Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  WARREN: This is what every original thinker must do. Flounder.

  JACOBS: The one thing I haven’t told you is that in the midst of this confusion I am always tempted to throw everything I have into one of those green garbage bags and get rid of it. I get in such despair sometimes. It is so uncomfortable to be in this confusion, but there are two reasons why I don’t throw it all away. What else would I do then? Also, I’ll always be in this confusion if I don’t work it out. So I don’t throw it away. I just keep on.*13

  WARREN: Sheer Guardian will.

  JACOBS: Well, it’s worse to stop than to keep on. Certain patterns begin to announce themselves. It’s not that I think them up; I’m not consciously thinking about them. Whish! There they are, and that’s exciting.

  WARREN: But it was you who spotted them.

  JACOBS: They were there all the time, but I didn’t spot them until a certain point. I’m very slow and full of trial and error and plodding and I wish I knew some faster, more efficient way to work, but experience hasn’t taught me any.

  WARREN: Would it be fair to say that you have participated in a late twentieth century rethinking of “scientific method”: a resurgence of teleological reasoning, if I may be so bold?

  JACOBS: Actually, I think that what is called the scientific method often works the way I do. You don’t know. By the time you know what you are looking for, you’ve already found it. You can’t know ahead of time what you are going to discover. How can you find out, except by fiddling around?

  WARREN: Yet the one universal feature of the scientific method, no matter where you start, is that you end at: Eureka!

  JACOBS: Yeah, that’s right. You know the man who discovered penicillin. He was propagating various bacteria in Petri dishes and molds got into some of them and killed the bacteria. And that was not what he was looking for. He regarded the ones that were contaminated as worthless. And he put this away for about eighteen years, and then suddenly it struck him—Eureka! The molds are killing bacteria. Hey!

  WARREN: Why do you use the dialogue form in Systems of Survival?

  JACOBS: I started to write the book like my other ones, in essay form, and got bored with that. And I always am carrying on dialogues in my own head. All my life I have had a couple of imaginary companions: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Since I was a little girl I’ve been carrying on dialogues with them in my head just to keep from being bored, so it was natural for me to think of the dialogue form when I got bored with writing a long, long essay. At first I dismissed it as ridiculous, because I didn’t know anything about writing dialogue and so on.

  This is another example where you have to trust yourself when you are interested. More and more I thought: If something is going to rescue us it will be people talking to each other about moral questions, and not shoving them under the rug, or thinking that if they are told to do something wrong the choice is either to exit, or to shut up and do it. I don’t think that is satisfactory. People should talk about these things.

  Dialogue is the natural form for this subject, because people have to struggle with it: they have second thoughts; there are qualifications; wisdom comes out of experience. It is no accident that writing on moral questions has often been in the form of dialogue. It is suited to the subject matter. I’m not an artist but I like to have my form agree with the content, and I like it to conceal the labor that went into it.

  WARREN: And why was the dialogue set in New York?

  JACOBS: I began by imagining it here in Toronto. The characters were not much formed in my mind, and as Canadians they didn’t work. Canadians are so polite. I like this politeness and, in comparison, New York is much less gentle and even cruel. I had to have characters who would raise their objections right then and there, and not try to paper them over or change the subject. So I converted them to New York characters and, like the characters in a novel, they then began to take on a life of their own.

  WARREN: Perhaps the dialogue form is inevitable for philosophy. You sense this reading even the Critique of Pure Reason. Each idea, or interest, assumes a dramatic personality. Not even Kant can quite suppress it, though he tries to be impregnably dull. They have their entrances and their exits, and between they squabble like players on a stage.

  JACOBS: So they could be characters. I don’t think I was successful at changing prose rhythms for my different speakers. Although many readers of prose don’t realize it, if prose has a rhythm it carries you along and if it doesn’t, it’s obnoxious. An author has a rhythm that is unconscious, it is a component of style even when the style is as transparent as Edmund Wilson’s.*14 He has a wonderful transparent style! You are not conscious of it, but it has a rhythm. It is Wilson’s voice. I tried to differentiate my characters’ speech, but I was unable to do it in the fundamental way I would have liked to. It would have been better to give each character his own idiosyncratic prose rhythm. That is what masters of dialogue do.

  WARREN: A good writer reads better to others than to herself. Often your dialogue continues for pages without a character being identified, and I, for one, never lost track of who was speaking.

  JACOBS: I’m glad to hear that.

  WARREN: “Morals” is the word in your title—Moral Foundations, not Ethical. Why?

  JACOBS: I think it is more embracing than the word ethics. Ethics has taken on a meaning of such little pettifogging things in many instances, like classes on ethics—journalistic ethics, medical ethics….

  WARREN: Ethics are for people who lack morals, morals for people who lack love.

  JACOBS: No, love goes against both syndromes. It’s untamed.

