Vital Little Plans
Page 35
STEIN: That’s a short question I could spend the rest of my life answering. My instinctive response is we don’t know. I think the U.S. may be the exception and why do I think that?
I think that warfare was highly organized, and I think that’s now in our past. We’ll see some of it—just like people dueled even after dueling was outlawed. But I think that large-scale, mass movement, command and control warfare, which not only defined empires but which made states, is coming to a close. The modern state, as we know it, grew out of the capacity to make war. So did empires. War was the handmaid. Bureaucracies grew around war making. I think that idea is coming to a close. I really do. And we’re moving to a different kind of network: knowledge-based world will. There will be lots of struggle. Power will still matter. It’s naïve to think it won’t. Work will still matter. Economics will still matter, but we may have passed through the death of empires through continuous warfare.
JACOBS: Good. I certainly hope you’re right. That’s what I would like to believe, too.
* * *
*1 Janice Gross Stein (1943– ) is a Canadian political scientist and the founder of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. Her Massey Lecture, which this conversation addresses, was published as The Cult of Efficiency.
*2 Michael Adams (1946– ) is a Canadian cultural commentator and co-founder of Environics, an opinion poll company often cited in the Canadian media. He has published several books on Canadian attitudes.
*3 As Jacobs observes in a 2005 interview with John Sewell, whereas statistics can only capture correlation, not causation, stories keep intact the intricate connections between factors and the chains of cause and effect, a virtue particularly important in studying multi-variable complex systems like cities.
*4 The “guardian culture” refers to one of Jacobs’s two “moral syndromes” in Systems of Survival. For an in-depth explanation of this ethical system and its counterpoint, the commercial moral syndrome, see “Two Ways to Live,” in this volume.
*5 In chapter 5 of Dark Age Ahead, “Dumbed-Down Taxes,” Jacobs uses the principle of subsidiarity to critique the paternalistic relationship between governments at the so-called senior (state/provincial and federal) and junior (municipal) levels. She favors, wherever it is possible and prudent, devolving the powers of government to the local level.
*6 In chapter 6 of Dark Age Ahead, “Self-Policing Subverted,” Jacobs compares contemporary professions to ancient priesthoods, which preserved the right to regulate their own affairs. Unfortunately, police, architects, and Catholic priests alike, she writes, have been failing to fulfill the duties that traditionally afforded them that right, hence “dying” priesthoods.
The Sparrow Principle
* * *
EXCERPT FROM “URBAN ECONOMY AND DEVELOPMENT,” INTERVIEW WITH ROBERTO CHAVEZ, TIA DUER, AND KE FANG OF THE WORLD BANK, TORONTO, FEBRUARY 4, 2002
OPENING
JANE JACOBS: First I would like to mention some points that I think are basic, going through the list of questions you have given to me. The significance of cities for developing countries, and also for developed countries, is their economic behavior and their indispensability for a prospering economic life and everything associated with that, which is a lot of things that we call noneconomic.
This is a new idea to many people, and also to the World Bank. The last time I talked with the World Bank in 1984, it was assuming rural life with its agriculture and raw materials resources supported an economic life, and cities were a frill.
TIA DUER: I think it’s changed a lot.
JACOBS: And for a long time, the Bank ran on those premises, and it was one reason I was reluctant to get involved again until you explained to me that they had learned better, because it was a waste of time.
DEVELOPING ON EACH OTHER’S SHOULDERS
JACOBS: Important as livability infrastructure is in cities, I don’t think it is as basic as infrastructure that connects cities which are in about the same stage of development as one another. The conventional supposition in developed countries, which have often been imperialist, of course, has been to concentrate on infrastructure between very developed cities and poorer, undeveloped economies. That’s okay to provide a kick-start for an undeveloped economy, but if that remains the only significant connection between a developing city and the rest of the world, what you get is something like Argentina or Uruguay. Their cities had strong connections with European and American developed cities, and for a while this seemed very successful. But they had little connection with each other or with other cities of Latin America. Yet economic connections between cities in initiative stages of development are vital; they can sell to each other, copy each other, and feasibly replace their imports from each other. And they can develop much of their economic life on each other’s shoulders, which they can’t do only on the shoulders of a highly developed economy because the gap in capabilities is too large.
ROBERTO CHAVEZ: The metropolis.
JACOBS: They can be given transplanted companies, but that doesn’t provide them with the process for their own development. An infrastructure connecting cities in more or less the same stage of development must be safe, and to be waylaid by bandits is very bad, or to have thugs extorting tolls. The infrastructure, whether it is for pack animals, or for people on foot, bicycle, train, truck, water transport, or plane, whatever it consists of, it must be safe, and extortion-free.
