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How Should We Interpret Jane Jacobs?

Jane Jacobs

At first blush, the enterprise of interpreting the Jane Jacobs’ work might seem like one best left to the proud and peculiar few, or to put it less charitably, those of us with nothing better to do. Yet the forces of history militate against this apathy: Jane Jacobs has emerged as quite possibly the most important figure in North American urban planning in the second half of the twentieth century. Her work is now taught in every urban theory and urban planning program worth its weight in ESRI access codes. She is responsible for introducing hundreds of thousands of people to planning and urbanism (including this author) and continues to shape how many of us think about cities. In one of my more popular blog posts here on Market Urbanism—and in a forthcoming book chapter—I argue that we should interpret Jane Jacobs as a spontaneous order theorist in the tradition of Adam Smith, Michael Polanyi, and F.A. Hayek. Built into her work is a profound appreciation of the importance of local knowledge, decentralized planning, and the spontaneous orders that structure urban life. Needless to say, this is not the prevailing interpretation of the importance and meaning of Jacobs’ work. Two very different alternative interpretations prevail. In this post, I argue that both interpretations are mistaken. Jane Jacobs, Form-Based Coder Many have taken Jacobs’ particular critiques of conventional U.S. zoning, often referred to as “Euclidean zoning,” as motivating a new form of zoning that takes into account her observations on design. In contrast to the mandates of Euclidean zoning, which proscribes land-use segregation and low densities, Jacobs celebrated mixtures of land uses and urban densities. Jacobs spends large sections of Death and Life discussing in detail particular urban designs that she sees as essential to fostering urban life. Much of “Part One” focuses on […]

Ch. 1 What is a City?: What a city is not (and is)

As Jacobs explains in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist…the essence of the process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted…To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither art nor life. They are taxidermy.” (1961: 372-3, emphasis original) So how do we avoid turning the results of urban design into taxidermy and killing off a city by planning? I think the short answer is that we avoid it by recognizing that there’s a tradeoff between the scale of a design and the degree of spontaneity, complexity, and intricacy in the resulting social order that the design allows. Now, saying that a city cannot be a work of art doesn’t mean of course that a city cannot be beautiful or that deliberate design can never enhance that beauty. But I am suggesting that beauty that is designed as a work of art is fundamentally different from the undersigned beauty that emerges from a lifetime of experience. The skillfully made-up face of a fashion model and the face of a 90-year-old grandmother are both beautiful, but in profoundly different ways. Niels Gron, quoted in Gerard Koeppel’s City of a Grid: How New York Became New York: Before I came to this country, and in all the time […]

Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”

Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there’s important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws. They are embarking on an undertaking of noble intentions, and I will explain why the technology sector needs to be at the forefront of thinking about cities.  However, in the pursuit of designing “new” cities from a “blank slate” they have begun their quest with one fatally flawed premise, that wise technocrats can master-build entirely new cities catering to the infinitely diverse set of needs and desires of yet-to-be-identified citizens.   Any visions of city-building must first humbly acknowledge that cities are an “emergent” phenomena.   According to wikipedia, “emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”   What makes cities vibrant are the “spontaneous order” which emerges among city dwellers as they pursue their individual desires. Cities are like the internet – networks, patterns, and interactions emerge not through design but from spontaneous order.  Like no entity could conceivably understand or control the internet, no entity has the knowledge to anticipate the desires of millions of individual agents, and design a city accordingly.  This is called the “knowledge problem.” According to economist Friedrich Hayek: If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the […]

