by Jane Jacobs
Poor districts of a city that persistently fail to generate enterprises of their own, originated by their own people, remain interminably stunted economically, and socially stunted as well.
Although ethnic or immigrant economic ghettos often seem hopeless, they are not inherently devoid of economic opportunities. Their own cultural peculiarities provide some opportunities, the most obvious being ethnic food stores and restaurants. Clothing, decorative, and entertainment preferences of their own people present other ready-made opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs. So does preservation, production and promotion of ethnic crafts, whether locally made or imported from the home country, and like ethnic restaurants and entertainment, these can appeal to the city at large. Ethnic communities often contain skilled people, women as well as men, whose skills find no market among large employers but could in the ghetto itself.
Here let us stop and think a moment about underground economies. Even in advanced nations it is becoming hard to tell just how large an economy is, statistically, because the official figures omit so many barter arrangements and underground enterprises. And in some Third World cities, such as Lima for instance, the underground economy is now believed to account for as much as sixty percent of production and two out of three jobs.
Underground economies are by definition illegal, but for the most part not because their production is harmful. On the contrary, it fills real and pressing needs for goods and services on the one hand, and for jobs and incomes on the other. The illegalities are evasions of taxes, and avoidance of licenses and the demands of bureaucracies. It is all very well to say these illegalities are wrong, but the hard fact is that if firms in the underground economy were not operating illegally, many would not be operating at all. They get by only by cutting corners. The result of effectively clamping down on them is not necessarily larger tax yields, but rather greater poverty and more idleness.
I am not advocating that we should turn a blind eye to tax evasion or other illegalities. The notion that operating outside the law is ethically acceptable is a terribly dangerous notion. But what I would suggest is that we seriously consider exempting young and small enterprises from the usual burdens of taxation, and perhaps their workers as well, which would lower their wages without lowering their incomes commensurately, and hence lower costs. By analogy, we do not expect our babies and young children to take on the household chores they will assume when they are older, stronger and more experienced. We realize that their first job is to develop, learn, and get a good foothold in life; if they accomplish that, they can pull their weight later.
This might be a desirable way of regarding young and small city enterprises generally, at the time they are getting a start. In persistently poor and stunted economic ghettos, I suggest that such a policy would not only be desirable, but may be absolutely necessary. These ghettos, in a way, are like little pieces of Third World cities lodged within more advanced economies.
However, it is of course impossible for cities to experiment with such policies, as long as municipalities have so little control over the taxation that affects their own economies. Perhaps it is worth remembering that medieval cities, which had so little in comparison with modern cities, and yet were astonishingly fertile and creative, had at least one thing our modern cities have typically all but lost. They had a right called “farming their own taxes.”*5 That right was so important to them that it was usually part and parcel of a city charter, hard-won from feudal authorities. Maybe it is almost as important for modern cities as well.
To get back to ethnic economic ghettos, of course their economic deficiencies are intertwined with social problems. I have no easy answers to difficulties associated with discrimination, segregation, and cultural conflicts. However, the experience of my own city, Toronto, may be suggestive.
For historic reasons, Canada never adopted the ideal of the melting pot for immigrants. This is one of many ways in which Canada differs profoundly from the United States. The Canadian ideal is expressed metaphorically as the mosaic, the idea being that each piece of the mosaic helps compose the overall picture, but each piece nevertheless has an identity of its own.*6
As a city, Toronto has worked hard and ingeniously to give substance to this concept, as torrents of migrants from Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Europe—especially, of course, the poorer parts of Europe—have poured in during the past generation. The city government, and many other city institutions, continually celebrate the ethnic differences among the citizens, and tirelessly emphasize that this diversity is a source of social and economic richness. Many of the ingenious ways of doing this have been thought up by immigrants themselves, and then have been supported and encouraged. The provincial government, which has its capital in Toronto, has followed suit through its Ministry of Multiculturalism. In the schools, special efforts are made—all of them experimental and some controversial—to assure children who are immigrants themselves, or whose parents are immigrants, that their identities are valued and the languages and ways of their parents are respected. When I became a Canadian citizen, the immigration judge who examined me, and who had been an immigrant herself, told me that she always speaks seriously to the children of immigrant families obtaining citizenship, about how brave their parents were to come to a new country, and how valuable the language, the memories, and the customs are that they brought along with them.
As far as I can see, assimilation of immigrants into Toronto’s life and its ways occurs at much the same rate as assimilation into the American melting pot, if anything faster, but without the institutionalized assaults on individual and group self-respect or on children’s respect for their parents that the ideal of the melting pot so often imposes. I am convinced that in Toronto we have a much happier city than we would without our ingenuity at celebrating cultural differences, and that bigotry, resentments, feelings of mutual fear, feelings of inferiority, and conflict, have been greatly minimized. I am also convinced that this is no small thing.