SPECIALIZATION IS NO ANSWER TO LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
JACOBS: Here’s something that the World Bank didn’t understand in the past and I am not sure it does now. Specialization of economic activity in a city can be a starter, a transitory starting point. If the city doesn’t diversify rapidly, specializing is a dead end. No specialty is safe. All become either obsolete or outgrown. That’s true whether in Detroit or Uzbekistan. So forget it as an economic strategy, except as a very transitory phase. The world is littered with little cities that once had a successful specialty. A city can even have once been successfully diversified—this was true of Detroit—and then decline, often specializing, as Detroit did, in favor of an activity that became particularly successful. As a strategy for cities, specialization is never good.
CHAVEZ: In connection with that, could I ask a question? We have something of a debate in the Bank about promoting the competition or the competitiveness of cities, and the assumption underlying that is that some cities will be better suited to develop certain areas or specialization. We’re suggesting that we should encourage competitiveness, by finding out what makes a city “special” in order to build upon that. This seems to be in contradiction with what you’re saying.
JACOBS: Yes, it’s very much in contradiction. For example, Halifax in Nova Scotia was a great port and shipbuilding site in the early nineteenth century, the days of wooden ships and sail. Nova Scotia stagnated economically. It never progressed to building iron and steel ships, powered by steam. In contrast, Norway, which had been much like Nova Scotia in the days of wooden ships and sail, not only progressed in shipbuilding but diversified into navigation instruments which it could export everywhere and proceeded to diversify much further, with many kinds of design, technology and products, one kind of skill building on another. The notion that some cities are best suited for this or that kind of work is a carryover from Adam Smith’s notion of regional division of labor.
Of course, geography and weather give Smith’s idea some grounding. Gruyere cheese made in Switzerland is better than imitations elsewhere. You can grow apricots in some places and not in others. But there are very few things that one city is naturally equipped to do better than other cities.
DUER: One thing you’re pointing to is how to support, not stand in the way of but hopefully also support, people’s inherent creativity and looking for opportunities.
JACOBS: Yes, but when something is successful in a city, it can be a danger, if almost everything else is given up and starved of capital and encouragement.
JACOBS: Yes, exactly.
DIRECTLY LEND TO CITIES
JACOBS: But it is also destructive to try to make all the cities of a nation alike by putting them into a comprehensive development framework. This ignores the particularity of cities. The minute you begin to prescribe for cities’ infrastructure or programs comprehensively, you try to make one size fit all. Actually, different cities, if they’re working properly, are not behaving the same way at the same time. Some may be doing well on exporting but aren’t replacing imports much. Others are doing just the opposite. Some, at a given time, may be receiving many immigrants. Others are not. If they’re behaving properly, each has its own kinds of work emerging. Creative cities have even more individuality than nations. Cities are much older economic entities than nations. I think it’s important that whoever is working on aiding cities doesn’t work on bunches of cities through a centralized intermediary government.
DUER: Not through an intermediary, but one city at a time?
JACOBS: One city at a time, focusing on each individually and on its own situation at that time. So I wonder whether the Bank’s negotiations and loans always need to be with national governments.
DUER: This is a big, big issue for us with regard to supporting cities.
JACOBS: If you really are serious about supporting cities, you should be able to lend directly to cities and negotiate directly with them. After all, you’ve got a big clout—the money that you have gives you a big clout. If you are intimidated into dealing only with national governments, your intended help for cities will be inefficient at best and perhaps self-defeating.
CHAVEZ: That certainly doesn’t have the city’s best interest at heart.
JACOBS: National governments often don’t. They often are afraid of cities. For one thing, economic development always upsets the status quo, and it does this first in cities. You have to face the fact that what you want to do for cities is not going to make everybody happy.
The main thing for livability is to outlaw crime, extortion, fraud, whatever is victimizing people; facilitate ownership and facilitate entrepreneurship. You probably know Hernando de Soto’s book about registering property.
CHAVEZ: The Mystery of Capitalism, yes.*1
JACOBS: And getting rid of all the nonsense that means it takes years to establish a tailor shop or anything productive.
DUER: Could I just pick up on the last point before we even go into anything else? You raised this point about facilitating ownership and entrepreneurship, and in many of the really profoundly poor slums in the cities in developing countries, people don’t have secure tenure. It’s the worst possible insecurity for them. They can be rousted out of there anytime and the whole area razed to the ground.
JACOBS: Yes. It’s what makes gentrification so dangerous.
DUER: Are there ways in which the thinking that you’ve been doing about this question of supporting local entrepreneurship can support working directly with the communities in those slums—you know, dealing with the slum dwellers in terms of their own self-organization and getting the services in that they want and so on? What are the key things you think that we should bring to bear?
JACOBS: I think it goes without saying, almost, that the authorities ought to pay real attention to what the people in an area say they want. I have mentioned tree planting because I love trees, but everybody doesn’t love trees. And there may be other things that they want more, like a market.