Neither Public nor Private: Rethinking the Dichotomy

Cato recently kicked off an essay series they’re calling “What Can’t Private Governance Do?”. The series questions how far we can take private governance in replacing public institutions. The most recent essay by Mark Lutter questions where to draw the line between private and public in territorial governance. And, more importantly, whether drawing that line even makes sense. Mr. Lutter concludes that it does, but I’ll politely disagree. We should instead abandon the public vs private dichotomy. It doesn’t accurately describe reality. It’s not useful for understanding policy problems. And it distracts us from the more interesting lines of inquiry we could otherwise be pursuing. A Tale of Two Cities Imagine two different cities, one proprietary and the other public. The former is run as a private, for-profit firm. It has an executive team, board of directors, and shareholders. The latter is a traditional municipal corporation. It’s run partially by elected officials and partially by appointees. It’s what we would call non-profit. No one “owns” the government as a legal entity. Now imagine that both cities raise revenue through land values. Greater demand to live in either city translates into a higher price for land. And the more that either city does to make their jurisdictions attractive, the more revenue that either stands to collect. In this scenario, price signals in the form of land valuations give both cities an incentive to make positive sum investments. Those same price signals also provide both cities with the ability to understand what those positive sum investments might be. Each city is responding to price information and making positive sum investments. So what difference does it make to call one public and the other proprietary? In all fairness, there’s still one place we could draw a line. We could make the choice of […]

Intro to Emergent Urbanism

Mathieu Helie has been writing at a blog he calls Emergent Urbanism.  His most recent post is the first part of a series that will be published as an entire article entitled “The Principles of Emergent Urbanism” at International Journal of Architectural Research. This first part of the series, and hopefully the entire published article gives a great introduction to the concept Helie names “Emergent Urbanism.”  In my opinion as a Market Urbanist, Mathieu’s most remarkable contributions to urbanism revolve around the concepts of “emergence” as it relates to urban patterns, particularly with regards to Hayek’s ideas about “emergent order” or “spontaneous order”.  As Mathieu writes: How is it possible for what is obviously a human artifact to arise as if by an act of nature? The theory of a spontaneous order provides an explanation. According to Friedrich A. von Hayek (Hayek, 1973) a spontaneous order arises when multiple actors spontaneously adopt a set of actions that provides them with a competitive advantage, and this behavior creates a pattern that is self-sustaining, attracting more actors and growing the pattern. This takes place without any of the actors being conscious of the creation of this pattern at an individual level. The spontaneous order is a by-product of individuals acting in pursuit of some other end. In this way cities appear as agglomerations of individually initiated buildings along natural paths of movement, which originally do not require any act of production as dirt paths suffice. As the construction of individual buildings continues the most intensely used natural paths of movement acquire an importance that makes them unbuildable and these paths eventually form the familiar “organic” pattern of streets seen in medieval cities. This process still takes place today in areas where government is weak or dysfunctional, notably in Africa where urban planning […]

Talking points on the housing bubble

By Sandy Ikeda Last week I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty about the current economic and financial turmoil.  I shared the podium with three of my colleagues, who range all the way from far to the left of Barack Obama to very, very far to the left of Barack Obama.  Needless to say, they all blamed, to a greater or an even greater degree, “the free market.” Now, I do think it’s possible in principle for wide-spread mal-investments to occur in an unfettered market.  (F.A. Hayek writes about the possibility in his Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, which you can read online here.)  But enormous speculative bubbles, of the sort we’ve just witnessed in the housing market, are typically the result of government interventions and policies. So in my talk on this highly complex issue I tried to make three points:  (1) the immediate cause of the financial panic on Wall Street was the housing bubble with its sudden rise in mortgage defaults; (2) the free market, which stands for minimal government and the absence of privilege or discrimination, did not create this bubble; and (3) government (and Fed) policy and pressure did, by undermining lending standards across the board and pushing lending rates artificially low. This blog has already referenced Russell Roberts’s fine collection of blog posts on the problem, and if you’re already familiar with the issues then obviously there will be nothing new here for you.  But I think it might be useful to have a list of “names and dates” that make the above case.  The following is not meant to be exhaustive (e.g., it doesn’t even mention important international factors), but is only an outline of the major legislation and policies relevant to the housing bubble. (Caveat:  My expertise in […]

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