Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  And so logically enough, municipalities of the time were bracketed with asylums and taverns as provincial responsibilities.

  As wards of provinces, municipalities were permitted to levy only property taxes—probably not a bad idea when usual municipal capabilities were limited to maintaining roads, fighting fires, making water and sewers available—in short directly servicing properties. The somewhat more sophisticated provincial governments took care of most other management.

  Times, of course, have changed beyond recognition. Canadian municipalities are no longer country bumpkin villages. But the antiquated arrangements failed to change with the times. They still haven’t changed. They’ve only been tinkered with, adapted superficially, as little basically as has been possible.

  One adaptation has been to load up property taxes with municipal costs that have nothing to do with servicing property. This has had side effects of making property taxes regressive and inequitable and skewing them into destructive unintended consequences.

  The other type of adaptation consists of patchwork grants from provinces and sporadic acts of largesse from the federal government, makeshifts that are circuitous and inefficient. They are also crippling. They demean city governments, forcing them into the demoralizing position of being assumed to be too incompetent to assess and deal with internal affairs except at the discretion of superior governments. Provincial and federal grants, permissions and largesse can’t help but reflect those governments’ priorities. They certainly can’t and don’t reflect each city’s own circumstances at a given time—for instance, just when this city or that one needs to undertake innovative infrastructure or services and can feasibly do so.

  It is no wonder that so few hub cities emerge from this cumbersome and happenstance mess. And it is little wonder that the well-being of the few that have emerged is so precarious.

  That said, the practical question is how the outdated and crippling system can be disposed of. Historically, cities themselves have had to take the initiative for the reforms they require.

  If the five hub cities of Canada, the C5, don’t take initiative for reform, I can’t imagine who will. You are in a position to make a case for greater responsibility and greater resources that must be seriously heeded by the federal government. You have allies in your regions who realize that they share your difficulties and frustrations. You have potential allies among stunted cities elsewhere who need you to break a trail that would benefit them too.

  Most important, you have a wealth of human capital—people with intelligence, talent and experience that equips them to deal with city needs and opportunities; or you can get them. Your citizens are anything but stupid. Many are fed up with paying generous income and consumption taxes, and then watching how the government closest to their daily lives must plead and wheedle to receive a share of that very same money in round-about ways. Many are already dissatisfied, even contemptuous of the childish roles their cities are forced to play in deference to an outgrown, arbitrary system.

  Possibly the hardest part of winning reform will be resisting old, ingrained habits of accepting municipal dependence and practicing opportunistic beggary.

  In contrast to that, you have an opportunity here to think out of the box. It is unprecedented for the elected leaders of the country’s hub cities to discuss together what powers and resources they would like their cities to have, as of well-earned right. For instance, why shouldn’t the federal government shift its allocations of income-tax points and consumption-tax yields: shift them so that the shares municipalities require for responsibilities they are capable of assuming would go directly to them instead of by inefficient, round-about and crippling routes? This is also an unprecedented opportunity to organize yourselves with the object of winning reform.

  If you can do this sort of thinking and self-organizing—and I see no reason why you can’t if you choose to—you could well achieve something as constructive and significant for Canada in our time as the Fathers of Confederation achieved in their time.

  Efficiency and the Commons

  * * *

  CONVERSATION WITH JANICE GROSS STEIN,*1 GRAZING ON THE COMMONS CONFERENCE, TORONTO, NOVEMBER 15, 2001

  JANE JACOBS: As you already said cogently in your Massey Lecture, efficiency harms medical care, public schooling, accountability and choice. It invites stupid police and slapdash justice. It undermines wholesome communities. It cheats the interests of posterity and toys very dangerously with all types of security—from water to airports. Your question, “Efficiency for what?” is the right question, with its emphasis on effective results. But here’s the rub: Effective health care, schooling, accountability and so on are not the bottom lines that register political effectiveness. Rather, the bottom line for political organizations is success at winning or retaining power to govern. In Canada, this means winning elections.

  No matter how specious the cult of efficiency is, if enough voters fall for it, we get it. So, your brilliant analysis of the cult’s fraudulence is important civic education. But what about the many, many well-educated experts who help the voters fall for this because they, themselves, have?

  Do you think miseducation helps lead civil servants, elected officials, the media and institutional administrators as well as voters astray? Do universities, schools, governments, businesses and departments of economics and political science have an important part to play in unmasking the fraudulence of this cult? Is information from the new science of complexity developed by physicists, biologists and ecologists needed by social scientists and civil servants? Do you think university communities are listening to you? I would value your thoughts about any concrete means for putting government efficiency on a saner intellectual setting.

  JANICE GROSS STEIN: I agree with every word you said, Jane. We just assume that efficiency is an end, not a means. So pushing that one step further, and asking people, “Efficient at what?” should enable us to get beyond this myth of efficiency that drives our public policy and harms our public good. The rub is that politicians run a four-year cycle; their goals are short term. I think the real place this discussion has to happen is among citizens. And it’s a tough conversation to have.

