by Jane Jacobs
We knew what we would like. Those houses I told you that we finally got? We were discussing those among ourselves. We were getting up a booklet about them. But we said never a word about them to the city until after we got the urban renewal designation officially removed. Absolutely, the only thing we would tell the government we wanted was to remove this designation.
We went to hearings where we proved that according to law the neighborhood wasn’t a slum. That made no difference to the city. We were a slum; we were designated. But always they were trying to get us by one trick and another to say what we would like. Everybody in the neighborhood knew why but we never could get the newspapers to print this information. The New York Times wouldn’t print it, although many of its reporters knew why we seemed so negative. We told them, and they could look at the law. Their editors wouldn’t allow it to be printed. This information was such ammunition for the public that the establishment just didn’t want the public to be armed with it. We were so lucky we had it.
DUER: And all because someone knew someone on the inside, basically.
JACOBS: That’s right. I’m sure that this kind of thing happens in cities the Bank works with, and I wouldn’t think you would want to cooperate with that kind of chicanery.
DUER: No, no, no.
JACOBS: I see over and over your emphasis on the importance of community participation, and I want to make sure you understand what traps can be arranged under its name. The Bank should not be a party to these traps, even if people are not warned and fall into them and are victimized by them, maybe especially then. People will know what happened to them. They will know who to hate, and the Bank will be among those.
This is vicious stuff, and under such nice names: community participation, power of the people, and so on. You always have to look for the substance of these things, not how nice they sound.
CHAVEZ: I think that’s extraordinarily important for ourselves, for our work. I’m thinking back to a point you made earlier which had to do with doing for the people rather than the people doing for themselves. Somehow that ties into what you’re saying here now. The true community action is where you’re not substituting for the people or using that label to push your own agenda, but rather, to really allow the people to do for themselves.
JACOBS: Yes, that’s very well put. I don’t like the conception of economic trade-offs, meaning you sacrifice this in order to get that. Or social trade-offs either. It implies belief in a zero sum of social good or a zero sum economy instead of an expanding economy in which nobody needs to be worse off.
Also, communities that want a certain thing are derided for saying “not in my backyard.” If you listen to “not in my backyard” people, their objection is often to something that shouldn’t be in anybody’s backyard. What has been proposed should be done differently. One example in America was low-income housing projects, awful projects, which shouldn’t have been done that way. People were quite right not to want them. But they were called selfish and told they must accept a trade-off for the sake of the housing.
When enough people said no, either of two things happened: low-income housing was dropped, which is bad because it is needed, or planners learned how to do it better than just doing projects.
Housing projects weren’t a necessary way to build affordable housing. Sewage treatment shouldn’t be done in a way that stinks up a neighborhood. Those are just examples. But trade-offs, and the notion that people have to make them, always need examination.
ON GLOBALIZATION
JACOBS: Your material comments that globalization can be a political opportunity for redistribution policies that favor the poor. Redistribution policies are stopgaps but not cures for poverty. You want to help the poor be able to support themselves. If cities’ economies are working, they keep manufacturing a middle class. There probably will always be some poor, but they needn’t be the same poor and there needn’t always be so many. In fact, good economies and good policies can reduce the poor to almost none.
In the Netherlands, there are almost no poor. In Switzerland, there are almost no poor. It can be done, but it isn’t accomplished by redistribution. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be redistribution, which is vital for some people, but it’s no cure for poverty.
Globalization does involve shifts in economic power, and these shifts do not always favor the already powerful. In fact, the shifts never favor the already powerful. It wouldn’t be a shift.
CHAVEZ: That’s right.
JACOBS: Development, whether it’s globalized or not, always involves shifts in power. If development occurs in a feudal economy and feudal society, it undercuts the power of the feudal authorities. In a capitalist society, development undercuts the power of old money, older capitalists, enterprises and fortunes. Bound to happen. You might as well recognize this. It doesn’t mean absolute losses in prosperity for people who formerly were well off. But it does mean losses of ability to control other people, which is a different thing.
DUER: Because there’s more power sharing in real development.
JACOBS: Yes, sure. And so that’s going to happen. I find it hard to put myself in the place of people who want to control other people, and to whom that’s important to their own identity. But there are people like that, and they are in an unavoidable conflict with development. Better that such people should become dissolute playboys.
I don’t think that’s so bad as becoming tyrants.
Your material mentions that global growth often threatens the environment. But so does stagnation, lack of development, because the same resources are exploited too long and monotonously. Parts of the world have been devastatingly deforested where wood was used too long for fuel.
It’s only in developing and growing economies that you find shifts to alternative resources, and ways of repairing what was done in the past. That’s where hope lies.
