The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs

I won't claim to agree with her 100%, but like many people I disagree with, articulating what we agree on, what we disagree on, and why is very informative about my own views on a topic.

So, at 18, it was very formative to interact with several of her books about city structure, how culture both emerges from and influences that structure, and related works and topics.

> No reader of Jacobs’s work would be surprised by the recent finding by a Gallup researcher that Donald Trump’s supporters “are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones.” These zones are latter-day incarnations of Higgins: marooned, amnesiac, homogenous, gutted by the diminishment of skills and opportunities. One Higgins is dangerous enough, for both its residents and the republic to which it belongs. But the nation’s Higginses have proliferated to the point that their residents have assumed control of a major political party.

The entire article is nothing more than an attempt to cast everyone living outside of metropolitan areas as backwards bumpkins. It's as offensive as it is transparent.

So I read it. Getting a good recommendation for a book out of your subject area is gold. Jacobs is very readable.

One idea of hers that has always stuck with me was Gradual Money vs Cataclysmic Money. She also railed against the pointless new.

Some of her concepts such as "import replacement" (a free market process of discovery and division of labor within a city) can be very helpful for cities aiming to mimick San Francisco / Silicon Valley such as Lille in France (with its Euratechnologies neighbourhood, where I work) or Shenzen (now that it's losing its toy factories and moving up the economic laders). And the importance of "eyes on the street" for everybody's safety, of diversity of shops/works for economic resilience, of serendipity for the process of innovation (the creation of new work, in Jane Jacobs terms), etc.

And by the way, her books are an easy read too ! I'd say a real "classic" : even more 40 years later there's still some real insights for non-urbanists.

I read this recently, which I found to be a more interesting take on Jacobs. In particular, on how easily linked article wants to blame trump on rural and commuter neighborhoods as uniquely isolated and un-diverse.

I agree with the take from the New Yorker article that cities don't organically solve this problem even if mass development is kept out -- the history of urban life in the US over the past ten years seems to be a reduction in diversity, especially in areas without a lot of recent development, due to skyrocketing rents and trendy-but-not-diverse incoming populations.

I see more real diversity - people of different backgrounds interacting and doing the same things - in a lot of suburbs these days than in more urban cores, where's it's largely reducing to a relatively homogenous set of affluent residents and the more-diverse-but-non-resident-and-distinct set of Uber drivers, restaurant staff, store employees, etc.

Or, to quote:

> She believed in that virtuous, reoxygenating circle whereby density—and short blocks and small green spaces—guaranteed diversity. This no longer seems so, at least not in Manhattan. In the past fifteen years, the density of my Upper East Side block has remained constant, and the play of old and new buildings, parks and streets is unchanged. (No one can build without several years of planning hearings.) But we have lost two toy stores, a magazine store, a cigar store, and a stationery-and-card store, and gained two banks, a real-estate office, a giant Duane Reade drugstore, and, to the bafflement of the neighborhood, three French baby-clothes stores. (The best theory is that these are part of the settlement in hedge-fund divorces.)

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/039...

The article spent a bit of time talking about decline of empires. I watched a few documentaries on the topic yesterday. A central theme that recurred was environment and conflict with other regions. This was the point where I decided that this article wasn't for me. I'm no historian, but, the analogy lost me. This and the lack of details about her theory.