  I had an email today from two high school principals in British Columbia who said they were dissatisfied with the accountability measures in schools because the timelines are too short. What is really the measure of an effective school? It’s how well that school equips the students to be citizens; how well the school equips people to be productive members of society.

  In my book, I ask one of the vice presidents of one of our hospitals, “If it were up to us as citizens, what criteria should we use to judge a community hospital? What is reasonable?” The answer was, “Well, we measure work, we can’t be held accountable.” I bet that wouldn’t be good enough for you, Jane. And I think Michael Adams, who does all this work on citizens and their attitudes, would say, “It’s not good enough for most citizens.”*2

  Where’s the bottom-up conversation coming from citizens? How do we get parents and schools to really engage and say, “You know, I don’t really like this standardized test. My kid is more than the ability to answer a multiple choice question.”

  JACOBS: Well, we do need accountability, obviously. One reason that this nutty cult of efficiency got power is that it became clear that throwing money at problems didn’t solve them. That doesn’t mean that nothing works but I think we’ve got to look at what is sneeringly called “anecdotal evidence.”*3 It’s good to have statistics but I think anecdotal evidence is often sharper and truer.

  It’s like novels. If you want to find out about a part of the world you haven’t personally experienced, you probably will get a better idea from a good novel than you will from any nonfiction. Novels are like collections of anecdotal evidence. We should take them seriously and look much more at what happens with many individuals, not as statistics but as stories, and use that as an important ingredient of accountability. Does that make sense
to you?

  STEIN: It does make sense to me. One of the things I was asking these two high school principals was, “What about following individual students when they’re at school and when they leave? What about following high school students when they graduate? A year later, do the students feel they have learned what they needed? Can they tell us what they wished they had learned?” Let’s make the measure of effectiveness the stories of the people involved.

  People can identify gaps in the public institutions that I call “gluey” because they stick to citizens. Those institutions haven’t done a great job in working with citizens to be accountable. So, the guardian culture comes in and says, in Jane’s words, “We’re going to do it this way and we’re going to impose these measures, whether you like it or not.”*4 My big problem is, where are the levers to start this? I see individual citizens doing it. I see some communities doing it, but how do we scale this up from small groups so we get some critical mass?

  JACOBS: I’m always amazed at how many people don’t trust their own experience. They don’t think that what happened to them can be important.

  STEIN: Are you saying selfishness can serve the public good?

  JACOBS: Yes, indeed it can. There are many kinds of selfishness and unfortunately greed is what pops into most people’s heads when they hear the word selfish. But selfishness can mean concern for your family and your neighborhood. It can mean concern for what touches you, and many things touch you besides material things.

  STEIN: I was working on school choice. When I listened to parents talking about why choice mattered to them, I was struck with how strong support for school choice is in minority communities where their culture, their language and their community matters to them. Those parents feel their kids aren’t well served in the larger public school system. They want to be able to choose their kid’s school but still stay within the public school system. They might be called selfish, but they were telling a story that was very important to them.

  JACOBS: That’s the kind of selfishness that is so important.

  STEIN: That’s right. And when I asked, “Are you worried that if you set up a school just for your community, your kids won’t have the chance to get to know kids from other communities?” their answer was, “We need to provide a safe environment where our kids can learn and become more self-confident, more secure; then they will be able to go out and meet kids from other communities.”

  This is tough for me because, as somebody who works in international politics, I know what happens when people stay only within their own communities. They develop stereotypes about others and opinion polarizes. But if we don’t listen to what these parents are saying matters to them, we’re not going to fix anything.

  JACOBS: I think it is absolutely wrong to sacrifice your children to any ideology or affinity that you have. You absolutely have to change it if it’s not working for your children. That’s your first responsibility when you’ve had children. Any child is more important than any idea.

  When parents want their children to be educated in their own community because they’re safer, there’s something very wrong. One thing I have admired about Toronto is that there are not ghettos in the sense that there are in American cities. The nearest thing we have to ghettos in Toronto are the misguided public housing projects but we’re finally learning how to do it right.

  We also need to look at specific things that make parents feel unsafe. Bullying is very bad. And it’s amazing how prevalent it is, generation after generation. My husband went to a nice suburban public school and he had many stories to tell me about bullying and how frightened he was to walk home at night. I went to a nice suburban public school and I had no such trouble. But I remember my brothers did. So anecdotal evidence suggests it’s a male problem.

  STEIN: Safety is one of the biggest issues that concern parents. The strongest support for school choice is among African Americans who are moving to charter schools; the communities come together, set up and run their own schools. These parents feel passionately that these exclusive community schools are their highest priority.

