Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  In place of the goods and services they used to import for their customers, the growing city’s import-replacing industries are now importing much less. The city economy is shifting its imports to the raw materials, semi-finished goods, and auxiliary services that the import-replacing industries need, and also to the food and other necessities, luxuries and services that the much larger number of workers and their dependents now earn or need.

  For hundreds of years economists and proto-economists have seen that settlements, towns, villages, and cities have sold exports to earn imports. They have believed and taught that cities and their economies are export-led, and most of the public has accepted this too. But here is a way of earning imports without gaining exports. The new imports that the city economy is earning are the shifted imports. This is the explanation sought by mystified historians who could not understand how great cities were growing vigorously at times when their exports were not increasing.

  The initial process of replacing city imports with local production continues to use up the imported goods and services available for replacement until this phase comes to an end from shifts to products not suitable for replacement. This can be because they require rural production, because the economy is not yet technically advanced enough, because the city lacks a large enough pool of potential customers, or for other reasons. Having used up its fuel, the little city now must gradually develop new imports plus the capabilities and the capacity to once again ignite a complex chain reaction of import replacing and shifting, made evident by another burst of explosive growth.

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  TO SUM UP: The most radical idea here is that once it gets going the macroeconomy continues by itself, self-organizing like a biological process. A new macroeconomy starts when fractals of an existing economy continue to replace imports, thereby earning imports for the economy. The result is a rapid burst of growth that incrementally expands the world economy as well. When, for a combination of reasons, the fractals of the macro-economy run out of grist for the import-replacing mill, the import shifting decreases and the macroeconomy settles down to another period of gradual growth. This continues until and unless it piles up another collection of imports and the other conditions necessary to set off another burst of import replacing and shifting. The triple process—followed by quiescent periods of indeterminable length—can repeat indefinitely.

  Each time a burst or growth explosion occurs the city experiencing it is much changed. Among the most stunning changes are that it becomes a much larger city and the portion of its economy which is devoted to production for its own people—including its own exporters—becomes enormous in proportion to its import and export economy. It has grown room in its economy for goods and services it never previously had—neither imported nor homemade.

  With each of its enlargements by this method of growth, such a city becomes a sea of activities unique in the world. No other city reproduces its arts, learning, points of view, styles of life and the like. Its influence on its own region and on other cities can be profound; yet paradoxically, it has become a very local economy. Throughout the peculiar growth process that has made this possible, from beginning to end runs a theme of human creativity and human improvisation. The economy responds automatically, according to the intensity of the stimulation and its timing. This is what I mean by the dis-anthropomorphism of the economy.*13

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  *1 By “import replacement,” Jacobs simply means the replacement of products or services that a city once imported with improvised local versions. See “Strategies for Helping Cities” in this volume for a more detailed description of the process, and its connection to innovation.

  *2 This sample is drawn from The Nature of Economies, p. 60. Armbruster was a character in this book and in Systems of Survival. He is a retired publisher—perhaps a nod to her long and close friendship with famed publisher Jason Epstein (1928– )—and in both cases the instigator of the social gathering that is the occasion for the book.

  *3 As Jacobs writes in the first chapter of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was “the most influential economist of this [the twentieth] century” (16). According to her summary, Keynes argued that oversaving could lead to reduced demand and thus economic slowdowns and rising unemployment. To counteract this, he reasoned that governments could use deficit spending to catalyze private spending and thus economic growth.

  *4 According to her son Jim, in Uncovering the Economy Jacobs hoped to further explain the conditions that prompt these explosive bursts of import replacement. First, she surmised that a city must be in the midst of a period of high unemployment. While painful, this downturn acts as a catalyst, increasing the number of people who are available and motivated to undertake new work and test out new ideas. Second, these unemployed entrepreneurs must also have access to enough unrestricted capital, whether through their own savings, family loans, or similar informal mechanisms, to invest in their untested business. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the city must still retain a healthy network of small, diverse producers for these new businesses to draw upon and creatively recombine. For this reason, a city only has a short window after an economic downturn for this self-organizing process to take place. Otherwise, the network of producers begins to break down, and savings dry up. By Jacobs’s reckoning, the rarity of these three conditions appearing together accounts for the similar rarity of explosive city growth.

  *5 This account, Jacobs notes, was condensed from The Economy of Cities, pp. 151–53.

  *6 Jacobs is likely referring to the passage by Herodotus that she uses as the epigraph to The Economy of Cities: “I will [tell] the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my own lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days.”

  *7 This passage comes from Cities and the Wealth of Nations, pp. 103–4.

  *8 Jacobs here notes that the reader should see Death and Life, “which in its entirety was devoted to this subject.”

  *9 Lewis Mumford, letter, October 18, 1961, to a Mr. Wensberg, looking for comment on an article by Jacobs. Reprinted in Max Allen’s edited volume Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs, 96.

