Jane Jacobs

New York: Randomhouse, 2004. 256 pages, hardcover. $23.95

Jonathan Swift thought he lived in an age of decline, as did John Ruskin, T.S. Eliot, and the Roman satirist Juvenal (who, of course, eventually proved correct). The fear of decline is central to our culture. The past few years, even before September 11th, produced a rash of new Jeremiads, from Paul Fussell’s wittily stoic BAD to the grim, scholastic monasticism of Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture.

Jane Jacobs’s newest book, Dark Age Ahead, repeats this age-old–and now fairly commonplace–warning that our civilization may be in for it. She attempts to explain how a vibrant civilization can deteriorate so irreversibly as to reach the catastrophic conclusion of a dark age, and vanish without a trace.

Culture, Jacobs points out, must pass continuously from one generation to the next, or else die out. It is largely inculcated not by texts or pictures but in person. This is why schools have teachers in addition to textbooks, why artists work in ateliers, why internships and workplace experience are so valued. Culture persists only if forcefully transmitted and expanded. When this process fails, society enters recursive cycles of decline and forgetfulness. In the most extreme cases, this enlarging spiral ends with society “finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was lost.” The result is a dark age.

Jacobs begins and ends her book examining the reasons that several cultures have waned, including dynastic China, the Fertile Crescent, and various Native American communities. Her examples are original and thought-provoking. But the book falters in its attempt to apply these models to American society, instead cataloging social worries in a gloomy, unoriginal, and unenlightening way.

According to Jacobs, five essential pillars of our society are facing serious rot: community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and other governmental powers, and self-policing by learned professions. The categories are broad and important-sounding, but Jacobs fails to explain how or why these vague concepts support the various institutions of society. She raises concerns–many of them already expressed by other writers in greater depth–but her method is catch-all, which makes any serious analysis of her argument impossible. She says, for example, that community is disappearing. In one sense, she is right: the dense, close-knit, urban communities that once characterized many American towns and cities have indeed disappeared. But have the functions they served simply disappeared, or reappeared in other guises? Her lack of a clear model for how society functions also makes it impossible to understand why she prioritizes different institutions. Why, for example, are strong professional associations more essential than, say, strong legal institutions? Why do science and technology outrank a reliable banking system? Why does a well-structured tax system trump a well-structured military?

Worse, Jacobs rambles terribly. Large parts of the book are occupied with settling old scores. Robert Moses, unsurprisingly, comes in for harsh criticism, as do General Motors and Jacobs’s most implacable adversaries, the traffic engineers. In one particularly heated passage, she compares the construction of the Interstate Highway System to such atrocities as the Inquisition and the sack of Carthage. Elsewhere, she meanders through topics that seem to have caught her eye: a poorly conducted health study by the Center for Disease Control, the scandals of Enron and the Catholic Church, the municipal difficulties of her home city of Toronto. Individually, many of these intellectual cul-de-sacs are thought-provoking, but collectively, they lead nowhere. The arguments seem knitted more by Jacobs’s biases than any consistent intellectual principle. The arguments also often rest on no more solid foundation than her own pessimistic intuition, and intuition is a terrible basis for prophecy.

Were Dark Age Ahead merely the screed of some minor crank, it wouldn’t merit the effort of dismissal. But the book is doubly frustrating for violating what has, in the past, been Jacobs’s great strength. The failure of Dark Age Ahead is that it is a work of deductive reasoning. Jacobs starts from a broad premise–that we as a culture are in for it–and then bustles about gathering tidbits of supporting evidence. It’s an odd turn for an author who has always relied on her unusually keen ability to reason inductively: to observe events and trends with as few preconceptions as possible, and then to assemble models based on her observations.

Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), attacked not only Modernist city planning but also the simplistic, deductive thinking that lay at its roots. At the time, city planning rested upon a few widely held assumptions about how cities should work: that functional uses should be “rationally” sorted and separated, that there should be as much open space as possible, and that streets needed to be rebuilt to handle large quantities of traffic, with pedestrians kept to the open spaces. “Outmoded” city areas such as Boston’s West End and New York’s Lower East Side were cleared and rebuilt according to these “modern” standards–Alas, the newly rebuilt areas were often plagued by worse problems–crime, social disintegration– than what they replaced. Jacobs and Death and Life were central in reversing this trend, starting with a successful campaign she led to ward off the razing of her beloved Greenwich Village. Within fifteen years, city planning by large-scale clearance was dead.

