From Planetizen — The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking"

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Michael Mehaffy refuted the contrarians and clarified Jacobs' lasting "Top 10" observations found in the incredibly influential book. 

MICHAEL MEHAFFY Planetizen Dec. 15, 2011 Just now we are nearing the end of the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs' hugely influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The year has seen a remarkable series of re-assessments and, in some cases, revisionisms. Planner Thomas Campanella has criticized Jacobs' "evisceration" of planning,which created a vacuum into which privatizing interests rushed; economist Ed Glaeser has argued that Jacobs fed gentrification with her call for preservation of some old buildings instead of all new towers; and sociologist Sharon Zukin attacked Jacobs' alleged fantasy of the "social-less" urban block. Most recently, my friend Anthony Flint suggested that Jacobs was a libertarian with a mixed legacy of NIMBYism.

What I find remarkable about these accounts – speaking as an instructor who regularly uses her texts - is that in almost all cases these were things that Jacobs herself simply never said. Read more: The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking" | Planetizen: The Urban Planning, Design, and Development Network

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapters six, seven

Trading, taking, monstrous hybrids and anomalies. Street gangs and organized crime, Mafia, Columbia drug cartels, Neopolitan Camorra, Hong Kong crime associations are examined. How does organized crime fit — or not fit — into the scheme of two survival systems, the guardian and the commercial? Exhibiting essentially guardian habits and characteristics; loyalty, hierarchy, use of force; they have in common an involvement in trade, resulting in "monstrous hybrids." 

The centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union comes in for special attention—

If you put economic planning into guardian hands you get economic planning for guardian priorities. The planning apparatus that presided over these [Soviet] investments, in itself, a pork barrel providing millions and millions of desirable jobs, increasingly for their own sake, not because they were pulling their weight creating viable production and commerce.

Or as the joke went up and down Eastern Europe, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." 

Law and agriculture are anomalies and are seen as subversive of the systems but interestingly art's provenance "seems to come from both taking and trading ... and its difficulties different from those of commerce and guardianship" To come: a discussion of "casts of mind."

The Economy of Cities

Jane Jacob's economics thought is often condensed as something called "import replacement." More accurately it can be said to be summed up as an economic self-replicating ecosystem. Better yet, as "new work added to old." Her hypothesis in The Economy of Cities is that there are three ways, and only three ways that she was able to uncover, by which a city's economy grows and prospers—" 

• By adding export work to other people's local work;
• By adding export work to different local work of their own;
• By exporting their own local work." 

"The significant fact about these processes is that they all depend directly on local economies... these are the only ways I have been able to discover. Indeed it soon becomes exceedingly tiresome to read the business histories of exporting organizations because their narrative plots are so few. One might be reading the same three novels over and over again." Chapter 6, How Large Cities Generate Exports.

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapters four, five

“…science needs the same values and precepts as commerce. Honesty is the bedrock of science. Moral rules for research are: don’t lie, don’t deceive or cheat under any circumstances; if you’re making reasoned guesses, say so and lay out your reasons.

“Voluntary agreement is the agreement that counts among scientists. Forced agreement to findings or conclusions is worse than useless. Science thrives on dissent for the sake of the task. Any theory is thus only provisionally true in science. It’s understood that theories can’t be proved; they can only be disproved. An accepted theory is merely one not yet proved false—and the possibility always exists that it may be."

The group is unable to disprove Kate's hypothesis of two moral syndromes, the commercial and the guardian, examining the kibbutz in Israel, the Scandinavian welfare states, communist Eastern Europe.  And they prepare in Chapter 5 to take a closer look next at the Guardian System.

Of particular interest to me is Chapter 5's examination of historical cultural expressions of an aversion to commerce. 

In the days of chivalry, a man was unfit for knighthood if he had a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent on either side who had been a merchant or a craftsman, 'in trade', as they said. Shameful, base. contaminating. But why? The doings of craftsmen and merchants are so innocent compared with making wars, pillaging, extorting, persecuting, executing, censoring, holding prisoners for ransom and monopolizing land at the expense of serfs, peons or slaves—all honorable activities for people who would sooner have died than sink into trade. 

