Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  *3 Robert’s Rules of Order (1876) is a book on parliamentary procedure, adherence to which would likely create a barrier to entry for the uninitiated.

  *4 The International Monetary Fund is an organization founded in 1944 (along with the World Bank) to promote international trade and global economic growth through lending to member countries. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs sharply criticizes the economic policies and practices of the World Bank and the IMF. Like many other critics, Jacobs objects to the power the IMF and the World Bank have in determining and overseeing local economies from the outside through debt-based lending and administrative rules determined in Washington.

  *5 Indeed, Warren Delano (1809–98), the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, made his fortune selling opium in China, widely recognized as an immoral trade, even by Delano himself.

  *6 Although it is omitted from this interview, Jacobs describes her shopping street, Toronto’s Bloor Street, in “Time and Change as Neighborhood Allies,” in this volume.

  *7 The primary “domestic problem” to which Jacobs is referring is Quebec’s separatist movement, which she defended in her 1980 book The Question of Separatism. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she would go on to investigate the various measures that nations take to keep their constituencies loyal, including such foreign aid contracts.

  *8 On the cover page of the original transcript of this interview, Jacobs offered this commentary: “The three staff members of the Bank were bright and mean well, but the Bank is sure to louse up their efforts.”

  Uncovering the Economy: A New Hypothesis

  * * *

  EXCERPT FROM UNPUBLISHED BOOK, 2004

  PART I: THE TRIPLE PROCESS

  INTRODUCTION

  This is an economics textbook. It sets forth a new way of understanding macroeconomic behavior: how it organizes itself and operates at urban, national, continental, imperial and global levels, sustains—or fails to sustain—itself. Macro-economic life is also large-scale in the sense of time.

  I urge readers to retain prudent skepticism and to remain protective of their individual judgments and experiences, a caution that applies, or should apply, to alert reading of any work on economics to avoid being misled by authorial enthusiasm. This book is no different in that respect, of course. If anything, it is more demanding than other economic texts because both its substance and form are unconventional.

  My points of departure and frequent touchstones are three commonplace economic phenomena. One of these, the first I shall describe, is a peculiar pattern of sporadic city growth that is absent in villages and towns. The pattern was conventionally taken to be inexplicable in olden times. Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and Science—a period we still inhabit—the sporadic growth pattern has been deemed irrational.

  The second commonplace, city import replacement, has conventionally been thought to be both too irrational and too trivial to account for anything of much importance.*1

  The third phenomenon, city import shifting, is an automatic response to city import replacement. It has conventionally been ignored, although if I am correct, it is a phenomenon largely responsible for economic expansion.

  After studying these three seemingly separate phenomena, I have concluded that they are actually three different aspects of one and the same phenomenon. Acting together, they organize self-sustaining macroeconomic activity and its smaller-scale derivatives (in real life, everything connects with everything else; nothing is isolated).

  The three phenomena (actually one) together exert such force and power that they are spookily more in charge of our macroeconomic fates than the human beings who assume they are directing what happens and determining what is to be expected from their activities.

  The body of this text consists largely of extracts drawn from previous books of my own. I have arranged the extracts in a new sequence, aimed at improving their coherence and clarity. Also, I have rigorously stripped them down. Originally this material was interlarded with many examples and substantiations, taken as I found them by following promising clues. Shorn of these and other embellishments of context, the lean and sequentially rearranged material appears here as straightforward statements of fact. Readers curious about omitted sources, justifications or other contextual information are referred to citations of my original material at the close of each extract or condensation. The reader can readily flesh out the citation by referring to notes following texts of chapters. These give sources of my information, frequently with other bits of germane and auxiliary information. Here is a sample citation:

  “The most truthful information that statistics give us is that for some reason researchers have become interested in what they’re counting,” commented Armbruster.*2

  The negative correlation is that things not interesting to investigators don’t get counted.

  In sum, my stripped-down extracts and condensations are a self-selected anthology of my germane findings over a period of almost fifty years. During much of that time, I myself wasn’t sure what I was doing, nor what I was looking for, until the clues I followed revealed their relationships and meaning of their own accord. What I was doing was learning. This is not an efficient way to learn, or to guide others. But it is the only way when one must start from scratch.

  Having inefficiently learned, finally, what I was doing—revising economics, the better to understand what economies are doing on their own terms—I am now able to explain it to myself in a textbook which aims to explain it to others.