Who can say what they care about the most?
CHAVEZ: Only they can.
JACOBS: Only they can. And that should be listened to very carefully and, above all, not disregarded on grounds that the authorities intend to do away with that district eventually, or give it a big makeover. No, small responsive evolutionary things are the ones that matter, and of course ensuring security of tenure.
COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
KE FANG: Jane, I have a question following up on this topic. In terms of better understanding what those dwellers and the residents need, what do you think about the role of community-based organizations?
JACOBS: You have to be careful that nobody is playing that old imperialist game of naming the organizations that authorities will recognize. Puppet organizations.*2
We had a genuine citizens’ organization that very successfully fought a dreadful urban renewal project in New York. Anybody who lived or worked in the neighborhood could belong to this organization. There were no dues, and no other qualifications. You only had to be there. Anybody who saw some need could start working on it, and anybody who wanted to join with them could do so. Totally permissive except for one hard and fast rule: Nothing that was done in connection with the community association could displace any person or business in the area. That was like a rule against murder.
We’re used to the idea that you can do all kinds of things, but you can’t murder somebody in the course of doing it. We called it the sparrow principle: not a sparrow shall be moved. Now, almost 45 years later, it’s still a very vigorous organization, and it still has that rule and it still has that looseness of organization.
How is it supported with no dues? It needs money for quite a lot of things, including the newsletter, which I still get, and various other things. It has fundraising events. That’s good because they’re fun and bring people together. People can give small donations if they like, and specify their purposes.
But inclusiveness is what’s important, and so is recognition that do no harm is basic to doing good. First, do no harm.
When authorities want an organization that they can co-opt and handle, they approach it very differently. It’s not inclusive. There are various qualifications. They get very formal about Robert’s Rules of Order.*3 In our organization, we never voted on anything. We depended on consensus.
At the annual meeting, anybody could get up and say what they thought should be done, like the playground at such and such a place needed supervision, or there was a terrible plan afoot to do something or other to the neighborhood. There are always terrible plans afoot in New York. So as anybody mentioned something to be done, or the need to carry on with something already under way, it would be written on the blackboard and given a number. At the end of the meeting, everyone interested in number one would be told to go over beside the piano, anybody interested in number two go near the door, and so on. Maybe nobody would respond to a number except the person who had said it. Maybe many members would respond to other numbers.
Whoever showed up as wanting to work on a given task—cared about fundraising or whatever—would elect their own chairman out of their groups of volunteers. This was self-organization. Regular meet was held once a month. If there was a squabble about something, or an emergency arose, the system was flexible enough so that members could add or subtract what was being done. If there was dissension about any proposal or program, we wouldn’t continue it or start it in the first place. What was done was always what people agreed should be done or at least had no persuasive objection to.
DUER: That is a really important lesson, actually, the—I mean, I know it has to be reinvented with every group, but in a sense, you know, the experience of this is really, really instructive. And helping groups that are starting to organize by having them meet and talk with people who have lived through this, gone through this, could be really helpful.
What’s the name of this particular one?
JACOBS: This was the West Village Committee. They still have a newsletter. And as far as I know, they are the only neighborhood in New York that succeeded in getting a plan for housing built: the West Village Houses. It was hard to get. The city planning department lost the plans and there were other delays of seven years. Somebody at one of the planning department meetings said if we let this neighborhood plan for itself, every neighborhood will want to plan for itself.
DUER: What a great idea.
JACOBS: And it would hav
e saved the city so much money because we worked out a plan that didn’t require anything to be demolished. The new houses could go into vacant places. We had good architects who worked out three different plans that could, in combinations or alone, fit in any site. You could have the advantages of scale in design and construction without needing a big clean slate. And those houses remain very popular. They were an early example of infill.
COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION
JACOBS: Community participation was a great danger to us, too. It was mandated in the national urban renewal law but the way the city planning commission and other city agencies interpreted it was that if any community organization discussed with the officials or their staff what they thought would be good for the community, no matter whether they were going to get it or not, the participation provision in the law was fulfilled.
DUER: Oh, my God.
JACOBS: We would have been caught, trapped.
CHAVEZ: Just by talking.
JACOBS: Just by talking. Fortunately, somebody in our neighborhood, by pure luck, knew the federal official who was in charge of the New York and New England office of urban renewal. She got him to tour the neighborhood and see if he thought it was a slum. He didn’t; he thought it was a wonderful neighborhood. But he told us about community participation, and said that if we wanted to save this neighborhood, the one thing we must never do was to speak of what we would like. This was the single most important thing we learned. We were called names for this: selfish and negative. What a bunch of negative people! But everybody in the neighborhood understood and was careful never to talk to anybody in government about what we would like.