Consistent throughout the research that lead to the identification of the two Systems of Survival, as the syndromes are also called in Chapter Four, is the recurrence of the value in the guardian syndrome 'shun trading.' Contemporary examples include class attitudes that, for instance, ascribe a moral superiority to a non-profit enterprise, and class attitudes of distinguishing "inferior new money from superior old money cleansed of commercial taint by the passage of generations and time."

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapter three

Armbruster's  group has been unable to identify behaviour systems other than the two presented by Kate. In Chapter Two they get a little help from Plato. In The Republic says Jacobs, or rather her speaker Armbruster, Plato "or rather, his speaker Socrates... takes pains to distinguish between two great, major groups of occupations and their purposes, precisely to disentangle their contradictory virtues from one another... He said both are necessary... the commercial occupations to supply everybody's physical needs and also support the guardians, presumably by taxation.

"The guardians are the Moral Syndrome B people... Police, soldiers, government policy makers and rulers... They're necessary to protect the state from corruption within and enemies outside... I propose you call Syndrome A 'commercial' and Syndrome B 'guardian'."

The chapter continues with the group  discussing in more detail the Commerce Syndrome and it's precepts, their purposes and origins and instances where this system contradicts, or seems to contradict the values listed in the Guardian Syndrome.

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapter two

In Chapter 1 Jacobs explores concerns which also surface in her later books Dark Age Ahead and The Nature of Economies. The erosion of the trust and honesty on which so much of our civic life is based, high on her list. In a conversation with a friend in the neighbourhood recently, he was telling me about his aid work in places like Haiti, Kenya, Nigeria and experience in his consulting work with Canadian First Nations. It all comes down to trust, it's all built on trust. It took a long time in Haiti for instance for his group to build trust. After they delivered a couple of hundred houses locals they were working with said, almost surprised, you did what you said you would. They'd seen lots of promises with no results from many others. Here in my small city on the east coast of Vancouver Island there has been an unbroken line of big promises and adrenaline (and testosterone) loaded plans that failed to launch. Trust badly damaged between citizens and their City Hall, by what is widely seen as exclusive secret backroom dealings.  Trust easily broken and extremely difficult to repair.

Characteristically, Jacobs examines deeply and objectively ideas which can be seen as "old fashioned" and have fallen from current favour (more on that later). Ideas like values, ethics, morality that more often than not have been appropriated and manipulated by forces of organized religion, government or by our own unexamined self-government. Without the slightest proselytizing or preaching, she asks with an anthropologist's discipline, how did they come about? What are their origins? How do they contribute to systems that support and moderate human life?

In Chapter 2 Kate delivers her findings. She circulates a mystifying sheet that contains two columns she has titled Moral Syndrome A and B. Under each heading a list of what she calls precepts. Here we get to the heart of it, we begin to see what Jacobs is up to. From the introduction: "This book explores the morals and values that underpin viable working life. Like the other animals, we find and pick up what we can use, and appropriate territories. But unlike the other animals, we also trade and produce for trade. Because we possess these two radically different ways of dealing with our needs, we also have two radically different systems of morals and values—both systems valid and necessary."

From the notes: The precepts are a compilation and refinement of "esteemed behaviour" notes I've made over a period of some fifteen years. Initially I conceived of the two precept groups as embodying "trader" and "raider" morality, and was laggard at recognizing that "raider" precepts are as morally valid as traders', and are grounded in legitimate territorial concerns.

Kate, for the previous four weeks, has been reading broadly and extensively, gathering "three kinds of evidence... behaviour extolled as admirable... behaviour expected or proper... behaviour deemed scandalous, disgraceful or criminal," assigning to each a precept such as "respect contracts" and "exert prowess." These behavioural observations began to be clearly associated one with the other and the two distinct syndromes emerged. Wikipedia notes here.

.@1sidewalkballet Systems of Survival was a mind-opening book ... essential reading for anyone who wants to improve how we govern ourselves.