As cities have grown in population, scale and complexity, central municipal governments have been expanded to cope with changes. Along with this has gone increasing national centralization of governments, removing powers and responsibilities into still remoter and higher realms. No wonder so many city people feel—or act as if they feel—powerless to affect their environments. Those who protect policies or try to shape governmental decisions through popular movements have to claim that they speak for people who, in fact, have never given them a mandate to do so. There is no way to give such mandates. That is a great weakness and handicap of popular action groups, and it can be a great danger as well if self-appointed leaders use their powers unscrupulously or have devious reasons for building their power. Yet a vacuum of caring is even worse. The rise and proliferation of informal action groups, and sometimes their desperation as well, tell us of serious institutional failure. We get the same message, delivered in a different way, when city people are discouraged about the problems of their neighborhoods, to the point of apathy.Enormous fields of political, social and governmental invention and evolution lie unexplored, untried and waiting, right within cities themselves.
I suggest that we need to experiment with decentralization of government within cities.*7 That task is not the same as merely copying small town or village governments within a city. The potential pitfalls are different. The relationships of city districts with the municipality as a whole, and with each other, are inherently complex. Which responsibilities are suitable for district or neighborhood control, and which are not, cannot be worked out abstractly but only through experiment and experience. Thus enormous fields of political, social and governmental invention and evolution lie unexplored, untried and waiting, right within cities themselves. Modern cities, I think, need to be fully as inventive in their own fashions as the little medieval cities were in theirs when they accomplished the amazing and creative feat of substituting city ways for feudal ways.
Logically, it might seem th
at the best way to go about experimental decentralization would be to decentralize this and that specific municipal government function, starting with those that have been major targets of popular dissatisfaction, and then keep adding still more decentralized functions. For example, when planning decisions became the major issues rounding citizen protest and anger, my own city, Toronto, proceeded to decentralize parts of its Department of Planning into neighborhood offices, more responsible to localities than they previously had been, and more responsive to local needs and wishes. This has been working for about a decade and has proved to be a good move, both from the viewpoint of localities and the viewpoint of the central municipality.
Indeed, that decentralization worked so well, that portions of the buildings department were decentralized so that householders planning structural, electrical, plumbing or other renovations, or those wishing to build small additions to their homes, could deal with an office geographically more convenient to them than the central office, and at times more convenient to them, in the evenings. The officials in these offices, rather than concentrating merely on approvals or disapprovals of plans, and on inspection of finished work, also became very helpful at explaining what corrections were needed and why, and suggesting how they could be made. In sum, the task was carried out in a fashion more direct, swift and convenient than previously and from what people using this service have told me, they genuinely feel the government is working as their servant.
So far so good, but observe, also, what has gone wrong here. The buildings department service does not correspond geographically at all with the decentralized planning department services. This is what always seems to happen when decentralization occurs by functions. Each function, or department, adopts its own decentralization rationale, different from that of other departments. The sum total is a very confused, fragmented and makeshift form of decentralization. Perhaps this is simply because municipal governments lack a true and serious commitment to decentralization. But perhaps it may be true, as one Canadian philosopher has said, that you can’t decentralize centrally.*8 Whatever the reason, this functional approach to decentralization has customarily petered out in confusion. While I am not suggesting that it is worthless, I think we must be suspicious of it in the absence of some other framework leading to decentralization.
Such a possible framework would be formal district governments, with formal elected procedures. How many city district governments would ultimately be necessary would depend upon the size of a given city itself, and also upon the number of popularly understood, natural communities within the city. Since we must assume that a central city government would also continue to be necessary, with its own election machinery, there is no reason why city districts should all be artificially made the same size geographically, nor is there any reason why all district governments should be instituted at one and the same time. Indeed, there would be advantages in a municipality feeling its way and starting experimentally with a first few.
Sooner or later, a municipality experimenting seriously and successfully with decentralized government will have to decentralize control over some of its taxation powers, and over many of the discretionary uses to which public money can be put. If that thought sounds alarming, it is only because we have become so deplorably accustomed to regarding the ordinary people of cities as if they were too ignorant to know what is good for them, or too irresponsible as not to be trustworthy. We have placed such exaggerated confidence in centralized expertise on housing, social work, education, economic development and many other matters that we have come to make less and less use of ordinary city people’s knowledge about life, common sense, imaginations and financial responsibility. This is not social progress, but the reverse. The pendulum has swung too far.We have placed such exaggerated confidence in centralized expertise on housing, social work, education, economic development and many other matters that we have come to make less and less use of ordinary city people’s knowledge.