  *10 An excerpt from Jacobs’s second essay in dialogue form, The Nature of Economies, 22–23. Kate, Hortense, and Hiram are, like Armbruster, characters in her imagined dialogue.

  *11 This line of argument refers to a now-obscure economic development scheme initiated by the Uruguayan government after it fell on hard times in the 1950s, which Jacobs recounts in Cities and the Wealth of Nations. As its specialized export-based economy of animal products stagnated, Uruguay could no longer afford the imported goods it relied heavily upon, so the government embarked on a program to substitute those imports with local production. However, without “the ranges of skills, the symbiotic nests of producers’ goods and services, and the practice at improvising and adapting” generated by active urban economies—the heart of Jacobs’s version of import-replacement—the scheme failed.

  *12 Jacobs notes that this discussion of the Japanese bicycle industry is drawn from The Economy of Cities, 63–65, 145–50.

  *13 The cover letter accompanying this excerpt that Jane Jacobs sent to her editor, David Ebershoff at Random House, included a table of contents that gives us a glimpse of what else she hoped to accomplish in Uncovering the Economy. Although the project was still in flux, after this opening chapter she imagined eight additional parts to the book, each addressing a different aspect of the “Triple Process” she describes here: a chapter each on the effects of “the Process” on individual cities, groups of cities, and rural places, plus four more on faking, blocking, killing, and living with the Process. The book would end with a reflection on “the Process’s roots in modest attempts by ordinary people to make do with what they have and of improvisation as an integral part of innovation.”

  The End of the Plantation Age />
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  LEWIS MUMFORD LECTURE, CITY COLLEGE, NEW YORK, MAY 6, 2004

  Professor Sorkin, ladies and gentlemen, my ostensible subject tonight is the past, present, and future of office skyscrapers.*1 But my real subject is the troubles induced from false perceptions of what is actually past, present or future. I’ve pinned these ruminations to skyscraper offices—in part to attach them to the tangible, everyday world, and in part because clusters of skyscraper offices and their gorgeous skylines in midtown and lower Manhattan are so central to New Yorkers’ sense of the city’s identity.

  Past, present, and future is an enormous swath. Future is the tense most easily disposed of because nobody can know what it is until it has already happened.

  It has already happened that skyscrapers are no longer the preferred habitats for headquarters of all self-respecting corporations, nor for the legions of workers in administrative, financial, research, design, engineering and marketing jobs associated with corporate headquarters. In the Toronto area, much of this work has decamped to converted factory buildings in the suburbs, and in the United States to suburban office parks. In neither variation is the trend from towers to the suburbs a reaction to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers. In the Toronto area, the new trend began two decades ago and was very well established by the late 1980s.

  In New York the trend began still earlier although the city tried to block it, and sometimes did, by offering corporations, especially those with high public profiles, inducements to stay in the city. So timing tells us that causes other than fears of terrorism must have driven this change.

  The movements of headquarters to the suburbs became possible, of course, and had the cachet of being up-to-date because electronic communications release executives and associated jobs from proximity to other corporations with which they do business and from the law firms, advertising agencies, insurance firms, banks, and employment agencies that serve many enterprises jointly. For face-to-face meetings, a centrally located pied-à-terre is sufficient. This need not even be under corporate ownership or lease. A city restaurant or a hotel or convention meeting room suffices. This has already happened too.

  Economy was another driving force, although it does not explain as much as is commonly supposed. Suburban economy conceals many hidden or denied expenses. Many costs are downloaded on car-dependent workers and their families. Many others, including direct and indirect costs of suburban land use and its redundant infrastructures, fall on taxpayers at large, including tax-paying corporations that move to the suburbs to reduce expenses. The major suburban economy that indisputably remains after all disregarded and denied costs are stripped away is the amplitude and cheapness of suburban car parking, with which downtown offices can never compete.

  Because of reduced demand for space in downtown towers, it has become harder than it was a generation or two ago for developers to land big or rapidly expanding office tenants. This is also why some existing tower space has become available for hotels, residence, studios, and live-work space.

  Simultaneously, suburban offices have been changing. Many are now deliberately designed to maximize contact and understanding among people and departments within the organization. They have become self-involved to the point of becoming introverted. They have also become attractive and interesting to the point of becoming narcissistic, if buildings can be said to be narcissistic. I think they can. Suburban offices can make traditional office cubicles and desk pools in towers look dull and deprived. Maximizing an organization’s self-regard and self-involvement risks minimizing contacts among people with different experiences, knowledge and ambitions. Introversion reduces the number and varieties of unplanned, indeed unplannable encounters.

  Organizational introversion is commonly a precursor to stultification and eventual failure. We say, in retrospect, that the organization got out of touch. All sorts of organizations can get out of touch: royal courts, a manufacturer of men’s shoes or cameras; a department store, a philanthropy. Entire cities can get “out of touch,” usually by fixing too long on an outstanding past success; Akron, Ohio, is sometimes cited as a classic example.*2 Even nations can get out of touch, and often have; usually—but not always—deliberately.