Global warming is quite rightly emphasized in your material, also pollution by fossil fuels. Notice what kind of stagnation goes along with that: stagnation of transportation in America and Canada. It’s not because there’s been progress in the sense of development of transportation. In fact, we need development to combat this pollution.
DUER: Yes, get past it. Diversification, types of transport.
JACOBS: I thought this material about the different waves of globalization is very interesting. The period from 1870 to 1914 was notable in the United States for inventions and innovations of all kinds, and also for globalization of trade. The gains in transportation were only part of a much larger, very complicated collection of technical changes and also shifts in power. The country went through a period of growth of monopolies and trusts, but then embarked on trust busting and breakup of monopolies, which was important to allow development to continue.
I’m old enough to be very aware of what an extraordinary period that was because my parents were born in the 1870s. I loved hearing about their childhood when I was a child in the 1920s. It was like another world, things had changed so much. When my mother was eight years old, she was chosen to push the button that turned on the first electric lights in her town.
Imagine no electricity there before. This is so close to me, it makes modern history seem very short.
In the period from the First World War until after the Second World War there was much less invention and innovation. I marvel at that too. For instance, my family had a dishwasher in the 1920s. And yet there were no further advances in dishwashers for decades and few more people had them. My parents weren’t rich, but they liked to try practical improvements.
My father, who was a doctor, had an automobile so he could use it to call on patients before the First World War. They had a telephone, again, because that was important for a doctor. At the same time, the building where he had his office had an elevator. I even flew in an airplane as a child. Then came the long period of not much change except in fashions. Now we have the Internet and another wave of globalization. So I think I was fascinated to read
this about these waves.
One thing very different in the two—I hope it’s different—is that the first wave of globalization coincided with imperialism. Back in 1905, there were only fifty sovereignties in the whole world.
DUER: That’s amazing when you think of it.
JACOBS: Yes. Now there are about 187. The reason there were only fifty was the fact of empires. Think how much of the world came under the sovereignty of the British and how many new sovereignties have broken from that empire. There were the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires and Russian, German, French and Dutch Empires. Why settle on 1905 as the high point of empires? Because in 1905 a new sovereignty, the first one for a long time, came into being. That was Norway, which broke away from Sweden. Once, of course, Sweden had been a great empire but about its only possession left at the time was Norway.
The reason I said I hope globalization is different this time is that there is a danger that the current globalization wave can be a kind of new imperialism. This is what frightens many people. It’s very common to call America an empire. This is not only because of the World Bank and the IMF, but these institutions are reasons for people fearing a new empire, especially if your policies are like imperial policies.*4 For instance, economic specializations in conquered possessions were so often imposed by imperial governments. It’s another reason for you to be so wary of specializations.
DUER: What role do you think multinational corporations have in pushing this kind of imperialism in the sense that they have much more power than a lot of countries have, they’re trans-jurisdiction, they can move from place to place at will. And they have, as all corporations have, much more economic power than the dispersed consumers who are doing the purchasing. It’s that much greater a disparity when you’re talking about the people in fully organized societies.
JACOBS: Yes. Multinational corporations may not be monopolies, but they have a lot in common with monopolies. The reason why they’re menaces and why they remain disproportionately powerful is that there is not a good birth rate of other enterprises in their field. There have long been these multinational corporations. Under imperialism, they were the East India Company and so on.
DUER: Big tool of imperialism.
JACOBS: The opium dealers who started opium sales in China—
CHAVEZ: Were English.
JACOBS: They were a combination of what now we would call a drug cartel and a monopoly, and ruinous in many ways. That’s why there were the Opium Wars. President Roosevelt’s ancestors made their money selling opium in China.*5 It was a big Yankee thing. Turning Chinese into junkies, that was awful.
These are not new. Whether they’re drug cartels, which are another kind of multinational corporation, or whether they’re McDonald’s or Walmart, they aren’t new. And the only way to keep them from concentrating power is for competitions to keep emerging. Walmart itself is an example which rose up from some little town in Arkansas and did a better marketing and assembling job than old department stores, which were very powerful in their day, but stagnated and have been disappearing, along with Woolworth and Sears. Walmart really did do a better job for consumers than they did. But it will probably stagnate. Even if it doesn’t, we can presume others will arise, and this is not so bad.
The worst multinational corporations are not ones that go after customers in that way; they’re very vulnerable. Consumers are flighty. Somebody else will take their fancy, just as Walmart won them away from Woolworth’s or Penney’s or other stores. The really dangerous ones are corporations that are big buyers. They are the ones that use pressure on forestry companies to clear-cut. They use pressure on all kinds of companies to trim costs at the expense of their workers and at the expense of the environment.