  POWERFUL YET HELPLESS

  Economic life that was surprisingly highly developed and admirably expanded is much older than our attempts to explain it to ourselves. Prehistoric achievements still serve as foundations for many economic activities today, the world over. Think about weaving, pottery, the wheel; think about river and ocean navigation; metals and alloyed metals such as bronze; stringed bows to twirl as fire-makers; hearths, smoke holes, roof-carrying carved timber columns, brick and stone construction with roof-carrying walls and arches; cooking, vegetable-oil pressing, fermentation; bartering and trade customs for acquiring valuable amber and pigments from far-distant sources, and superior cutting edges from distant, cooled volcanic glass flows; local weights, measures and (probably) local markets for local crafts; spears, nets and traps for hunting, raiding and warfare; awe-rousing tombs, embalming, corpse clothing, burial furnishings; painting; sculptures of wood, stone and clay; jewelry; percussion, stringed and wind instruments for making music; horticulture, grain agriculture, and domesticated animals for meat; transportation and by-products such as skins, feathers, leather, fur, fibers, horn sinews and teeth…all this and more, including specialized tools and tools to make tools.

  Prehistoric means, of course, “before written documentation.” Knowing this, the alert and skeptical reader will in a flash offer an alternative proposal to the unbelievable antiquity of foundation goods, services and skills; their prehistoric ancestry may merely testify instead that, amid the complex and diverse abundance and complicated interrelationships of skills, the craft of converting spoken language and the art of recording quantities with numeracy (which probably preceded writing) may have been very late bloomers.

  In our Eurocentric way, many of us tend to think of foundation goods and services such as those I’ve just mentioned as having been contributed to general or world economic life from parts of Europe now popularly known as “the West.” Some evidently were, especially from portions of the continent touching the Mediterranean and Black Seas, or territory close by, now known as Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But North Africa was a notable originator and contributor, and also Asia, especially what are now India and China and their offshoots.

  What is now known as the West began its modern development and expansion just about a thousand years ago in post-classical and pre–Late Medieval times in what is now Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Greece and what is now Turkish Anatolia. Apa
rt from some regions that have long outlived their formerly prospering heydays, the West currently contains the world’s most prosperous, strongest and most influential economies. But it is curiously helpless too.

  Alone, and working together through larger economic organs such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and World Trade blocs, nations sharing this rich and powerful economy have lavished great wealth and efforts to overcome poverty and economic backwardness in poor countries, often to little or no avail. Often the objects of this rich largesse are left burdened with debts so large and economic schemes and plans so unrealistic that the debts are unpayable; even interest payments to keep the unfortunate beneficiaries technically out of loan default must be borrowed, often from the banks that advanced the original loans, to keep them technically solvent.

  More tellingly still, rich and powerful nations of the West have even less success attempting to overcome causes of poverty and economic backwardness in persistently poor pockets (and whole large regions!) of their own home territories, to transform these into places capable of developing self-sustaining economies.

  Important pieces of economic understanding must clearly be missing or misleading.

  PUZZLING BURSTS

  My formal education in the conventional economics of the day, Columbia University (at the dawn of Keynesianism), was scanty and superficial, and then and for years afterwards I thought the subject bored me.*3 What engaged my attention eventually was a peculiar, sporadic growth pattern—a commonplace for cities, but not for villages and towns. A puzzle.

  Embryonic cities (except for those originating as planned ceremonial centers) have few obvious differences to distinguish them from other small and budding settlements; gradually and tamely the city-to-be enlarges its economy as its initial export work grows and earns imports from both domestic and foreign producers. The embryonic city’s exports, like its imports, include goods and services in both domestic and foreign trade.

  However, after an indeterminate period—which may be as short as only a year or two—the embryonic city abandons its tame and gradual mode of growth and experiences a burst of unaccountable growth and economic diversification. After another indeterminate period, the growth burst runs its course and disappears as abruptly and unaccountably as it appeared; it returns to slow and gradual import-earning export growth again, lasting until and unless another sporadic burst recurs. If it does, the repeat burst is usually larger than the first, and the next one—if there is a next one—is still larger, and so on.*4

  We hardly recognize a little city to have become a city until it has had a first growth burst and in the process rounded itself out with the usual goods and services common to other little cities of its time and place. Even small cities that have grown only briefly and then stagnated decisively have had at least one period of extraordinarily abrupt and astonishing development and expansion. Often we can tell just when it happened by observing the architectural period of the little city’s buildings; so much was built during a single swift interval. Villages and towns do not grow this way, but then they do not become cities either. The alert, skeptical reader will probably say at this point, in a flash, “Hey, maybe this peculiar growth pattern is not an innate attribute of cities; maybe it demonstrates that any settlement behaving that way becomes a city, as a consequence.”

  The alert reader may be right. It is an arguable point, much like interminable debates whether nature or nurture or both form human personality and character traits. Whether the pattern makes the city or the city makes the pattern, the result demonstrates an oddity unique to cities. The weight of evidence, for reasons I will explain later, indicates that the city makes the pattern. Odder still, with rare exceptions, all large cities have experienced many sporadic bursts, and all great cities, without exception as far as I know, have experienced such enormous bursts that these are more aptly described as growth explosions.

