Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  We all recognize, I think, that these are times of rapid change when we need to welcome innovative, better ways of doing things. Many traditionally monopolistic public services need to be opened up to entrepreneurs and others with good ideas—also with good jobs if their initiatives pan out. Great ranges of activities from transportation and sewage treatment to recycling services, products and technology invite innovative development. But governments can and too often do discourage experimenting, and prevent or delay privately undertaken initiatives that trespass into their traditional preserves. All central planning is at odds with multiple and diverse experimenting. To be sure, small bureaucracies can be as brain-dead as big ones, but at least if they are multiple, when one says, “No,” or just doesn’t get it, the old saying applies: not all the eggs are in that basket.

  Whatever Metro’s virtues were at the start, it now behaves like a dysfunctional family. Its members are suspicious of one another, they gang up on each other. The wrangles concern activities that are already amalgamated. The few Metro coordinating services really necessary are now geographically irrelevant.

  Anyone who supposes harmony will prevail and efficiency reign after whole-hog amalgamation has taken leave of common sense. These six cities really are different, and the differences won’t be erased by dint of everybody trying to mind everybody else’s business and beat down every local vision different from their own. The Golden Report had it right: strengthen the local city governments by doing away with Metro.*2 Coordinate fewer and more carefully selected responsibilities at scales which are actually rational for their functions.

  The ugly conflicts in Metro over methods of property taxation arise, ultimately, because over the years large and inappropriate burdens have been piled upon property taxes, the only way Ontario cities have of levying taxes. Property taxes hit poor renters and struggling businesses disproportionately heavily compared with their means. That’s why welfare costs in property tax bills are unjust as well as impractical. The same applies to support of public schools, essentially another type of social transfer payment. Both belong on income tax.

  Provincial governments, no matter whether Conservative, Liberal, or New Democratic, have one and all been frightened of biting that bullet. But the injustices and makeshifts of the property tax mess are now intractable. To place still further inappropriate burdens on that tax will make what is now intractable, intolerable, no matter how the take is pooled.

  There are ways out of relationships if and when they become intolerably destructive. One possible escape could be to create a new province, South Ontario. In that event, South Ontario and North Ontario could each set its own preferred tax and other provincial policies. North Ontario of course would still depend heavily on subsidies from South Ontario’s economy, but only indirectly through Ottawa, much as if North Ontario were an Atlantic province. However, it would be much, much more sensible to avoid an intolerable future leading to deterioration and disruption by intelligently and courageously facing realities in the fine province of Ontario we do have.

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  *1 “The Two Kings,” as the initiative dubbed them, were two underused industrial areas centered on the intersections of King Street and Spadina Avenue and of King and Parliament streets, on either side of downtown Toronto. Under the guidance of Mayor Barbara Hall and Chief Planner Paul Bedford, land-use zoning was liberalized in these areas, allowing residential and nonindustrial workplaces to move in alongside existing industrial uses. The one caveat was that existing buildings could not be torn down.

  *2 Jacobs is referring to the 1996 document “Greater Toronto: Report of the GTA Task Force,” chaired by Anne Golden, a colleague of hers. The report recommended not only strengthening local governments but also amalgamating the five regional governments in the Greater Toronto Area and clarifying their role in planning and coordination.

  A recursive portrait of Jane Jacobs taken by her daughter, 1996. The effect mimics the self-similar nature of fractal geometry—a theme Jacobs explored in The Nature of Economies and Uncovering the Economy in this volume.The smallest photo in the series appears to show Jane Jacobs in front of her home at 69 Albany Avenue in Toronto.

  In a retrospective mood at the end of her life, Jacobs found herself returning to ideas she had pondered for years in search of fresh perspectives on contemporary problems. Relatively famous in her old age, she was sought out for her opinions on topics large and small—even by those she had criticized in the past. In a conversation with World Bank officials, she took on the pressing problem of globalization and the foreign aid and trade policies that promote it. She likened debt-based strategies of development to the old modernizing impulses underlying urban renewal, arguing that they may simply be reinstating the abuses of imperialism. Elsewhere, as in the interview included here, “Efficiency and the Commons,” Jacobs returned to the standoff between commerce and regulation she had explored in Systems of Survival. At a moment when privatization was all the rage, she worried that it was undermining public life. The disrupted balance between guardians and traders had infected public education, science, criminal justice, medicine, and other professions—a concern she would take up in her final book, Dark Age Ahead (2004).

  Meanwhile, her calls for devolution of powers in The Question of Separatism and Cities and the Wealth of Nations returned too, during the continued fight for urban sovereignty in Canada. Despite the earlier failure to stop Toronto’s amalgamation, in 2001 she joined businessman and philanthropist Alan Broadbent and the mayors of five of Canada’s largest metro areas—Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Winnipeg—under the banner of a group called the Charter 5, or C5, which hoped to secure a charter for cities equivalent to that reserved for provinces (see “Canada’s Hub Cities”). After meeting only three times, however, the C5 had the wind taken out of its sails when the federal government upped funding for cities—without fundamentally altering their place within the political order.