— Stephen Wickens (@StephenWickens1) July 1, 2015

@MarcoLangzi Yes, as "traders" we build trust whereas our "raider" (guardian) selves quite rightly build admirable traits like loyalty.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) July 2, 2015

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapter one

"My personal favourite is Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Although written in the dialogue format, which some readers find irksome, this is a demanding, profound book that raises for me so many important questions about the values that underpin the different functions necessary to contemporary life." From: Mary Rowe on cities, nature, and chaotic systems — Mary Rowe Dir, Urban Resilience and Livability, Municipal Art Society NYC 

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... the old oracle said,

"All things have two handles:

beware of the wrong one."

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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I was sure Systems of Survival would be a difficult read. In fact it’s in the form of an engaging dialogue, the form she also used for her 2000 book The Nature of Economies.

Retired publisher Armbruster invites 5 friends and colleagues to discuss something troubling him: that “the web of trust [and honesty] upon which so much depends, is in a deplorable state.” He opens with an anecdote about taking a consulting fee he’d been paid in Hanover Germany to a local bank for transfer to his home bank in New York City. He realized later he’d turned over to a stranger a sum of money in return for a piece of paper written in a language he couldn’t understand and that he no concern that the funds wouldn’t be in his home account when he needed them. From this observation of unquestioned trust he also notes widespread and well known examples of “chicanery and avarice” and examples of every day folks “conspiring with dishonesty when it seems to benefit them.”

When he returned to NYC he researches examples of “embezzlement… fraud… collusion… kickbacks… cheating... bill padding… insider trading and stock manpulation… patent infringement… lies and coverups… With the exception of some of the embezzlers… these were all crimes committed by business owners or managers, bent on victimizing other enterprises, or else their own workers, their own customers, their own suppliers, or the public at large.”

Armbruster “dangles the bait” and they all agree with more and less enthusiasm to continue the discussion in four weeks time when academic, animal behaviour researcher Kate will present the first report to the group, a report to “identify our systems or systems of moral behaviour concerned with work. [For instance] What sort of rules safeguard the security of moving money around? We know honest accounting is one, but we also know it’s fragile…. Just some thinking about the commonplace norms we purport to depend on."

In the mail this morning...

In the mail this morning... pic.twitter.com/RflkqcaPej

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 10, 2015

@1sidewalkballet Sorry for the confusion this post caused. By way of explanation: these are books. Like in your old uncle’s den.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

And they came in the mail but not that mail, they were delivered by a postie. That’s not an avatar or a meme or a metaphor.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

A real postie, knocked on my door with a pleasant greeting and said I have a package for you. These books are what was in the package. OK?

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend — Discovering the sociability, the congeniality of the city

In this excerpt from Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the first book of the four Neapolitan novels, the 12 year old Elena spends the day with her father. She has qualified for high school and he wants to be sure she knows how to navigate the city to get to her new school. Her neighbourhood has been her entire world up to this point, a place described as violent—feuds and recriminations, domestic violence. This is her father's day to day world, he's a porter at city hall. She observes in him traits of habit and character that he never displayed at home or in the neighbourhood. And through observing her father she experiences a very different world, a world of civility, courtesy, congeniality. She witnesses and documents what Jane Jacobs said were the "sidewalk contacts [that] are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow." To my reading Ferrante's account through the eyes of her 12 year old protagonist rivals Jane Jacobs' description of the "sidewalk ballet" of her New York Hudson Street neighbourhood.

The boundaries of the neighbourhood faded in the course of that summer. One morning my father took me with him. Since I was enrolling in high school, he wanted me to know what public transportation I would have to take and what route when I went in October to the new school.

It was a beautiful, very clear, windy day. I felt loved, coddled, to my affection for him was added a crescendo of admiration. He knew the enormous expanse of the city intimately, he knew where to get the metro or a tram or a bus. Outside he behaved with a sociability a relaxed courtesy, that at home he almost never had.

He was friendly toward everyone, on the metro and the buses, in the offices, and he always managed to let his interlocutor know that he worked for the city and that, if he liked, he could speed up practical matters, open doors.