  This pattern, by the way, is both notably stubborn and ancient. When Rome, at the start of the fourth century B.C. experienced an explosive episode (surely not its first) sufficiently powerful to alarm the city fathers, they adopted a policy to thwart it by forbidding further immigration into Rome and encouraging Roman residents to leave the city. Like many attempts to defeat growth explosions since, the civic policy instead was defeated by the explosion, which proved invincible. This episode has long puzzled historians because Rome’s exports were not growing at the time, nor can the economic surge be explained by conquest. Rome conquered the Italian peninsula, beyond Latium, the city’s immediate hinterland, following this growth explosion.

  Now I am going to break my own self-imposed rule, mandating austerity of contextual prolixity, because to omit a few examples and some substantiation while communicating the enormous power and force exerted by city growth explosions would be as artificial as discussing big animals without mention of elephants and whales.

  Ordinarily when a city is host or hostess to a growth explosion, it still retains some of its important older import-earning exports; the imports they customarily earn for the city’s economy can thus remain at much the same value and volume as previously, or else expand gradually. However, sometimes the development and expansion owed to a growth explosion is unequivocal, and clearly responsible for overcoming a period of decline. In Los Angeles a situation of just this kind occurred as World War II was coming to a close. During the war, in spite of wartime shortages, the city economy had soared in the value and volume of its export work and the imports it had earned.

  Companies manufacturing aircraft, the city’s largest industry, laid off about three-quarters of their workers from the end of 1944 to the end of 1945, reducing employment in the industry from 210,000 to 18,000. Shipbuilding, the second largest industry, reduced its workforce a bit more slowly, with a decline in jobs from 60,000 to 18,000 between 1945 and 1949. The Hollywood motion picture industry was embarked on a long-term decline. Petroleum, once the city’s largest import-earning export and still an important one until 1946, was thereafter lost to the city’s import-earning export economy because the city’s people and enterprises took to consuming so much gasoline that the city economy ran a petroleum deficit and became a petroleum importer. One type of old and formerly stable export work had been depot service associated with nationwide distribution of citrus fruits, walnuts and avocados grown in the hinterland. The depot service, and much of the arboricultural produce as well, were lost as import-earning exports because the groves were uprooted to clear land for low-density housing tracts, shopping malls, highways, expressways and parking lots in the city’s immediate suburban hinterland. Farther out, in lower density exurbs, the groves were sacrificed to track farms supplying the city and its growing numbers of restaurants, gourmets, inspired amateur chefs and ethnic food enthusiasts with produce and novel dining ingredients.

  During almost a decade the fortunes of Los Angeles’s economy sank until they were lower than at any time except the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet as the 1950s dawned, prosperity returned; the city in 1949 had generated more jobs than it ever had previously. The necessary imports poured in, yet export-earning imports had not poured out, one more case to confuse economists and other experts who knew that growing imports ought to mandate growing exports, and were in the presence, instead, of economic growth seemingly detached from an export-import part of a relevant economy.

  It wasn’t “seemingly” detached, it really was detached from the city’s import-export economy. The Los Angeles economy had unpredictably and suddenly taken to earning imports by a different method. It was engaging in a torrent of replacements of the city’s funds of previously earned imports: an explosion of import replacements with local production for local markets.

  The enterprises adopting the “unconventional” tactic were always small to begin with, much smaller than the old, shrinking exporting firms. They were also improvising. They consisted of very few proprietors and workers, anywhere from two or three to forty-someth
ing. They started in corners of old loft buildings with cheap rents, in Quonset huts and backyard garages, in basements and living rooms. They poured forth sliding doors, china, mechanical saws, shoes, bathing suits, underwear, futons, sleeping bags and other frugal furnishings, cameras, hand tools, hospital equipment, scientific instruments, engineering services and hundreds of other things. One-eighth of all the new businesses started in the United States during the latter half of the 1940s were started in Los Angeles. Not all were replacing former imports, but most were. Not all were successful, but many were—some stunningly. For example, a company making sliding doors for local house builders was started in 1948 by a young engineer who had left his previous job in the materials laboratory of Douglas Aircraft to manufacture a furnace that soon was obsolete. He then started the door business in a Quonset hut with a young architect as partner. They succeeded locally, and by 1955 were exporting doors far and wide. It had become the biggest exporter of glass doors in the United States.*5

  A DISTINCTLY CITY PHENOMENON

  We are concerned here with a force of enormous social power and economic might. Los Angeles’s experience of its unequivocal force was not singular. Allowing for cultural and other differences separating sixteenth-century England and twentieth-century America, the enigma of Los Angeles seems to have occurred in London at a time when both the foreign and domestic imports of that city were shrinking drastically from differing causes. Nobody knows when London experienced its first growth burst, but it was before London was granted a royal charter to collect its own taxes. Starting, nevertheless, in the late sixteenth century and pushing into the seventeenth, London experienced a notable growth explosion. A case could be made that the golden age of Elizabethan England and the initial voyages of its great explorers depended on the growth explosion. How poor London would have been without it.