economists put their faith not in city economies, but in giant corporations and financial institutions that transcend city economies. The programs undertaken by national and provincial governments have been taken to mean that cities’ social problems can be successfully solved by superior governments and that municipalities are relatively trivial as arms of government and instruments of policy.

  Reasoning of this sort took hold among experts, and much of the public as well, in spite of the reality that the transportation, communications and electric power had been developed in cities and first put to use in them; in spite of the fact that the great corporations and financial institutions had emerged and established themselves in cities before outgrowing those cradles; and in spite of the circumstances that the very wealth supporting national and provincial social programs continued to be overwhelmingly derived from the taxation of city enterprises and city people.

  As we can see in cities that have become alarmingly riddled with crime, purposelessness and idleness, especially among the young, national and provincial programs have not solved the social problems of cities. As we can see, giant corporations are not dependable cornucopias of work and incomes; nor in spite of their immense economic powers are they immensely creative in the face of practical problems of all sorts. For example, when a practical problem, such as acid rain, has become a national and international problem, it means that nobody was coming to effective grips with its causes as they emerged. This is precisely the sort of very complex problem that emerges first in cities. The problems of pollution are now widespread and intractable precisely because cities have for too long neglected to overcome their own practical problems with toxic wastes, in a way that Amsterdam, in the past, did not neglect to overcome its practical problems of sewage disposal, water supply or epidemic control. These too would be intractable problems if cities had not undertaken to solve them and then disseminated their solutions. Indeed they remain horrendous problems in many a nation that lacks creative cities.

  It is worth remembering that a person of whom nothing more is expected, or indeed really wanted, than dependence and seemly behavior becomes a stunted and unresourceful person, and perhaps frustrated and decadent as well. It is much the same with cities. There is a connection, I suspect, between the fact that as much as ninety percent of a city’s public income today can arrive in the form of grants from superior governments, mostly for pre-ordained purposes, and the fact that cities today have been losing inventiveness at overcoming serious public problems.

  Historically, it has been the nature and glory of cities to be great laboratories of trial, error, experiment and innovation. Historically, this creativity has emerged from populations of ordinary city people, including the people who are born in a given city and those who have migrated to it because of its jobs or its opportunities for people of imagination and ambition. When I use the terms “a creative city,” “an innovative city,” or “a problem-solving city,” what I am actually speaking of, more concretely, is a city where many, many ordinary people can try out their hopes, insights, ambitions, and skills, and make something of them, often enough something unexpected to others and often enough surprising even to themselves.When I use the term “a creative city”…what I am actually speaking of, more concretely, is a city where many, many ordinary people can try out their hopes, insights, ambitions, and skills, and make something of them.

  Since a city’s own economy supports life there, as well as giving scope for people’s inventiveness, it follows that the most basic responsibility of a city is to be a place where it is natural and possible for ordinary people to engage in economic experiment and innovation.

  As a practical matter, this means a place with a continually high birth rate of small, diverse enterprises. Why small and diverse?

  Both historically and in our own time, any city where the economy becomes highly specialized is a city doomed to stagnate and decline. All its eggs have been put in too few baskets. Ironically, specialized city economies do not keep even their specialties inventive and up-to-date, for lack of new ideas and practices.

  All truly new kinds of goods and services tend to start out in a small way. So do many kinds of work that are merely improvements of goods and services that already exist. Historically, and in our own time too, small enterprises have been more fertile at innovating than already large enterprises. Also, small enterprises, collectively, account for more new jobs than already large enterprises.

  Small enterprises inherently depend on one another for everyday needs. They live by symbiosis, not by relative self-sufficiency. For this reason, to thrive and prosper, small city enterprises must be both numerous and diverse.

  Cities are forever losing their older work. Once an enterprise grows large and well-established, it can successfully move out, or else channel its further expansion into branch plants or branch offices. Indeed, this is one of the great services of cities: to cast up industrial transplants for towns and villages whose people need jobs and incomes and yet can’t generate them as cities can. Cities lose older work for other reasons too, such as obsolescence and competition. It is pointless to repine over losses of older work or to suppose they represent extraordinary misfortune. The losses inexorably happen. In an economically fertile city, young and newer work compensates for losses.

  It is short-sighted to suppose that a city’s exporting enterprises are more important than enterprises producing only goods or services for the city itself. Strictly local enterprises are especially valuable if what they are producing replaces former city imports, or if they are innovative. These frequently become a city’s exporters of the future. There is no way to know in advance how and where valuable economic mutations may arise in a city’s local “gene pools” of work.*3 All we can be sure of is that the greater the numbers of enterprises in a city, and the greater their diversity, the likelier the chances for innovations.

  A city enjoying a high birth rate of diverse small enterprises needs cheap, versatile and diverse working spaces, and not only where they are least visible, as if small, experimental forms of work or struggling enterprises are somehow disreputable or should be decently hidden, like undergarments. After all, the more the people of a city are aware of its economic life, and the more that they can see it is normal and natural for small things to take root in it, the more the economy which exists can serve as an example of what more might be done. City zoning needs rethinking. It has been developed, on the whole, without regard for promoting economic creativity. It seems to me that the actual performances of specific enterprises with respect to such things as noise, generation of traffic and pollution are to the point. Performance standards, rather than zoning categories of uses, would provide incentives for enterprises to overcome noxious problems in order to achieve greater freedom of location.A city enjoying a high birth rate of diverse small enterprises needs cheap, versatile and diverse working spaces.

  Any unnecessary international, national, provincial or city mandated standardizations of goods or services, other than the relatively few really needed for health or safety, are destructive. Many such standardizations merely serve special interests, or have been adopted for the convenience of bureaucracies, or have been short-sightedly invoked in the name of efficiency.*4 They need rethinking. How can city producers undertake differentiations for their local markets if deviations from standards are discouraged or forbidden? And who knows what further ramifications in methods of production, materials or purposes are being doomed?

  Cities can learn from one another about conditions that serve or encourage economic fertility. A number of econom
ic observers have recently been much impressed by the proliferation of symbiotic small firms in the city clusters of northeastern Italy, and by the high quality, inventive, technically sophisticated work they are doing. If I were a city official attempting to promote economic fertility in my own city, I would examine this Italian phenomenon. It might even be worthwhile to promote visits by small entrepreneurs from other European cities to see what ideas they could pick up from the northeastern Italian experience.

  Any type of sales tax on producers’ goods and services discriminates against symbiotic city enterprises. In symbiotic production, the burden of paperwork becomes horrendous, and the sales taxes must be disproportionately financed as a cost during production, in comparison with the same taxes falling on large enterprises capable of supplying many of their everyday needs internally. However, it is impossible for city governments to overcome this form of discrimination against symbiotic city production, as long as municipal governments are helpless with respect to such taxation policies.