  A designer, engineer or skilled craftsman who works in an attractive suburban office ideally gets speedily and eagerly to the office, parks the car, becomes engrossed in the organization, lunches with colleagues behaving similarly, loads the briefcase into the car for the drive home, having seen or heard nothing the entire day to pique his or her curiosity or jolt an old ambition or new daydream into life.

  Economic developments, and social or cultural developments too, do not arise out of thin air. They are always built upon prior developments, often on a combination of two, three, or more, and upon a society’s capability of building on these, meaning ability to adapt, produce and sustain the new development. But the outcome, particularly if the development is an innovation, is always unpredictable, even to its own originator and the pioneers who believed in it and launched it. The first financially successful railroad in the world was an amusement ride in London.*3 Many of us remember when plastics were useful for little except toys, kitchen gadgets, and decorative touches that tastemakers derided for their vulgarity. That was before strong, lightweight plastics, reinforced with fibers of glass, boron or carbon, replaced metals in some kinds of springs, joints and construction components. These plastics transformed serious spectacle frames like mine. At last I have frames that never hurt my nose and ears, and that last for years without weakened joints. These plastics were originated by makers of tennis rackets and rods for surf and sport fishing. Wonderful!

  I don’t know whether the string of encounters that led from a fishing rod to my spectacle frames included an eavesdropper excited and indiscreet enough to blurt out, “I know somebody you ought to talk to!” It is the kind of thing that happens in a society whose people commonly believe the business of the whole world is their business. That seems to be what developers of the boastful old towers thought: they invited the public in to gape at their grand lobbies, buy newspapers and candy bars, use telephones and ride in their elevators to the roof to share the stunning views.

  Like people who want to become recluses, organizations that genuinely want to be in touch chiefly with themselves will find ways to do so; then costs, distances and locational freedoms are beside the point. We must wonder whether the rapid increases in suburban offices, along with their changing social attitudes, mean that New York’s clusters of office towers are now destined to gradually become faded and thinning remnants of a vanished sensibility and outworn economy.

  Apparently that is to be expected in the short run, but not necessarily in the long run. Less opulent, more diverse and more experimental sorts of tenants than traditionally filled the towers might theoretically save them. After enough oddities wiggle into vacant tower spaces, and into buildings and streets among them and alongside them, New York’s old office districts might become notable economic and cultural incubators. Much as I would like to predict that future, the sooner the better, I can’t do it in good conscience because, as far as I can see, such a change shows no signs of having already happened.

  What I do see—don’t laugh—is cities reinventing agriculture—something so unlikely and counterintuitive that when signs of it are suddenly glimpsed in many cities in a number of countries, it begs to be noticed.

  Don’t try to predict what will come of it, if anything. It’s too early. Maybe gardeners on flat-topped city buildings are merely having fun showing off how they can conserve water and energy while creating beauty. Maybe they are only well-off customers for removable greenhouses and new roofing materials, and well-off suppliers of the freshest vegetables and herbs to in-house restaurants. But maybe it’s actually time for a rerun of the hanging gardens of Babylon, this time omitting the hubris and tower that followed the success of the gardens. Towers are not really the right shape for either sun-
catching or sun-shunning agriculture.

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  NOW I WILL LEAVE the future and digress a long way into the past. But I promise to return to skyscrapers, and physical planning, and think out loud about Lewis Mumford.

  Beginning with the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry some ten or twelve thousand years ago, the Agrarian Age got under way. Those of you who have read Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, will recall Diamond’s brilliant analyses of why the large and dense populations of successful agrarians defeated older hunting and gathering societies and also why agrarians more successful at producing food consistently won military victories over societies less successful at doing so. But even if you have not read Diamond, you are surely aware that foragers have lost out so universally to agrarians that foraging cultures are now almost extinct.

  Greeting card publishers, illustrators of children’s books, buyers of the cards and books, and many others enjoy sentimentalizing agrarian life with jolly portrayals of snug family farms. But in most times and most places, family farms have seldom been able to provide a decent subsistence living even for their proprietary families. And even when they have produced cash crops, the yields have usually been marginal additions to the wealth and power of conquering agrarians.

  Although Diamond does not say so, the powerhouses of agrarian supremacy were plantations. In the Middle East, early plantations supported the earliest empires: Sumer, Babylon, Assyria. In classical Rome and its conquered and annexed territories, large estates owned by large-scale importers and exporters were outproducing Rome’s family farms, which were traditionally lands granted as pensions to military veterans. Family farms were vanishing even before the republic vanished.

  Successful plantations and less successful family farms all but disappeared during the Dark Age that followed Rome’s imperial collapse. When Western Europe emerged from its famous Dark Age about a thousand years ago, it was as territories and cultures organized by warlords and abbots into feudal estates, some of which became agrarian cores of successor European empires.