The problem, as Jacobs noted in the introduction to Death and Life, was that city planners and architects had not taken the time to observe how cities functioned. Instead, they preconceived how cities should function. Jacobs’s research method was commonsense: start with observation, and only then begin to look for patterns and, lastly, principles. Ask basic questions: which streets or parks are the safest? Which neighborhoods are vibrant and which aren’t? In short, how does a city function for its inhabitants? City planning theory ought to derive from existing cities, not vice versa. After all, a city is a unique entity, fundamentally different from a suburb or a town (a distinction that many of Jacobs’s followers, particularly the New Urbanists, have ignored). It offers its own problems, and its own possibilities.

What Jacobs found was extraordinary. Cities, when they contain the proper ingredients, act as self-regulating systems in which the activities of individuals simultaneously benefit and reinforce each other. The four ingredients–mixed primary uses, short blocks, old buildings (i.e. cheap space), and high density–are all necessary to create and sustain diversity. They are the conditions necessary to accommodate a variety of people engaging in a variety of different activities, which in turn ensures that the area and its streets will be well-populated at all times of the day and night. “The ballet of Hudson Street”–where she lived in Greenwich Village–is her classic description of such a place. All of the various inhabitants have their place in the ballet through their comings and goings: residents leave for work, store owners open their shops, longshoremen come in for a bite to eat, mothers walk their children. Each does their small part to maintain order on the street; their presence keeps each other safe, and anyone else who should happen to pass through.

The metaphor of a ballet is not exact: a ballet is masterminded by a choreographer while the dance of Hudson Street is improvised. The improvisation of thousands of people, each pursuing their individual plans, is the model for a functioning city. In one form or another, Jacobs has studied this notion of independent, mutually reinforcing activity throughout her career.

The Economy of Cities (1969) explores how urban economies grow and develop, focusing in particular on the ways that new types of work evolve. Again, Jacobs reasoned inductively. She determined which cities had developed vigorously, and which had declined. Jacobs argued from her data that productive city economies grow by acting as immense laboratories for economic trial and error, as people experiment, innovate, and invent new products and new ways of doing business. The key element is not efficiency so much as diversity and fecundity–the same qualities she extolled, in their social dimension, in Death and Life.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) expanded the inquiry to how productive cities affect broader regional and national economies. Again, the question was simple: which areas of the world have prospered, and which have not? Here, she introduced an important distinction, one ignored by too many economists: she focused on “areas” rather than countries. After all, the economy of New York is different from that of the Ozarks, though both are American. Productive cities, Jacobs suggests, are the foundation of virtually all economic development. Only cities offer the variety of types of work, the levels of innovation, the markets, the capital, and the technology necessary for sustained economic growth. As a result, those regions and nations with productive cities flourish, while those without stagnate and decline, even in the face of immense efforts to the contrary.

Death and Life, Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations combine to form a complex and thorough study of the human ecology of cities. For Jacobs, the greatness of cities is not aesthetic but social. Cities offer both community and autonomy, the ability to collaborate and to strike out independently. They are complex, with their own systems of self-regulation, their own means of changing and adapting. They are not merely harbors of disease, hunger, crime, and overcrowding, as so many social critics have historically suggested; they are uniquely suited to solve their own problems. Above all, they are optimistic places, places of maximum possibility, where people are free to make their own plans, pursue their own dreams, create, risk, fail, or succeed.

It is sad to see Jacobs, nearing the end of her career, descend into pessimism. She has never flinched from making harsh criticisms, but she had always evinced a fundamental faith in the ability of humans to divine the roots of their problems and act upon them constructively. Perhaps we are headed towards decline, perhaps not. The future, as ever, is inscrutable. It is also, in some sense, irrelevant: we live in the present, and must confront present problems. If a lesson may be drawn from Jacobs’s career, it is that, in approaching problems intelligently through careful observation, we better equip ourselves to solve them. If businesspeople, planners, and politicians revert to the pre-Jacobs era, seeing cities as abstractions instead of vital, organic places, it will be a dark age ahead indeed.