  Perhaps Jacobs’s most consequential look back came in the realm of economics. Reviewing her work, she felt that her economic thinking had failed to coalesce into one overarching theory. She started a new book, to be called Uncovering the Economy, that aimed to rectify that problem by putting her ideas about urban growth, innovation, and macroeconomics into logical order, rather than the shape they assumed as she had discovered each piece of the puzzle years before. In the process, she found opportunities to embellish or clarify earlier concepts as well. Some of these updates she discussed only with her son, Jim Jacobs, who was, at this late stage of her life, helping her with typing tasks. In the latter cases, we have included these additions as annotations to our excerpt from the book, which she never finished.

  Alongside these retrospective reflections, Jacobs also set out to write a book that would interpret the trajectory of civilization from its deepest past into its incomplete future. She aimed, she said, to write nothing less than a short biography of the human race. Jacobs had long been interested in how societies rise and fall, and by the turn of the millennium she had begun to worry that North American society was headed for trouble. Her last published book, Dark Age Ahead, was a prelude to this final work. It offered a pessimistic look at the present and future. Published in 2004, two years before her death in 2006, it examined failures in five institutions of North American life: family and community, accessible and effective education, the scientific mindset, accountable government and taxation, and the self-policing of professions. Without the stabilizing influences of these cultural mores, Jacobs felt, very little stood in the way of North America falling into a new Dark Age, an era where we literally forget what it means to be American or Canadian through generation after generation of mounting problems, deepening poverty, and desperation. Forever hesitant to foreclose on the future, however, she concluded Dark Age Ahead on an ambiguous note: “At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy.”

  The last piece in this collection, “The En
d of the Plantation Age,” is the only known fragment of her second unfinished book, tentatively called “A Short Biography of the Human Race.” In this speech she ranges across a host of different topics, from skyscrapers to memorials to Lewis Mumford, but at its core is Jacobs’s hope that the forces of life are indeed in the ascendancy. It expands upon her theory, briefly explored in the final chapter of Dark Age Ahead, that since the first cities began to emerge from the Dark Ages of Europe a thousand years ago, society in the West has been undergoing a long transformation from one great era of human history to another. The Plantation Age reigned supreme for centuries, but has for some time now slowly been giving way to a post-agrarian age in which a minuscule portion of the population is engaged in food production. Drawing on biologist Jared Diamond’s popular history Guns, Germs, and Steel, which found that, over the long term, the cultures that reorganized themselves around agriculture ascended while their hunting and gathering counterparts declined, Jacobs proposes that, so too, the first cultures to truly embrace what she calls the “Age of Human Capital” will be the new “cultural winners.” In this still-emerging era, the capacity for exchange and new work will drive growth, while imperial expansion and control over resources will wither as a means of holding power. Societies that harness their tremendous collective capacity for ingenuity and embrace the organized complexity of city life will free their citizens from industrial and agricultural peonage and thrive.

  If this possible emancipation of human potential sounds uncharacteristically utopian, Jacobs is careful to show that this new age will upend and reorganize human conflict, not end it. If history during the Plantation Age was mainly a contest over land and resources, reaching its bloody depths in European imperialism or the Nazi pursuit of lebensraum, in the Age of Human Capital this may no longer be the primary way to secure prosperity. Land and resources “can be held exclusively,” Jacobs remarks. “Ingenuity cannot be.” This deceptively simple observation suggests new understandings of her earlier insights into cities and economies. Wherever the urban-focused values of the Age of Human Capital have found a way to germinate, new patterns of prosperity take hold. In this light, it makes sense that a tiny, resource-poor island like Japan can thrive on the creativity of its cities, as she argues in The Economy of Cities. Or, as she recounts in both The Question of Separatism and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, that the people of a kingdom like turn-of-the-century Sweden actually could benefit from losing a large portion of their territory to a secessionist faction like Norway, since both Stockholm and Oslo then each had their own national governments and currencies responding to their own economies, and the hinterlands had two creative, empowered cities instead of one. Or, as she says in this final speech, that the great rural breadbaskets of the world, once necessities of vast empires, now require massive subsidies and protections to stay viable. They burden as much as they propel a nation. In short, if the Plantation Age was a zero-sum game in which mastery over land, labor, and resources guaranteed power, the Age of Human Capital is a non-zero-sum game with a more complex, unpredictable, and—one hopes—equitable set of rules.

  As she neared the end of her life, she was hesitant to favor one future over another. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she remarks in “Plantation Age,” “and the only definitive thing to be said echoes Charles Dickens’s introductory comment to A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the worst of times and the best of times.’ ” Her ambivalence raises questions for all of us. Will we overcome the intertwined challenges of climate change, inequality, and stagnation or succumb to a new Dark Age? Will the “vital little plans” Jacobs celebrates multiply or simply evolve into more ingenious and insidious forms of the plantation? The answer, as always for Jacobs, rests with everyone, working singly and together for an open-ended future. “As we negotiate the difficult transition out of the dead, but not buried, Plantation Age,” she says, “we need unlimited independent thinkers with unlimited skepticism and curiosity.”

