gc
13 May 2004, 01:56 PM
Afraid of the dark?
By MICHAEL VALPY
Saturday, May 8, 2004 - Page F9
Jane Jacobs has dedicated her career to bolstering the cities of North America. Now, however, MICHAEL VALPY finds the world's leading urban philosopher distressed by 'ominous signs of decay.' At first glance, her new book, Dark Age Ahead: Caution, reads like a doomsday prophecy
Less than a decade ago, Jane Jacobs, likely the world's most profound and prescient urban philosopher, was bubbling enthusiastically about the future of the human race, and only four years ago she told an interviewer: "I think I'm living in a marvellous age."
Today big black thunderclouds hover over her head. Her latest book, to appear next Saturday and scarily titled Dark Age Ahead: Caution, reads a lot like a Sybilline doomsday prophecy for North American culture.
It is a warning, a wakeup call, says former Toronto mayor David Crombie, a disciple of Ms. Jacobs's urban teachings since he became involved in Toronto politics in the 1960s. He sees her as a disapproving mother superior icily observing corrosive affronts to the values and ideas she has preached for 40 years -- corporate immorality in the marketplace instead of entrepreneurship bonded to social justice; governments humbling cities instead of serving as their guardians.
John Sewell, another former Toronto mayor and long-time Jacobs follower, calls Dark Age Ahead "very prescriptive . . . a remarkable collection of ideas. There's so much evidence for what she is saying."
For chapter after chapter, an aroused Ms. Jacobs smacks her pointer against the five pillars that she says North American society depends on "to stand firm" but are now "in the process of becoming irrelevant."
These pillars are community and family, higher education, the effective practice of science and technology, self-policing by the professions and the application of taxes and other government powers to a society's needs and possibilities. And all are showing "ominous signs of decay," she warns.
"A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined. . . . I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectations that time remains for corrective actions."
The nuclear family, Ms. Jacobs writes, has been rigged to fail by public policies that, unintentionally, force both parents to work to meet the financial needs for themselves and their children. Families, she says, are forced into car-dependent suburbs, stripped of public supports through reduced services and provided fewer and fewer opportunities to get together and build a sense of community.
Universities now serve employers and act as colleges of heraldry, giving graduates a coat of arms to distinguish them from the underclass, but not educating them. They're credential factories, Ms. Jacobs says -- stripping the music, poetry, ethics, idealism and notion of the public good out of education.
She finds scientific research increasingly and immorally being bought by corporations or suppressed and ignored by governments. She inventories the sins of accountants, lawyers and other professionals in the great corporate scandals of the past two decades, and uncovers entire orchards of bad apples.
Cities, the true economic engines of North American culture, are being starved of the money they need by national, provincial and state governments and having more and more services downloaded on them. She holds this neo-conservatism or "reinvented government" responsible for a catalogue of Toronto's decay: its sagging public transit and public education systems, increasing filth, pollution, homelessness, erosion of community and the burgeoning sullenness of its citizens.
Prime Minister Paul Martin has vowed to come to the aid of cities. But Ms. Jacobs writes acidly of meeting with him when he was finance minister to argue for giving urban centres adequate funding and some control over their own fiscal levers. Not in the book is how she later described him to acquaintances: dunderhead. This week, the mayors of Toronto and Quebec City worried publicly that Mr. Martin's vaunted promise has faded to a whisper.
Jane Jacobs has just turned 88. She was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa., and grew up in what she calls "a nice old suburb" with her sister and two brothers.
Her father was a family doctor who taught his children to have two ways of earning a living: the one they preferred, and a skill or trade at which they could always find employment. Ms. Jacobs wanted to be a journalist and decided stenography would be her trade. After high school, she attended business school for six months "and, if I do say so myself, became a good stenographer."
Her first job was as a reporter for the Scranton newspaper, writing about weddings, parties and meetings of the Ladies of the Moose and the Ladies' Nest of Owls No. 3. After 18 months, she moved to New York City to seek her fortune. What she found, in the midst of the Depression, were stenographic and secretarial jobs with lots of unemployment in between.