  WARREN: It is “above” both syndromes.

  JACOBS: I don’t say it is above them, I say outside them. Again I’m being down-to-earth. I’m not trying to be hierarchical. You keep wanting to put all these things in a hierarchy. I don’t see it that way. I see them all as components of life and who’s to say that one is superior to the other, or under what circumstances? Love is outside the syndromes, not above.

  WARREN: Nevertheless, we grasp truth through love. This is something you’ve touched on in each of your books, though usually indirectly.

  JACOBS: I think it is a big mistake for people to try to reform something they hate, because their destructive feeling will ooze into what they prescribe. That was one of the great troubles with city planning; it was formed by people who really hated cities and they couldn’t help but be destructive to them. People who love cities ought to be doing the planning for them. Marx detested the Commercial syndrome, yet tried to prescribe for commerce, production, and trade. You wouldn’t want a doctor who doesn’t like human beings—well, women sometimes run across doctors like that. You want people who value the objects of their ministrations. So love, or respect, whichever is appropriate, is extremely important. I don’t deny that.

  WARREN: Perhaps I can ask what lies ahead. You have followed what in retrospect seems a very clear path; does it begin to seem clear in prospect?

  JACOBS: It was not obvious at all. I wish it had been.

  WARREN: There is a wonderful consistency of direction in your writings, from the earliest journalism on parks and city corners through the organism of cities to the principles of public life: the vantage rises and rises….

  JACOBS: Not so much up but outward.

  WARREN: Okay, “outward,” I give up. What lies further out?

  JACOBS: You’re asking what my next book is going to be about, if I do one? I’m not really sure. I have a couple of ideas, but it would be premature to bring them up. I’m not a prophet about anything in the world, and I’m not a prophet about myself.

  WARREN: All your life you have asserted the value of youth, of a generational change. You have tried to see old things in a new light. Now, what are the advantages of age over youth?

  JACOBS: One of the advantages of age is that so many loose ends get tied up. You see things that happened earlier and how they turned out, and you see things that mystified
you and then later developments that helped demystify them. And just the experience of living a long time dumps into your lap and your head a whole lot of interesting information that, by the nature of things, you can’t get in a short life. My knees are creaky and my eyes aren’t as good, but on the whole, I don’t resist getting older because I want to see how things turn out. And eventually, of course, I’m going to die, and my great regret is that I won’t see how so many things next happened.

  * * *

  *1 David Warren is a conservative Canadian journalist known for his roles as the editor of The Idler and as a controversial columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.

  *2 “Kate” is one of the characters in Jacobs’s essay in the form of Socratic dialogue, Systems of Survival. According to Robert Kanigel’s biography Eyes on the Street, Jacobs imagined the character as an amalgam of her daughter, Burgin, and two of her nieces, all bound up in the guise of an aspiring animal behaviorist.

  *3 Both Richard H. Tawney (1880–1962) and Max Weber (1864–1920) discussed the idea—originated by Weber—of the “Protestant work ethic,” a theory suggesting that the Calvinist morality of thrift and productivity contributed to the rise of capitalism.

  *4 For more on Jacobs’s views on the connection between so-called women’s work and the commercial moral syndrome, see “Women as Natural Entrepreneurs” in this section.

  *5 Cavendish Laboratories is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, founded in 1874.

  *6 Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was a philosopher, perhaps best known for his 1971 book Deschooling Society, a radical critique of institutionalized, universal education. Aside from her firsthand experience as a parent, Jacobs certainly learned about the challenges of public schools, as well as potential alternatives, during her time as the editor of schools for Architectural Forum. For instance, an unbylined June 1956 article titled “Tomorrow’s High School” (Architectural Forum 104) discusses the experimental “Random Falls” model for high school education, which incorporates learning spaces into the fabric of the town and citizens of the surrounding community into the classroom experience. In its practical, open-ended, community-based approach, this proposal foreshadows Jacobs’s commentary here and the more radically decentralized peer learning networks proposed by Illich.

  *7 Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968) was a poet and critic whose life work was advocating arts-based education for youth.

  *8 A stadium in downtown Toronto named for its distinctive retractable roof, the SkyDome opened in 1989. Though rechristened the Rogers Centre in 2005, many Torontonians still call it by its old name.

  *9 The Senate is Canada’s upper house of Parliament. Much like in the American Congress, Canada’s senators are intended to equally represent the regions of the country, counterbalancing the lower level (the House of Commons), in which Members of Parliament are popularly elected. However, in Canada, senators are appointed by the governor general on the advice of the prime minister, making the office an ideal—and controversial—tool of both partisanship and patronage. As of 2016, the debate over Senate reform is ongoing.

  *10 The Parkinson in question is probably C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–93), a humorist and critic of bureaucracy and taxation best known for Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Jacobs is likely citing one of his less-known books, The Law and the Profits (1960), which revolved around another law: “Expenditure rises to meet income.”