  Time and Change as Neighborhood Allies

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  VINCENT SCULLY PRIZE LECTURE, NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 11, 2000*1

  We take it for granted that some things improve or are enhanced by time and the changes it brings. Trees grow larger; hedges grow thicker; fine old buildings, put to uses not originally anticipated, as this building has been, are increasingly appreciated as time passes.*2 But some other things are too seldom enhanced or improved by the workings of time. On the whole city and suburban neighborhoods have very chancy records of dealing well with time and change. I’m going to discuss briefly four common kinds of failure for city neighborhoods and make a few suggestions.

  My first suggestion concerns immigrants. Right now, in locations extending from the Virginia metropolitan fringes of Washington and the Jersey metropolitan fringes of New York to the Los Angeles fringes of Los Angeles, striving immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, the Philippines, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, are settling in woebegone city suburbs to which time has been unkind. Right now newcomers are enlivening dull and dreary streets with tiny grocery and clothing stores, second-hand shops, little importing and craft enterprises, skimpy offices and modest but exotic restaurants.

  Either of two fates can befall these newly minted immigrant neighborhoods. On the one hand, if members of the new populations and their children melt away as they find their feet, the sequel for the bottom of the ladder is probably followed by yet another population. Ample experience informs us that neighborhoods serving only as immigrant launching pads repeatedly take a step or two forward, followed by two or three steps backward, while dilapidation inexorably deepens with time.

  In contrast, as many a Little Italy and Chinatown attest, along with less celebrated examples, immigrant neighborhoods that succeed in holding on to their striving populations are neighborhoods that improve with time, becoming civic assets in every respect: social, physical and economic.*3 Progress on the part of the population is reflected in the neighborhood. Increasing diversity of incomes, occupations, ambitions, education, skills and connections are all reflected in the increasingly diversified neighborhood. Time becomes the ally, not the enemy, of such a neighborhood.

  Self-respecting people, no matter what their ethnic origins, abandon a place if it becomes fixed in their minds that it is an undignified or insulting place to be. Here’s my suggestion: smart municipalities ought to contradict those perceptions before they take firm hold—no time to lose—by making sure that newly minted immigrant neighborhoods receive really good municipal housekeeping, public maintenance, and community policing and justice services, along with some respectful amenities. Traffic-taming and street trees come to mind, and especially quick, hassle-free permissions for people to organize open-air markets if they ask to, or run jitney services, or make whatever other life-improving adaptations they want to provide for themselves.

  Simple, straightforward municipal investments of the kind just mentioned, and sensitive, flexible bureaucratic adjustments are minor in comparison with costs and adjustments demanded by city megaprojects. But if those minor costs and adjustments attach newcomers to neighborhoods in which they can feel pride and proprietorship as they are finding their feet, and afterwards, they carry a potential of huge civic payoffs. Time and change will then have been enlisted as allies of these neighborhoods.

  My second suggestion has to do with communities’ needs for hearts or centers and with a related problem: damage done to neighborhoods by commercial incursions where they are inappropriate. The desirability of community hearts is well recognized nowadays. Much thought goes into designing them for new communities, and inserting them into neighborhoods that have lost community hearts or never had them. The object is to nurture locales where people on foot will naturally encounter one another in the course of shopping, doing other errands, promoting their causes, airing their grievances, catching up on gossip, and perhaps enjoying a coffee or beer under pretty colored umbrellas.
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br />   Let’s think a minute about the natural anatomy of community hearts. Wherever they develop spontaneously, they are almost invariably consequences of two or more intersecting streets, well used by pedestrians. On the most meager scale, we have the cliché of the corner store or the corner pub that is recognized as a local hangout. In this cliché, “corner” is a significant adjective. Corner implies two streets intersecting in the shape of an X or a T. In traditional towns, the spot recognized as the center of things surprisingly often contains a triangular piece of ground. This is because it is where three main routes converge in the shape of a Y. In communities where historically much traffic was waterborne, a heart often located itself at the intersection of a main waterfront street with the exit from a busy dock where passengers disembarked; when water travel declined, the heart moved elsewhere. Large cities of course have typically developed not only localized neighborhood or district hearts, but one or several major hearts, and these also have almost invariably located themselves at busy pedestrian street intersections. All but the very smallest hearts—the corner store—typically provided splendid sites for landmark buildings, public squares, or small parks.

  The converse logic doesn’t work. Living, beating community hearts can’t be arbitrarily located, as if they were suburban shopping centers for which the supporting anatomy is a parking lot and perhaps a transit stop.*4 But given the anatomy of well-used pedestrian main streets, hearts locate themselves; in fact they can’t be prevented from locating themselves. Of course good design can greatly enhance or reinforce them, as I implied with my remark about landmark buildings and public squares.Living, beating community hearts can’t be arbitrarily located…but given the anatomy of well-used pedestrian main streets, hearts locate themselves.