At 22, she enrolled at Columbia University for two years. Then she pursued journalism, writing for trade magazines and, occasionally, newspapers. In 1944, she married architect Robert Jacobs and began to work regularly for Architectural Forum, with her husband's help. The magazine assigned her to write about city planning and urban renewal. She got interested.
"It soon became obvious," she says, "as I looked at what was being built and how it was working, that city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life." She found planners to be "intellectually very moribund . . . There seemed to be almost no curiosity, except on the most superficial level, about how big cities work."
Using her curiosity and phenomenal talents for observation and linking seemingly disparate events and facts, she wrote an article for Fortune magazine called "The Exploding Metropolis." It brought an inquiry, with grant money attached, from the Rockefeller Foundation: Did she want to write anything else about urban life?
She did. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, now considered perhaps the most influential book about cities of the 20th century.
The image of the city Ms. Jacobs presented was organic, vibrant, as cluttered and magical as human life itself, and possessing a natural order light-years removed from the T-squares and calipers of urban planners. It was a stunning riposte to the devastation wrought across the United States by postwar urban renewal projects and the cancerous blight of expressways.
North of the border, meanwhile, Death and Life was being absorbed with a passion by young urban reformers such as David Crombie and John Sewell. "We looked south at what was happening to American cities," Mr. Crombie recalls, "and we took the view that we had to find another way. We didn't just copy Jane out of the book, we had ideas from our own experience. But Jane legitimized what we were doing."
Then came 1968, and not only were Ms. Jacobs's ideas in Toronto, but so was she -- with Robert and their three children, rejecting America because of the Vietnam War. The following year, as reformers won elections to Toronto Council, she told a reporter:
"As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options. Few of us profit from the mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto will prove to share this disability. If so, I am grateful at least to have enjoyed this great city before its destruction."
Dramatic foreshadowing.
The foundation questions of her life's work have been "why some cities grow and why others stagnate and decay" -- questions that, for Ms. Jacobs, underlie virtually all inquiry into human advancement, Ryerson University economist Mark Lovewell says.
They have led her from examination of the street life and physical organization of cities to inquiring into their fiscal and regulatory governance and economic well-being and the nature of community, to an ever-broadening exploration of what makes creativity and innovation thrive and economies grow, and to what is the required moral and ethical framework that facilitates creativity and wealth.
Book followed book -- The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992) and The Nature of Economies (2000). In crisp, clear prose, she debunked the notion of national economies, declared that all economies are local and that cities should focus on import replacement and have their own currencies, and proclaimed the free market to be the central turbine of human endeavour and liberation that should at best be patrolled but not regulated by government and never be repressed by corporate policies.
"With each iteration, the tapestry of Jane's ideas and concepts gets stronger and denser," Canadian architect and urban planner Ken Greenberg says. "More of the gaps fill in; there are more examples to prove the points."
Her thesis on new economic growth (that only in cities does entrepreneurial innovation get the optimum bang for the buck) has attracted new followers, such as Nobel economist Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, Smart City guru and economist Richard Florida and influential Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser.
A little oddly, she took a side road in 1980 with A Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, a defence of Quebec independence, and now comes Dark Age Ahead: Caution.
"It's a new idea, this introduction of a dark age," Mr. Sewell says. "Cultures do fall into dark ages. Cultures can self-destruct. It happens all the time."
According to Ms. Jacobs, dark ages occur when cultures are confronted with such radical jolts that their fundamental institutions cannot adapt adequately. She considers the jolt that is whacking our time the most significant since the agrarian revolution sent the hunter-gatherer culture into oblivion 10,000 years ago.
Of course, the best-documented dark age swept Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and lasted 600 years. The glories of Greco-Roman thought and accomplishment fell victim to cultural amnesia -- the very spectre now facing North America, she warns.
Dark Age Ahead is, unlike her other books, a sermon -- a fire-and-brimstone jeremiad. "She wants us to get it right, so she wants to shake us a little harder," Mr. Crombie explains. "First, values are what's important; values are what make things work. And, second, action is important. City building to her is a moral cause and a spiritual exercise. It's on God's side. "
Mr. Sewell agrees: "She does think we can get out of it."
