by Jane Jacobs
Or consider the growth pattern of Paris. In the twelfth century Paris had been no more important than half a dozen other French commercial and manufacturing cities. But during the thirteenth century Paris unpredictably became five or six times the size of the next largest city in the realm. Again, growth of exports doesn’t account for that episode, nor does royal favor account for it. The city’s promotion to France’s major city and, after that to the permanent royal or capital city, followed the growth explosion that bestowed urban dominance.
New York’s growth explosions followed so rapidly upon one another that from 1820 to 1930 it was either entering, experiencing or ending (with much disorder and anxiety) a growth explosion. Early in that period, it supplanted older and richer Boston and Philadelphia as the preeminent U.S. city.
In classical times, a comment by Herodotus implied that he recognized this mighty sporadic force, saw it as a distinctly city phenomenon, but took it for granted.*6 Until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which idealized Reason and Science as the human talents that legitimized mankind’s lordship over the earth and all its fruits and creatures, most earthly phenomena were considered either inexplicable or projections of inscrutable supernatural decisions. Catherine the Great was an early disciple of the Enlightenment (Voltaire himself was her mentor) and a fan of Reason, at least in the abstract. An exasperated Catherine looked at the distribution of work in the world she knew, and wrote:
Most of our factories are in Moscow, probably the least advantageous spot in all Russia. It is dreadfully overpopulated and the workers become lazy and dissolute….On the other hand, hundreds of small towns are crumbling in ruins….Why not transport a factory to each of them, according to the produce of the district and the quality of the water? The workmen would be more industrious and the towns would flourish.*7
Catherine was not asking the hard questions: Where did the factories that bloated Moscow come from? And what if there weren’t enough for all those crumbling towns?
REASON AND PROGRESS TAKE ON THE CITY
Growth bursts and explosions have seldom been welcomed by people taking serious responsibility for city livability and finances. City boosters without responsibility for public affairs or, to use a fine old term, the common good, are another matter. It is easy to understand the hostility of responsible people. Unplanned and unpredictable, the bursts and explosions heedlessly ruin good agricultural land and ecological treasures at city outskirts. They obliterate previously established city amenities and convenience. They overwhelm the capacities of existing infrastructures and those that have been planned for future needs, from schools and sewer systems to adequate transportation systems and tidily operating institutions of government. They drive up land prices, drive out facilities that no longer have expansion room on which they had counted, drive away residents who no longer recognize their home communities nor feel at home in them. As a final outrage, at just about the time when compromises and makeshifts start to corral chaos, the growth rate can plummet as suddenly and unpredictably as it appeared, leaving forecasts embarrassingly deflated. City growth patterns, in sum, are messy and leave messes in their wake. They insult trust in order and offend authority of all kinds; perhaps that is their most unpardonable perversity.
In modern times, I firmly believed, many experts with better educations than mine, and sharper or quicker minds, must have become aware of such striking and commonplace phenomena as city growth bursts and explosions. How could they not have become aware? And some among these savants must have asked themselves the same questions for which I sought simple, direct answers: What starts a growth explosion? What terminates it? What is going on during its frenetic activity? (And one more generalized question: why is this a city pattern of growth?) So I airily supposed I could pick up, ready-made, the information I sought. Good. I wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
I was wrong.
Because of my job at the time, as a writer and a sub-editor for an architectural and planning magazine, I was able to speak readily with highly respected city experts in the United States to see how Reason and Progress were doing in North America. No matter what their nationalities, they all agreed on their aim of defeating the nasty way cities grow. Their ideas of how to accomplish this were sometimes far out. Some advocated forcing cities to take the form of long, narrow, densely settled strings. Others preferred cookie-cutter (meaning standardized) configurations located at major expressway intersections. That was a favorite of my own editor. Of course, eccentricities like these went nowhere except as fads to spice up international conferences and journalists’ feature stories. My program of learning about the peculiar but commonplace city growth pattern went nowhere too.
Whether in person or in print, the experts I consulted were much too reasonable and too pressed by their ongoing important tasks to waste time investigating what they already knew was irrational. I heard a lot from them about city growth, but only from the viewpoint of beating Reason and Science into cities. They generously and patiently instructed me in what they were doing: in sum, they were creating, refining and touting ways and means of putting work where they reasoned that it belonged and squelching it where they reasoned it didn’t. Catherine would have been proud of them all. The experts were laboring at the hard and absorbing work of preventing city growth explosions from happening, or thwarting them if they started.
The experts and their colleagues and graduate students worked out elaborate master plans for cities and their regions, and nation and continent-wide transportation plans, and worked even harder at getting these accepted and funded. They contrived for cities and suburbs anti-city zoning codes, outlawing high densities and high ground coverages and mandating segregated land uses such as shopping in controllable malls, and housing tracts so uncontaminated by any other land uses that cars became necessities merely to get on with life. To get all this worked out effectively, financed and enforced was a big, big task; it amounted to means of creating sprawl, no trivial achievement.