We spent the whole day together, the only one in our lives. I don’t remember any others. He dedicated himself to me, as if he wanted to communicate to me in a few hours everything useful he had learned in the course of his existence. He showed me Piazza Garibaldi and the station that was being built: according to him it was so modern that the Japanese were coming from Japan to study it—in particular the columns—and build an identical one in their country. But he confessed that he liked the old station better, he was more attached to it. Ah well, Naples, he said had always been like that: it’s cut down, it’s broken up, and then it’s rebuilt, and the money flows and creates work.

He took me along Corso Garibaldi, to the building that would be my school. He dealt in the office with extreme good humour, he had the gift of congeniality, a gift that in the neighbourhood and at home he kept hidden. He boasted of my extraordinary report card to a janitor whose wedding witness, he discovered on the spot, he knew well. I heard him repeating often: everything in order? Or: everything that can be done is being done. He showed me Piazza Carlo III, the Albergo dei Poveri, the botanical garden, Via Foria, the museum. He took me on Via Constantinopoli, to Port’Alba, to Piazza Dante, to Via Toledo. I was overwhelmed by the names, the noise of the traffic, the voices, the colours, the festive atmosphere, the effort of keeping everything in mind so I could talk about it later with Lila, the ease with which he chatted with the pizza maker from whom he bought me a pizza melting with ricotta, the fruit seller from whom he bought me a yellow peach. Was it possible that only our neighbourhood was filled with conflicts and violence, while the rest of the city was radiant, benevolent?

He took me to see the place where he worked, in Plaza Municipio. There, too, he said, everything had changed, the trees had been cut down, everything was broken up: now see all the space, the only old thing left is the Maschio Angioino, but it’s beautiful, little one, there are two real males in Naples, your father and that fellow there. We went to the city hall, he greeted that person and that, everyone knew him. With some he was friendly, and introduced me, repeating yet again that in school I had gotten nine in Italian and nine in Latin; with others he was almost mute, only, indeed, yes, you command and I obey.

From Brain Pickings — A Love Letter to Jane Jacobs, Tucked Inside a Graphic Biography of Robert Moses

...make no mistake — Moses was no holy hero. The deep flaws of his power-hungry character and the dehumanizing ruthlessness of his industrial vision reveal themselves gradually and crescendo midway through the book as his counterpoint emerges: Jane Jacobs, legendary patron saint of urbanism and the human-centered city, enters the scene, via the beloved bicycle on which she was known to roam the city. 

Read more: How New York Became New York: A Love Letter to Jane Jacobs, Tucked Inside a Graphic Biography of Robert Moses | Brain Pickings

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From The Daily Beast — ‘The Power Broker’ Turns 40: How Robert Caro Wrote a Masterpiece

September 16, 2014. Forty years ago today, Caro’s magisterial 1,296-page life of New York master builder Robert Moses rewrote the rules of biography.

In the spring of 1974, after Robert A. Caro had finished writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York—a seven-year ordeal that took the book through three publishers and two editors and nearly bankrupted Caro—the first-time author got a surprise phone call from his agent, Lynn Nesbit.

“I submitted the book to The New Yorker,” she told him, “and Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, who was then the editor of The New Yorker] told me he's never read anything like it, and he's going to publish more of it than he's ever published of any book.” Read more: ‘The Power Broker’ Turns 40: How Robert Caro Wrote a Masterpiece - The Daily Beast

Julie Campoli — Made for Walking and Visualizing Density

Julie Campoli combines design projects with research, writing and teaching using a planner’s perspective and a designer’s sensibility to help people understand the built environment and the processes that shape it. Her study of land settlement patterns led to an exhaustive look at the issue of density. Visualizing Density was a five year project sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to develop tools for understanding density — the issues, the role of design, and overcoming public opposition. The components of the project are: a book containing a “density catalog” of 1,000 images of neighborhoods across the country, a workshop for planning and design professionals, and an interactive web site.

Sample chapter and video at Julie Campoli – Made for Walking and, co-authored with Alex S. MacLean Visualizing Density.