Perhaps that explains her Dalai Lama-esque remedy for suburban sprawl: treat it as a first phase. Stop yelling about what already exists and, with a boost from demographics (all the suddenly old baby boomers, either with empty houses or looking for downsized shelter), adjust fiscal and other policies to encourage a second phase where suburbanites infill their backyards with new residential accommodation, invite shops and other commerce into the midst of their desiccated tracts and convert limited-access arterial roads into lively boulevards.
Even here, being an optimist at heart, she noses through history to find societies that should have succumbed to dark ages but didn't -- Japan after Western ways were imposed; Ireland after being battered for centuries by the English.
Today, both thrive, she writes, because they retained cultural memory, cultural values, cultural competence. The Irish never forgot their songs, "an extremely effective way of passing a culture down."
This is not to be, in any event, the final word from Jane Jabobs. In her ninth decade, she has a contract for at least two more books, one with the working title A Short History of the Human Race.
Words of warning
Some examples of Jane Jacobs's thinking in Dark Age Ahead: Caution, to be published next Saturday by Random House.
On the ebb and flow of human culture:
The world today is a bewildering mosaic of cultural windows, groups of people sunk into old or recent dark ages and downward spirals, groups in the process of climbing out, and remnants of pre-agrarian cultures, as well as remnants of declined empires. Even within cultures, mosaics and modern, ancient and dark-age cultures exist.
On the folly of assuming things will turn out all for the best:
Some people think optimistically that, if things get bad enough, they will get better because of the reaction of beneficent pendulum swings. . . . Corrective stabilization is one of the great services of democracy, with its feedback to rulers from the protesting and voting public. . . . But powerful persons and groups that find it in their interest to prevent adaptive corrections have many ways of thwarting self-organizing stabilizers.
On making things right:
Time for corrective action is finite: culture resides mainly in people's heads and in examples people set, and is subject therefore to natural mortality.
On cultural memory loss:
A couple of decades ago, it was common to hear residents remark . . . that they never used to need to lock their doors. Nowadays the remark is seldom heard. People who once didn't need to lock their doors have gradually died off, and so even the memory of what has been lost is now almost lost.
Michael Valpy writes on ethics and faith for The Globe and Mail
By MICHAEL VALPY
Saturday, May 8, 2004 - Page F9
Jane Jacobs has dedicated her career to bolstering the cities of North America. Now, however, MICHAEL VALPY finds the world's leading urban philosopher distressed by 'ominous signs of decay.' At first glance, her new book, Dark Age Ahead: Caution, reads like a doomsday prophecy
Less than a decade ago, Jane Jacobs, likely the world's most profound and prescient urban philosopher, was bubbling enthusiastically about the future of the human race, and only four years ago she told an interviewer: "I think I'm living in a marvellous age."
Today big black thunderclouds hover over her head. Her latest book, to appear next Saturday and scarily titled Dark Age Ahead: Caution, reads a lot like a Sybilline doomsday prophecy for North American culture.
It is a warning, a wakeup call, says former Toronto mayor David Crombie, a disciple of Ms. Jacobs's urban teachings since he became involved in Toronto politics in the 1960s. He sees her as a disapproving mother superior icily observing corrosive affronts to the values and ideas she has preached for 40 years -- corporate immorality in the marketplace instead of entrepreneurship bonded to social justice; governments humbling cities instead of serving as their guardians.
John Sewell, another former Toronto mayor and long-time Jacobs follower, calls Dark Age Ahead "very prescriptive . . . a remarkable collection of ideas. There's so much evidence for what she is saying."
For chapter after chapter, an aroused Ms. Jacobs smacks her pointer against the five pillars that she says North American society depends on "to stand firm" but are now "in the process of becoming irrelevant."
These pillars are community and family, higher education, the effective practice of science and technology, self-policing by the professions and the application of taxes and other government powers to a society's needs and possibilities. And all are showing "ominous signs of decay," she warns.
"A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined. . . . I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectations that time remains for corrective actions."
The nuclear family, Ms. Jacobs writes, has been rigged to fail by public policies that, unintentionally, force both parents to work to meet the financial needs for themselves and their children. Families, she says, are forced into car-dependent suburbs, stripped of public supports through reduced services and provided fewer and fewer opportunities to get together and build a sense of community.