DUER: You’re talking about ones that are mining companies and manufacturing—
CHAVEZ: Gas trading companies.
JACOBS: Right. And it’s useful to distinguish between those two kinds because Walmart is not really hurting the environment. It might even turn into an Ikea.
DUER: Well, you could make arguments that stores like Walmart really undermine local economies because they come in at such scale, and they also don’t care about the environmental impact where, in fact, they’re developing. But I can see what you’re saying. It’s a different scale of impact overall. It’s on the locality in which they operate.
CHAVEZ: It’s not global.
JACOBS: That’s right, and the reason they undermine local economies—I look at this also from the viewpoint of a consumer—is that in so many places there isn’t a decent general store. There could be, like the good local bookstore I told you about on my shopping street, or our hardware store, which have flourished in spite of big chains.*6 Even though they own their buildings, if they weren’t good stores, too, they would succumb.
So for anything that’s in direct contact with consumers it’s true that to a great extent the consumers are their bosses. In some places consumers may be prisoners of stores; there may be only one grocery store. When my father finished medical school, the first place he worked as a doctor, as part of his apprenticeship, was for a mining company, as a company doctor, in West Virginia. The people there had no choice of anything. The mining company controlled the entire local economy.
DUER: It was a company town, basically.
JACOBS: I’m full of admiration for lots of things in your globalization paper. It mentions that developing a sound investment climate is primarily a national and local responsibility and should focus particularly on the problems facing small firms. It points out that employment in small- and medium-sized firms in towns and rural areas will be central to raising living standards of the rural poor. It’s also even more true that in cities employment in small- and medium-sized firms is central to improvement. Plenty of such firms represent the best chance for development, and this will also indirectly help rural economies.
Your material about the high returns from education is very good, and how important this is to poor people.
I’m glad to see that empowerment with respect to organizing property rights and government in a way that involves poor people is mentioned.
Debt relief is mentioned. Yes, there must be debt relief for unrealistic, unpayable debts, the same as in any bankruptcy. Think of debt relief in the context of pseudo-imperialism; that is, how did these bad debts to rich countries arise? What were the assumptions behind them? Who did the loans benefit?
Canada is culpable in this respect. For instance, much of Canada’s foreign aid is not really for the benefit of people who are getting the aid. These are actually subsidies to Canadian companies, called foreign aid to make them more palatable. They go especially to Quebec companies because of domestic Canadian problems.*7 At least in these cases Canadians, not poor countries, pay. But all tied aids need to be looked at suspiciously, as economically imperialistic.
CLOSING
DUER: It would be, I think, really important if you could reflect on what you think would be the most important advice to give urban staff working in the Bank in terms of the role that the Bank should play in urban development. What’s the most important type of contribution that should be made?
JACOBS: Maybe the Bank isn’t the right instrument for urban development if it must deal with superior governments all the time.
DUER: In some countries it can lend through subsidiary loan agreements down to city governments.
FANG: The Bank is proposing to establish a new fund through which the Bank may directly give some funds to cities, because it is, as you mentioned, very important for supporting urban development.
JACOBS: If you have a means of doing it, it should be done in preference, whenever you’re dealing with cities. In preference to going through a central government, it’s better to deal directly with the city and the city government. If you can’t do that, it’s questionable whether you ought to be doing anything.
DUER: Well, you raise something that’s a real challenge for us, actually. It�
��s something we’re trying to come to terms with, but it’s a real problem. It’s also a problem because when you operate through central ministries, it will often be a certain sector, like the Ministry of Construction, that actually is the conduit for the funds. And then you don’t, in fact, get a whole city government with all its departments interacting around solving the problems.
JACOBS: That’s absolutely right, it undercuts city autonomy as well as particularity. It is serving the agenda of another government, which may not even recognize what is actually needed in the city. I was serious when I said maybe not do anything. Remember, do no harm. You may just be adding to future unpayable debt. Which is harm.*8
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*1 The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s book is actually called The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. In this and other writings, de Soto (1941– ) argues that the solution to the spread of informal settlements in the cities of the Global South will be found in giving squatters the right to own the land they are occupying. Formalizing informal settlements (and informal economies) will give those currently outside the political and social system a stake in maintaining that system and a role in promoting developing market economies. Critics suggest this silver bullet approach is a narrow version of more radical land reform visions and will simply increase inequality by giving some already more powerful settlers advantages over others who are less fortunate.
*2 This comment was likely inspired by Jacobs’s experience battling urban renewal in 1960s Greenwich Village. There she found that before the public announcement of the project, New York officials had already approached carefully selected community organizations and even cultivated new “tenant” organizations for the cause. Elsewhere, she calls these groups “cuckoo committees,” after the birds that co-opt the nests of other birds.