  *11 Jacobs often mentioned her frustrations with sociology, which date back at least to her days in the late 1930s at Columbia University, where she took an unimpressive class on the subject. Also sociology, particularly at midcentury, the heyday of the social sciences, tends toward the deductive—analyzing people and society through theoretical categories—rather than Jacobs’s preferred inductive method, in which she argues up the scale, so to speak, from individual clues to overarching conclusions. Ironically, the book she would be most remembered for, Death and Life, often carried a subject recommendation for stores to shelve it in the sociology section.

  *12 Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935) was a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and continues to be one of the most cited jurists and legal writers in history. His particular brand of realism and his knack for aphorisms must have spoken to Jacobs, since she chose his words for the epigraph of Death and Life, summed up in the phrase: “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.”

  *13 Although Jacobs never threw away her writing entirely, she did make a habit of throwing out entire drafts of her books and starting from scratch. According to her son Jim, she used writing as a way to think through her subject matter, so when she found an error in reasoning while editing her work, she took it as a sign that she needed to think it through again.

  *14 Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was an influential American writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator. He was at various points an editor at Vanity Fair and The New Republic and the chief book critic for The New Yorker. He wrote more than twenty books, including Axel’s Castle (1931), To the Finland Station (1940), and Patriotic Gore (1962).

  First Letter to the Consumer Policy Institute

  * * *

  ENERGY PROBE RESEARCH FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER, 1994

  Dear Probe Supporter,

  Affordable, convenient public transit is vital, yet Canadian cities are plagued with costly, inadequate systems. Time and again, transit managements and politicians with public funds at their disposal embrace foolish, extravagant policies while ignoring common-sense alternatives and neglecting innovative thinking. Those decisions are paid for in higher fares, lost customers, rotten service, tax subsidies and lost opportunities. The environment pays in over-use of automobiles, pollution, energy waste and exorbitant urban sprawl.

  It used to be reasoned that public service monopolies would benefit from lack of “wasteful” competition and economies of scale. They don’t. The post office is a notorious example. Only when that monopoly began to break down did many badly needed innovations from independent businesses become available. Or consider long-distance passenger rail services: they are a disgrace, forever deteriorating yet becoming more costly.

  To govern well, governments must neither monopolize commercial services themselves nor foster monopolies by others. Government needs to be independent of business to avoid conflicts of interest that prevent honest regulation or invite corruption.* Good service delivery must be responsive to customers’ ever-changing needs, not protected from customers by limiting their choices or evading failure by winning government favors. Hopping the gravy train is no way to run a railroad or any other successful commercial service.

  Yet more and more we hear of government-industry projects and “partnerships” that cloud what should be arm’s-length relationships between businesses and regulator. Little wonder that our federal and provincial capitals swarm with lobbyists for corporate interests that find it more profitable to court politicians than customers. Little wonder that the environment is victimized or that we become triple victims as consumers, taxpayers and citizens.

  That’s why the Energy Probe Research Foundation, of which I have been a director since its inception, has decided to establish a new division, the Consumer Policy Institute. Other groups within our Foundation deal primarily with environmental and resource policies. The Consumer Policy Institute will work for consumers with the aim of increasing fairness, choice, safety, reliability and affordability.

  If you believe Canada needs an alert, research-oriented consumer watchdog and advocacy organization to take on powerful corporate interests and government monopolies, please join me in being a co-founder of this much-needed new agency.

  Sincerely,

  Jane Jacobs

  * * *

  * In Systems of Survival, Jacobs explores the mechanics of how the mingling of “commercial” and “guardian” values causes such “systemic moral corruption.” See also �
��Two Ways to Live” in this volume.

  Women as Natural Entrepreneurs

  * * *

  SPEECH AT THE CANADIAN WOMAN ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR AWARDS, METRO TORONTO CONVENTION CENTRE, TORONTO, OCTOBER 29, 1994

  I want to begin by touching briefly on the phenomenon of the glass ceiling—the ceiling that, as we all know, seems to obstruct women from reaching our gender’s share of top positions in business. Objectively speaking, that share ought to be somewhere around fifty percent. It is closer to only a tenth of that.

  These wretched statistics are connected with entrepreneurship. Any entrepreneur who establishes an enterprise is, at least for the time being, its proprietor. And by definition, proprietors of businesses occupy top positions there. No glass ceiling there, for them.

  Most existing businesses in our country are run by males, no matter what the enterprise’s origins or its industry’s early history may be.

  Women are not the only people frustrated by glass ceilings. Historically in North America, there have been obdurate glass ceilings for people who belonged to religious minorities, like Jews, or to Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American or African races, or to some other ethnic groups such as Italians, Catholic Irish or, in Canada, French Canadians.