Universities now serve employers and act as colleges of heraldry, giving graduates a coat of arms to distinguish them from the underclass, but not educating them. They're credential factories, Ms. Jacobs says -- stripping the music, poetry, ethics, idealism and notion of the public good out of education.
She finds scientific research increasingly and immorally being bought by corporations or suppressed and ignored by governments. She inventories the sins of accountants, lawyers and other professionals in the great corporate scandals of the past two decades, and uncovers entire orchards of bad apples.
Cities, the true economic engines of North American culture, are being starved of the money they need by national, provincial and state governments and having more and more services downloaded on them. She holds this neo-conservatism or "reinvented government" responsible for a catalogue of Toronto's decay: its sagging public transit and public education systems, increasing filth, pollution, homelessness, erosion of community and the burgeoning sullenness of its citizens.
Prime Minister Paul Martin has vowed to come to the aid of cities. But Ms. Jacobs writes acidly of meeting with him when he was finance minister to argue for giving urban centres adequate funding and some control over their own fiscal levers. Not in the book is how she later described him to acquaintances: dunderhead. This week, the mayors of Toronto and Quebec City worried publicly that Mr. Martin's vaunted promise has faded to a whisper.
Jane Jacobs has just turned 88. She was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa., and grew up in what she calls "a nice old suburb" with her sister and two brothers.
Her father was a family doctor who taught his children to have two ways of earning a living: the one they preferred, and a skill or trade at which they could always find employment. Ms. Jacobs wanted to be a journalist and decided stenography would be her trade. After high school, she attended business school for six months "and, if I do say so myself, became a good stenographer."
Her first job was as a reporter for the Scranton newspaper, writing about weddings, parties and meetings of the Ladies of the Moose and the Ladies' Nest of Owls No. 3. After 18 months, she moved to New York City to seek her fortune. What she found, in the midst of the Depression, were stenographic and secretarial jobs with lots of unemployment in between.
At 22, she enrolled at Columbia University for two years. Then she pursued journalism, writing for trade magazines and, occasionally, newspapers. In 1944, she married architect Robert Jacobs and began to work regularly for Architectural Forum, with her husband's help. The magazine assigned her to write about city planning and urban renewal. She got interested.
"It soon became obvious," she says, "as I looked at what was being built and how it was working, that city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life." She found planners to be "intellectually very moribund . . . There seemed to be almost no curiosity, except on the most superficial level, about how big cities work."
Using her curiosity and phenomenal talents for observation and linking seemingly disparate events and facts, she wrote an article for Fortune magazine called "The Exploding Metropolis." It brought an inquiry, with grant money attached, from the Rockefeller Foundation: Did she want to write anything else about urban life?
She did. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, now considered perhaps the most influential book about cities of the 20th century.
The image of the city Ms. Jacobs presented was organic, vibrant, as cluttered and magical as human life itself, and possessing a natural order light-years removed from the T-squares and calipers of urban planners. It was a stunning riposte to the devastation wrought across the United States by postwar urban renewal projects and the cancerous blight of expressways.
North of the border, meanwhile, Death and Life was being absorbed with a passion by young urban reformers such as David Crombie and John Sewell. "We looked south at what was happening to American cities," Mr. Crombie recalls, "and we took the view that we had to find another way. We didn't just copy Jane out of the book, we had ideas from our own experience. But Jane legitimized what we were doing."
Then came 1968, and not only were Ms. Jacobs's ideas in Toronto, but so was she -- with Robert and their three children, rejecting America because of the Vietnam War. The following year, as reformers won elections to Toronto Council, she told a reporter:
"As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options. Few of us profit from the mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto will prove to share this disability. If so, I am grateful at least to have enjoyed this great city before its destruction."
Dramatic foreshadowing.
The foundation questions of her life's work have been "why some cities grow and why others stagnate and decay" -- questions that, for Ms. Jacobs, underlie virtually all inquiry into human advancement, Ryerson University economist Mark Lovewell says.
They have led her from examination of the street life and physical organization of cities to inquiring into their fiscal and regulatory governance and economic well-being and the nature of community, to an ever-broadening exploration of what makes creativity and innovation thrive and economies grow, and to what is the required moral and ethical framework that facilitates creativity and wealth.