Centralized expertise means standardized solutions to city problems. Standardized solutions, and the programs that result from them, are seldom or never really the best that could be done in any specific location. They are very cumbersome, as well, and inherently sluggish at responding to changing conditions or to newly emerging needs or newly emerging possibilities. Worst of all, standardized answers and programs stifle localized ingenuities, and forestall diverse innovation and inventiveness.
In sum, what I have been saying is that the first responsibilities of cities are to themselves. A city has to be responsible for keeping its own economy inventive and prospering. No other entity but the city itself can generate the high birth rate of diverse and small enterprises a healthy city economy endlessly requires. A city has to be responsible for keeping its own society endlessly involved with maintaining a city its own people can feel at home in and proud of. No other entity can do that job. If a city itself fails at solving reasonably well these economic and social problems of its own, the result is bound to be economic and social deterioration of the city.
In other words, the less that cities use their own people’s economic and social capacities for experimenting and inventing, the more decadent and stunted cities become; also, the more surely, in that case, widespread national and international practical problems must pile up, unsolved.
But for that pessimistic side of the coin, there is an optimistic obverse. The more that cities can make of their own ordinary people’s capacities for economic and social invention and experiment, the more useful and valuable cities become—not only for their own people but also for their nations.
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*1 Jacobs uses this phrase in several of her major works, including Death and Life (444). She had long drawn inspiration from Henri Pirenne, a medieval historian who emphasized the role of cities and trade in Europe’s economic and cultural revival after the Dark Ages. In the fallout of the Roman Empire, the feudal system overtook Europe, dividing people into strict categories of noble landholders and serfs who tilled the land. The phrase “city air makes free” refers to the fact that after commerce had transformed Europe’s forts into the vibrant city-states that Jacobs and Pirenne both celebrate, a rural serf could become a citizen—and thus a free person—simply by living inside the city walls for a year without being reclaimed by his or her master.
*2 This personal anecdote would later appear in the opening chapter of Systems of Survival as the “great web of trust” in economic life, the subject of the book.
*3 This became one of Jacobs’s favored analogies to express the value of diverse, local kinds of work. See, for instance, her foreword to the Modern Library edition of Death and Life in this volume. It also foreshadows the biological and ecological analogies of The Nature of Economies.
*4 For an in-depth discussion of “the cult of efficiency,” see “Efficiency and the Commons” in this volume.
*5 In Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs explains the origins of this saying through the etymology of the word farmer: “The Oxford English Dictionary gives, as the first meaning of farmer, ‘one who undertakes the collection of taxes, revenues, etc.’ The word comes from medieval French for a fixed fee. It came to mean, in English, an agriculturalist, because farmers were subject to paying landlords fixed fees. The charter allowing a city to farm its own taxes meant that the city could appoint its own tax collectors, responsible to the city rather than to the royal treasury, the church, or a regional warlord. Cities with these powers sometimes overtook what became major regional or national improvements. For instance, the merchants of London, financing a campaign against piracy, laid the foundations of the English navy” (199–200).
*6 According to Jacobs the mosaic narrative is mostly a result of the longstanding tension between English and French Canada. The federal government used the mosaic narrative to balance the need for national unity with the desire of the Quebecois for independence and cultural distinction. When asked whether she would like Quebec to separate from Canada in a 1970 interview
with the Toronto Star, Jacobs replied, “If I were a Quebecoise, I would probably be a separatist. But since I am an Ontarian, I hope Quebec stays with us. I believe many of Canada’s best national qualities are the direct result of Quebec’s presence and prickliness: e.g., the rein on centralized powers in favor of provincial powers; the image of the mosaic instead of melting pot.”
*7 Her remarks here provide one solution to the unanswered questions put forth by “Metropolitan Government” in this volume. Jacobs also argues for a similar decentralization of municipal government in chapter 21 of Death and Life, “Governing and Planning Districts.”
*8 The Canadian philosopher in question is Jacobs’s friend and collaborator Marshall McLuhan. Jacobs was fond of this saying; it pops up three times in this volume.
Pedaling Together
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SPEECH AT SPOKESPEOPLE: ENERGY PROBE’S CONFERENCE ON BICYCLE ADVOCACY, CITY HALL, TORONTO, APRIL 26–27, 1985
Probably all of us here think that cycling safety is important and do a certain amount of worrying about it. I know I do. Without minimizing that problem, however, I would like to remind you that accidents also happen with stationary bicycles on which people merely pedal around and around for exercise without going anywhere.
In the United States in 1983—the last year for which figures are available—people using mechanical exercising equipment such as stationary bicycles and rowing machines, and treadmills with elastic and pulley stretchers, suffered 18,000 accidents severe enough to require hospital emergency treatment. That was a 75 percent increase over 1981.