  JACOBS: I think it’s very important that such schools should be publicly funded because in real life one size doesn’t fit all. Every individual is different. We know that. Every town. Every city is different. Every chain store isn’t different and that’s getting very boring.

  STEIN: If one size doesn’t fit all, why is “choice” a right-wing word? When did choice become a right-wing word?

  JACOBS: It’s a right-wing word but it’s not a right-wing deed. And it leads to the second question I have for you.

  Within hierarchies, differing arrangements are possible. That’s choice. One available choice is called subsidiarity, meaning that higher governments can delegate various responsibilities and resources downward to governments that are in closer touch with local needs and possibilities.*5 Under this principle, the federal government hands many functions and resources to the provinces. All federalism is built on this idea. Under the same principle, provinces and the federal government should be able to yield to municipalities many responsibilities and resources they badly need but now lack; they can handle these much better than the provinces because one size doesn’t fit all municipalities.

  But here’s the rub. For historical reasons that are now long out of date, municipalities must consistently resort to begging from higher levels of government. They’re also forced to embrace the cult of efficiency. It seems that Marshall McLuhan was right when he observed that you can’t decentralize centrally.

  STEIN: You can’t decentralize centrally. But I think we’re on the edge of meeting some of the concerns that you’ve addressed in your work, Jane. The big missing voice in our politics is cities and communities. We can’t make that voice heard. What stops us is that cities and communities have no political home in our structures. I think we’re on the edge of seeing a change because I think hierarchy is diminishing. Our culture isn’t as supportive of hierarchy today as it was fifteen years ago. So, even the state, which is, after all, the ultimate hierarchy, is changing on us.

  Government today has to reach out. It has to pull in advice from outside. It has to find partners because it doesn’t have the resources or the knowledge to do it all. The old top-down hierarchical state that we had all through the last century is beginning to transform itself. And that’s the one big positive of efficiency. In a sense we’ve bought the argument that old top-down hierarchical structure isn’t very efficient and so it’s changing. But here’s where citizens are going to have to weigh in.

  I think citizens are correctly distrustful of hierarchies. They’re skeptical about markets, too. It’s that skepticism among citizens—the lack of deference to authority—that I’m counting on to change the way we as citizens relate to these institutions. It’s confounding to me that we have a guardian culture with values. And we have a commercial culture with a set of values. But where’s the citizen culture? How do you fit the citizen culture into your picture?

  JACOBS: The hierarchy, I agree, is changing. I think we live in a time of what you might call “dying priesthoods” of all kinds. You can’t believe how intimidated women used to be by doctors not so long ago and how intimidated everyone was by lawyers. And, of course, if you read novels, you will see that people were kept in line by clergy.*6

  We’re also probably living in the last days of feudalism. It’s been a long-term, thousand-year thing, but change is happening rapidly lately. So, we are digging away at hierarchy. And I think that’s reason for optimism. On the other hand, and there is another hand about this, if we get too starry-eyed about the market and what it can do, we get really monstrous things like prisons run by profit-making organizations. That is an abomination to my way of looking at it. And yet right here in Canada we have it. And we’re threatened all the time with having our health system destroyed by the American-type system and that’s an abomination to my mind.

  We have to be very clear about what we dare
make the responsibility of the market and what we must keep as the responsibility of the public service and the public good. When they get too mixed up—and this cult of efficiency is exactly such a mix-up, taken without understanding from commercial life and applied idiotically to government—it hurts the common good. There are lots of things that are not subject to being judged by financial success.

  STEIN: I think we need to think about citizenship not just as voting in an election. We need to start thinking about citizenship as a part-time job that we all have. And then we ask ourselves, “Okay, which job am I going to take on? Am I going to go work in my local school? Am I going to go help out in the local clinic? Am I going to help out with a community issue?” Because it seems to me that’s what crosses that bridge that we built between states and markets.

  We know states do some things and markets do others—how do we fit this part-time citizen into our economy?

  JACOBS: I think what you are describing has a great deal in common with art, which has always been a big question mark. Art done for art’s sake is outside economic life. Artists do need, somehow or other, to eat but that’s not why they do art. They do it because they’re driven to it. And it’s a gift. And I think that community things are done not for livelihood and not for power. That’s where that work belongs.

  In the past, all major empires have gradually become stagnant when they were unable to maintain themselves. In hindsight, we can see that the course of this melancholy pattern is marked by warfare that might be described as “continually sporadic,” which sounds like an oxymoron, in order to combat insurrections, safeguard resources, strengthen unstable borders, bring client states into line, and oppose rival and would-be powers. Beginning with the Korean War, the U.S. seems to have fallen or been pushed into this pattern of continually sporadic warfare. The anticipated peace with the end of the Cold War has not materialized. What do you make of this, Janice? Is this an inevitable pattern for empires until they disintegrate or is there plausible reason to believe the U.S. could be an exception?