If it seemed to the tidy-minded experts that more was needed, including injections of charm, New Towns and Garden Cities were planned and some were built to try and attract factories or other work places. Greenbelts were mapped as barriers to city growth bursts and explosions.
I believe in Reason and Progress too. We still dwell in the period of the Enlightenment, and as a human being I appreciate deeply the benefits Reason and Science have given to beneficiaries fortunate enough to receive them. But it did not seem plausible to me that a growth pattern so stubborn, evident over such long periods, responding to some mysterious clock of its own, could occur for No Reason. Surely, the operation of Cause and Effect had not been abolished, and that was all I was seeking—causes and effects of a commonplace phenomenon.I believe in Reason and Progress too….It did not seem plausible to me that a growth pattern so stubborn, evident over such long periods, responding to some mysterious clock of its own, could occur for No Reason.
I was already suspicious of the quality of Reason being applied to cities. From my experience of daily living and raising children in a large city (New York) I was not convinced that the diagnoses and prescriptions of the experts whom I consulted and whose advice and its consequences were being demonstrated were giving cities, their people and their businesses the help and improvements they needed; on the contrary, they were being harmed.*8
Another thing: the experts I consulted or read were united in assuming that the growth explosions they were battling were a pushover. This is not true. Every now and again, the magazine on which I worked carried inspirational essays, the purpose of which was that given sufficient (but not exorbitant) public funding plus society’s determination and enough political guts, the willful ways of cities could handily be suppressed. Come on guys! We can do it! It’s not that hard! People who kid themselves are not trustworthy guides through the complicated mazes of reality.
From early childhood I had liked cities; they contained so many surprising and interesting pe
ople and things to see and think about. It was no treat, then, seeing them described as carriers of a disease called Blight and, later on, as being a disease, Cancer, requiring radical surgery:
You are in effect suggesting that an old surgeon give public judgment on the work of a confident but sloppy novice, operating to remove an imaginary tumor to which the youngster has erroneously attributed the patient’s affliction, whilst over-looking major impairments in the actual organs. Surgery has no useful contribution to make in such a situation, except to sew up the patient and dismiss the bungler….*9
LUCKY FRACTALS
With my progress stalled, in spite of several years of diligent interviews and reading, I turned to other interests and shoved my paltry findings into a dead-storage bin for abandoned puzzles in the back of my mind, drawn wistfully forth now and again to scan for another clue. There the discard would probably have stayed permanently had I not, entirely by chance, bumped into a revivifying fractal in the marvelous pre-computer card catalogue in the New York Public Library’s main reading room….
“I keep coming across references to fractals,” said Hortense, “but what are they? And why should we care about them?”
“They’re complicated-looking patterns that are actually made up of the same motif repeated on different scales,” said Kate. “For instance, a muscle is a twisted bundle of fibers. Dissect out any one of those fiber bundles, and you find that it, too, is a twisted bundle of fibers. And so on. When you get down to the irreducibly smallest fiber, which you need an electron microscope to see, you find that it’s a twisted strand of molecules. That’s a real-life fractal. Mathematicians make computer-generated fractals, fascinating in their complexity and seeming variety, yet each fractal is made of repetitions.”
“We should care about fractals,” said Hiram, “because lots of things that seem impossible to comprehend become more understandable if we identify the basic pattern and watch what it produces through repetition. It’s a way of dealing with some complexities that otherwise are impenetrable—the way development as we’ve described it was impenetrable to Aristotle.”*10
Although fractals were new to me too, I felt that I had always known about them because of a nursery ditty for English-speaking toddlers:
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
Maybe all we need to put this macroeconomic puzzle together is the fact of repetition at different scales.
My lucky fractal, which revived my interest in the city growth puzzle, had been published in 1925. It told that in the late nineteenth century Japan’s economy had been suffering severely from cheap Western imports with which Japan could not compete or could not make at all. Among the imports were bicycles. They had become enormously popular in big Japanese cities, where shops to repair them had sprung up. In Tokyo the repairs were done in large numbers of one- and two-man shops. Imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles were too valuable to cannibalize for parts.
Many repair shops thus found it worthwhile, themselves, to make repair parts—not too difficult if its mechanics specialized on one kind of part, as many did. In this way, groups of shops were almost doing the work of making whole bicycles.
That step was taken by bicycle assemblers who bought parts on contract from repairmen. Far from being costly to develop, bicycle manufacturing in Japan paid its way right through the development stages. The Tokyo-assembled bicycles were even more popular than the foreign imports had been because they cost less. They were financially feasible. Moreover, most of the work of making production equipment was added too, gradually and as rising sales warranted.