Book followed book -- The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992) and The Nature of Economies (2000). In crisp, clear prose, she debunked the notion of national economies, declared that all economies are local and that cities should focus on import replacement and have their own currencies, and proclaimed the free market to be the central turbine of human endeavour and liberation that should at best be patrolled but not regulated by government and never be repressed by corporate policies.
"With each iteration, the tapestry of Jane's ideas and concepts gets stronger and denser," Canadian architect and urban planner Ken Greenberg says. "More of the gaps fill in; there are more examples to prove the points."
Her thesis on new economic growth (that only in cities does entrepreneurial innovation get the optimum bang for the buck) has attracted new followers, such as Nobel economist Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, Smart City guru and economist Richard Florida and influential Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser.
A little oddly, she took a side road in 1980 with A Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, a defence of Quebec independence, and now comes Dark Age Ahead: Caution.
"It's a new idea, this introduction of a dark age," Mr. Sewell says. "Cultures do fall into dark ages. Cultures can self-destruct. It happens all the time."
According to Ms. Jacobs, dark ages occur when cultures are confronted with such radical jolts that their fundamental institutions cannot adapt adequately. She considers the jolt that is whacking our time the most significant since the agrarian revolution sent the hunter-gatherer culture into oblivion 10,000 years ago.
Of course, the best-documented dark age swept Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and lasted 600 years. The glories of Greco-Roman thought and accomplishment fell victim to cultural amnesia -- the very spectre now facing North America, she warns.
Dark Age Ahead is, unlike her other books, a sermon -- a fire-and-brimstone jeremiad. "She wants us to get it right, so she wants to shake us a little harder," Mr. Crombie explains. "First, values are what's important; values are what make things work. And, second, action is important. City building to her is a moral cause and a spiritual exercise. It's on God's side. "
Mr. Sewell agrees: "She does think we can get out of it."
Perhaps that explains her Dalai Lama-esque remedy for suburban sprawl: treat it as a first phase. Stop yelling about what already exists and, with a boost from demographics (all the suddenly old baby boomers, either with empty houses or looking for downsized shelter), adjust fiscal and other policies to encourage a second phase where suburbanites infill their backyards with new residential accommodation, invite shops and other commerce into the midst of their desiccated tracts and convert limited-access arterial roads into lively boulevards.
Even here, being an optimist at heart, she noses through history to find societies that should have succumbed to dark ages but didn't -- Japan after Western ways were imposed; Ireland after being battered for centuries by the English.
Today, both thrive, she writes, because they retained cultural memory, cultural values, cultural competence. The Irish never forgot their songs, "an extremely effective way of passing a culture down."
This is not to be, in any event, the final word from Jane Jabobs. In her ninth decade, she has a contract for at least two more books, one with the working title A Short History of the Human Race.
Words of warning
Some examples of Jane Jacobs's thinking in Dark Age Ahead: Caution, to be published next Saturday by Random House.
On the ebb and flow of human culture:
The world today is a bewildering mosaic of cultural windows, groups of people sunk into old or recent dark ages and downward spirals, groups in the process of climbing out, and remnants of pre-agrarian cultures, as well as remnants of declined empires. Even within cultures, mosaics and modern, ancient and dark-age cultures exist.
On the folly of assuming things will turn out all for the best:
Some people think optimistically that, if things get bad enough, they will get better because of the reaction of beneficent pendulum swings. . . . Corrective stabilization is one of the great services of democracy, with its feedback to rulers from the protesting and voting public. . . . But powerful persons and groups that find it in their interest to prevent adaptive corrections have many ways of thwarting self-organizing stabilizers.
On making things right:
Time for corrective action is finite: culture resides mainly in people's heads and in examples people set, and is subject therefore to natural mortality.
On cultural memory loss:
A couple of decades ago, it was common to hear residents remark . . . that they never used to need to lock their doors. Nowadays the remark is seldom heard. People who once didn't need to lock their doors have gradually died off, and so even the memory of what has been lost is now almost lost.
Michael Valpy writes on ethics and faith for The Globe and Mail