“We haven't had a free market in real estate for 80 yrs.”—Ellen Dunham-Jones Retrofitting Suburbia from @thehappycity http://t.co/LTGBrNT8qW
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) December 7, 2013

From Kaid Benfield's Blog — The Ten Steps of Walkability

In Jeff Speck’s excellent new book, Walkable City, he suggests that there are ten keys to creating walkability. Most of them also have something to do with redressing the deleterious effects caused by our allowing cars to dominate urban spaces for decades. I don’t necessarily agree with every detail, and my own list might differ in some ways that reflect my own experience and values. But it’s a heck of a good menu to get city leaders and thinkers started in making their communities more hospitable to walkers.

Read more: The ten steps of walkability | Kaid Benfield's Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

From The Atlantic Cities — What It Really Takes to Foster an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

RICHARD FLORIDA Innovation and entrepreneurship are the engines of economic growth. For decades now, cities and communities across the United States have tried to infuse themselves with those two properties by emulating Silicon Valley, a never-ending quest to become the next Silicon Somewhere. Brad Feld’s terrific new book, Startup Communities, takes us inside the real ecologies of innovation and entrepreneurship. Feld, co-founder of venture capital firm Foundry Group, serves on the boards of numerous high-tech companies. He recently chatted with Cities about his new book.

Read more: What It Really Takes to Foster an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem - Technology - The Atlantic Cities

Sitting on a bridge, laughing out loud at @clmarohn 's 'Thoughts on Strong Towns'. Can we make this required reading for... everyone?
— Erika Ragsdale (@erikarags) November 3, 2012

Thoughts on Building Strong Towns

Charles Marohn is a Professional Engineer (PE) and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). He has a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute. He is the author of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns (Volume 1).

He combines these essentially geeky credentials with an urbanist's sensibility. He's interested in the creation of healthy neighbourhoods, in building community. He questions and challenges his engineering colleagues, analyzing costs/benefits of road infrastructure projects particularly in the medium and long term. The existing development model that dates from the years after WWII, "creates modest short-term benefits and massive long-term costs," he says.

Today's  municipalities' drive to create new growth to keep up with the costs of earlier infrastructure amounts to a "Ponzi scheme". And. as we all know, Ponzi schemes come to unpleasant and abrupt ends. He claims no magic bullet solution but offers clear eyed perspective and outlines the mostly self-evident measures that need to be taken without delay. We knew prior to building this unsustainable car oriented model how to build strong  neighbourhoods, communities, towns. We need to take a look back to learn how to repair some of the damage done.

I've recommended to our Mayor and Council here in Nanaimo (a laboratory in which to study the damage done to neighbourhoods by sprawl, malls and busy arterial roads) to read Marohn's Thoughts on Building Strong Towns and ask their senior managers, planners and engineers to brief them on whether in their opinion he's got it wrong and if so, how. And what if he's right?

Vancouver Urban Forum — Edward Glaeser and Architect James Cheng

Architect Cheng's repurposing proposal for the long despised Sears building (aka the ‘Great White Urinal’) in downtown Vancouver is to be unveiled today. Here's a terrific chat at the recent Vancouver Urban Forum between Cheng and Harvard economist Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City — How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier.

From Ciudades a escala humana — The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs

Is Jane Jacobs a commonplace? How is it possible that ideas developed some decades ago, in a very different world, are in the spotlight? What makes Jane Jacobs’ thoughts so appealing today? Is it justified? These are some of the questions addressed in this complication of articles edited by Sonia Hirt and Diane Zahm (associate professors in urban affairs and Planning at the college of architecture and urban studies at Virginia Tech)in an interdisciplinary and international (with case studies from Beirut, Kansas or Chiang Mai) review of the impact of Jane Jacobs´ intellectual and activist work. 

Read more: Ciudades a escala humana: The urban wisdom of Jane Jacobs

Vancouver Urban Forum Video ―Edward Glaeser

More videos at: http://globalcivic.org/vancouver-urban-forum/videos/