The Japanese got much more than a bicycle industry, the report pointed out. They had acquired a pattern for breaking complex manufacturing work into relatively simple fragments in autonomous shops. The method was rapidly used to produce other popular imported products, such as sewing machines, and was still being used in 1925, said the report.
This fractal did not electrify me because it was about bicycles but because it was about a process, the commonplace phenomenon I call city import replacement. It appeared to be the launching point of a quite complex process that organizes macroeconomies, guides how they operate, and shapes smaller microeconomies that are creatures of the great macroeconomies. I was already familiar with the plot line of this import-replacement story because I had already encountered it repeatedly in American and European cities, but the narrative in this case was less sketchy; it told me so much. It told why the replacement of an import had been financially so feasible.
What does financial feasibility mean in import replacement? It means that the replacements are not so expensive (nor so ineptly made) that they cost as much or more than the imported versions. Complete bicycle manufacturing in Tokyo might have proved to be infeasible had its entrepreneurs attempted to copy the model presented, say, by the contemporary plant of the large American bicycle trust in Hartford, Connecticut. It was financially successful, too, and a tempting model, but it would have required the Japanese to import many expensive machines to begin with, and also required them either to pay for imported management services or to send Japanese managers abroad for training.
However, by using manufacturing methods tailored to Tokyo’s already existing capacities—a creative thing to do—the assemblers and their suppliers made the work economically feasible.
The new work’s location itself gave it two major assets: The first asset was the existing pool of customers right at hand to form a worthwhile market. The second was the existence of germane skills capable of undertaking the work. Moreover, the possessors of these skills did not need to search each other out; they already formed a known community, a network. These two assets were a basic existing foundation for the financially viable new departure. That is why I call this commonplace phenomenon city import replacement.
At this point the alert and skeptical reader becomes impatient. “This is just a long-winded way of saying that import-substitution benefits a country financially. Everybody knows that already. Besides it doesn’t work. Back in the 1970s import-substitution bankrupted Uruguay. It’s all about supplies, right? Well that substitution program was devised and supervised by the best teams of supply-side economists in America, and they took into consideration a lot more things than I’ve just heard from you.”*11
Yes, I’ll get around to that fiasco in due course. The many things it took into account were beside the point. What its sponsors did not take into account were the long-winded explanations of necessary basic assets found in cities.
What other assets does financial viability include? Savings could be made in transportation costs which had to be absorbed by customers, and were partly eliminated by city import replacements. It also means that local costs had to leave enough margin to pay for extra bicycle supplies now needed by Tokyo assemblers; say, steel for framework, rubber for tires, leather for seats, and who knows what finicky items for production machinery when it became justified by growing sales.
“This undermines global trade,” fumes the alert and skeptical reader, who is now more skeptical than alert. “When Tokyo began making its own bicycles, former exporters to Tokyo lost business, and global trade must have shrunk.”
No. Here is where import-shifting, the third commonplace phenomenon I mentioned, comes into the equation. Tokyo did not import less in value than it otherwise would or could as a result of its city import replacement. It shifted some of its purchases from elsewhere. This was, in part, automatic and unavoidable. As already mentioned, the bike assemblers needed extra imports like steel, rubber and leather they hadn’t required before. As bicycle sales increased, growing numbers of workers automatically required more food, clothing, shelter and other consumer goods and services for themselves and their dependents than the Tokyo economy previously needed. Look at it this way. After the Tokyo economy began making its own bicycles, the city had everything i
t possessed before the event: as many or more bicycles and the basic assets that made the bicycles’ success possible, plus the city’s extra shifted imports. The source of the shifted import purchases differed, also their composition, but because they were an add-on the world’s trade and the world’s economy, taken as a whole, had not shrunk; it had expanded a little.*12
Let’s return to unaccountable growth bursts and explosions. One of my main questions had answered itself of its own accord: Why is the peculiar city growth pattern a city phenomenon? Answer: because smaller and simpler settlements lack both existing pools of customers and existing production capability to replace those same imports. But another mysterious question remained: why do the bursts always eventually subside?
THE DIS-ANTHROPOMORPHISM OF THE ECONOMY
Here is my hypothesis for a city growth burst or explosion: The settlement begins like any other; it finds an export successful enough to earn the imports it needs. It grows gradually and slowly, but sooner or later it generates a few more exports, and, therefore, also more imports. Eventually it acquires an import it can make for itself, and it does so.
The embryonic city grows until it contains enough potential customers, and at the same time a large enough collection of people with skills and experience to make another, or several more, of the settlement’s imports for itself using the same basic principles as the bicycle assemblers in the fractal.