Word: jacobses
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Curmudgeon and Gadfly. As an organic cure for the complex ills of great U.S. cities, Jane Jacobs' program was preposterous. By itself, planned diversity could hardly create a new way of life for urban slum dwellers. Given the economic pressures working upon them, and the present tastes of middle...
This time out she is up to much the same sort of trick. In The Economy of Cities, she asks "why some cities grow and others stagnate and decay." To find the answer, she develops a beguiling window-box theory of economics in which personal conviction and anecdote weigh more...
Bee in Clover. To support this conclusion, she darts around history hunting for examples like a bee in a clover field. Ancient Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, Tokyo in 1900, medieval Antwerp are all plundered for signs of stagnation or growth. But her key comparison is drawn from 19th...
Parallels with the present-day U.S. are freely drawn. Such cities as Detroit, Pittsburgh and Rochester, the author warns, are more like Manchester than Birmingham. Each depends on a few specialized products and so does not enough encourage new kinds of work. Boston, on the other hand, looks much healthier...
Like Norman Mailer, who dreams of turning New York City into a citystate with himself as philosopher-king, Mrs. Jacobs deals with each city as an isolated economic entity, with its own exports and imports. She ignores the economic interdependence of today's world and the enormous, unavoidable impact...