Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs

MORE EARLY PRAISE FOR

Vital Little Plans

This might be the very best of Jane Jacobs’s books. The articles and speeches collected here are terrific summaries of her thoughts about the marvelous complexities of cities and how we might respond to city challenges to our best advantage.

—JOHN SEWELL, former mayor of Toronto

It’s one thing to bring important ideas to the world, quite another to do it with such wit and subtlety. This volume reminds us what a sheer, crackling great writer Jane Jacobs was.

—JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER, author of The Geography of Nowhere

"Vital Little Plans lays out Jane Jacobs’s evolution as an intellectual, from her early reportage on the sidewalks of New York to her wide-ranging theories on cities and human economies. Her eye for details, for the small things that matter, was always there. It takes an anthology like this to capture the breadth of her work. Jacobs had no time for orthodoxy and wasn’t afraid to change her views, many of which will surprise her fans, her critics, and all those who think they know what Jane Jacobs thought and what she would have done."

—SHAWN MICALLEF, author, columnist, editor of Spacing

"Vital Little Plans is a generously annotated and beautifully curated celebration of Jane Jacobs’s life and work. Readers will find both shining jewels and marvelous curiosities here. Most important, they’ll find new evidence of Jacobs’s depth, integrity, and indomitable spirit. A must-read for anyone interested in cities, systems, and societies."

—COLIN ELLARD, author of Places of the Heart and You Are Here

"This remarkable compendium of Jane Jacobs’s writing covers a period that begins long before the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and ends long after. We see how, piece by piece, she expanded her range into the next ring of connected ideas, periodically consolidating them in a book or an article, edging ever closer to a kind of unified theory linking ecology, economy, ethics, and social mores and their manifestations in real places. Like her fundamental observation about the city itself, her work was never finished."

—KEN GREENBERG, urban designer and author of Walking Home

Reading Jane Jacobs’s short works again tells us what a visionary and creative thinker she was. Her words are as fresh today as when she wrote them and speak to us by telling compelling stories. There is, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, ‘no virtue in meek conformity.’ This collection is a treasure for us all.

—JANICE GROSS STEIN, professor, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

"Vital Little Plans is an immensely important retrospective of Jane Jacobs’s articles and speeches. Her belief in the power of residents to make cities economically, environmentally, and socially successful shines through, as does her disdain for those who would build cities for cars, not people."

—DAVID MILLER, president and CEO of WWF-Canada and former mayor of Toronto

"This indispensable anthology is a delight. Through older works and new writings, the urgency of Jane Jacobs’s message continues to ring clear. This book further exposes us to Jacobs’s unconventional, process-oriented thinking, and positions us to take action to transform our cities. There is a better world around us, if we are willing to see it. Vital Little Plans is simply superb."

—JENNIFER KEESMAAT, chief planner, City of Toronto

A book to get your blood running and ideas soaring!

—MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE, author of Urban Alchemy

"We seem to be facing a perfect storm. The population of cities will double to 7 billion in just thirty-five years, while we endure climate change, traffic congestion, a public health crisis, and an aging population. These are challenges, but we can also see them as opportunities. The world clearly needs more Jane Jacobs. In Vital Little Plans, she provides vision and action to create cities for people, especially those most vulnerable: children, older adults, and the poor."

—GUILLERMO (GIL) PEÑALOSA, founder and chair of 8 80 Cities and chair of World Urban Parks

We know Jane Jacobs wrote brilliant books, and it would a crime to let her equally brilliant smaller writings, speeches, and interviews be lost. This collection is more than the sum of its parts, and is a great book to have at your fingertips.

—BRENT TODERIAN, city planner and urbanist, TODERIAN UrbanWORKS, and former chief planner of Vancouver

Don’t cheat yourself of the pleasure that lies between these covers.

—JEFF SPECK, author of Walkable City

An essential read for those wanting to understand the contradiction and chaos of a woman whose legacy is that we must all think for ourselves. The editors have brilliantly selected and sequenced Jacobs’s writing so that we can plainly see how she wrestles with, and problem-solves around, messy and complex systems. Many of us have only scratched the surface with Jacobs, ending our love affair with her work at a time when she’d just begun to connect the dots. Reading through the entire pilgrimage makes the calls to action more vivid and more urgent than ever before.

—DENISE PINTO, executive director, Jane’s Walk

Copyright © 2016 by The Estate of Jane Jacobs

Introduction and part introductions copyright © 2016 by Samuel Zipp & Nathan Storring

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Most of the essays in this work have been previously published. Original publication information is included with each essay. Credits and permissions are on this page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

NAMES: Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006, author. | Zipp, Samuel, editor. | Storring, Nathan, editor.

TITLE: Vital little plans : the short works of Jane Jacobs / edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.

DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016014099| ISBN 9780399589607 | ISBN 9780399589614 (ebook)

SUBJECTS: LCSH: City planning—United States. | City planning. | Sociology, Urban—United States. | Sociology, Urban. | Urban policy— United States. | Urban policy. | Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006.

CLASSIFICATION: LCC HT167 .J324 2016 | DDC 307.1/2160973—dc23 LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016014099

Ebook ISBN 9780399589614

randomhousebooks.com

Title page portrait by Ruth Orkin

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Rodrigo Corral

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Timeline

Part One: A City Naturalist, 1934–1952

While Arranging Verses for a Book

Diamonds in the Tough

Flowers Come to Town

Caution, Men Working

30,000 Unemployed and 7,000 Empty Houses in Scranton, Neglected City

Islands the Boats Pass By

No Virtue in Meek Conformity

Part Two: City Building, 1952–1965

Philadelphia’s Redevelopment: A Progress Report

Pavement Pounders and Olympians

The Missing Link in City Redevelopment

Our Surplus Land

Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There Is No Other Recipe

Metropolitan Government

Downtown Is for People

A Living Network of Relationships

A Great Unbalance

The Decline of Function

Part Three: How New Work Begins, 1965–1984

The Self-Generating Growth of Cities

On Civil Disobedience

Strategies for Helping Cities

A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug

The Real Problem of Cities

Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?

Part Four: The Ecology of Cities, 1984–2000

The Responsibilities of Cities

Pedaling Together

Foreword to the Death and Life of Great American Cities

Two Ways to Live

First Letter to the Consumer Policy Institute

Women as Natural Entrepreneurs

Market Nurturing Run Amok

Against Amalgamation

Part Five: Some Patterns of Future Development, 2000–2006

Time and Change as Neighborhood Allies

Canada’s Hub Cities

Efficiency and the Commons

The Sparrow Principle

Uncovering the Economy: A New Hypothesis

The End of the Plantation Age

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Image and Text Credits

By Jane Jacobs

About the Author

About the Editors

Jane Jacobs lost in thought as she reads The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the living room of her house at 555 Hudson Street, New York City, circa 1956.

Introduction

Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring

More Jane Jacobs, less Marc Jacobs reads the boldfaced sign peering out from behind age-rippled glass along a side street in New York’s Greenwich Village. This minor protest, which popped up several years ago in the windows of the neighborhood’s few remaining unprimped townhouses and non-chain stores, pits urbanist icon against fashion designer in a proxy war between locality and luxury. A small, clever note trilling in a familiar sorrow song, it’s a discordant flutter disturbing an otherwise triumphant era of urban symphony. We live in a golden age for city life, we’re told again and again these days. In the rich parts of the world, despite deepening inequality (probably because of it, the sorrow song objects) the streets are teeming with cyclists and new condos and artisans and pop-up parklets. But cities, it seems, are somehow also dying. Or, at the very least, a certain idea of the city is under threat. Some cherished sense of what it means to be urban feels as if it might be losing its footing, staggering, and going down.

Most city lovers have an intimate sense of what this loss might entail, even if they don’t know exactly how to describe what they are losing. The sign’s maker, Mike Joyce, said that most people got the point even if they didn’t quite follow the joke. Anyone could see that there was suddenly a surplus of Marc Jacobs–like chain boutiques popping up around the neighborhood. But who, they often asked, is this Jane Jacobs? It’s a tragic irony: Marc Jacobs, a self-described native son and lover of New York, unwittingly drives out the urban virtues that Jane Jacobs taught the world to see, even as her name begins to fade from popular memory.¹

What is at stake here, it seems, is the intricate sidewalk ballet that Jane Jacobs famously witnessed on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and described in her most celebrated book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). The performance Jacobs recounted, with its daily circulation of motley players—schoolkids and shopkeepers, longshoremen and office workers, slaughterhouse hands and beatniks on motor scooters, drunks with hats unapproved by the Hat Council, and beautiful girls getting out of snappy British sports cars—is increasingly imperiled for all but the latterday descendants of those beautiful girls. In the very neighborhood where Jacobs discovered the self-organizing drama of healthy urban order, the chance for just anyone to play a part in the city dance, to enjoy the perennial promise of a local life lived close to the grain of the streets, stoops, and stores, seems to be slipping away or already departed.

So what else is new? The Village was lost as soon as it was found. Gentrification panic is perennial, too, going back years before Jacobs made her name there in the 1950s and ’60s. People still flock to Greenwich Village to shop and eat, to stroll around and gawk at everyone else shopping and eating and strolling around. People still go just to be there—these pleasures are part of the dance, too. So the Village endures, but as a bright and blurry clone of a past self. With astronomic rents came chain stores, fashion boutiques, luxury condo conversions in glass and steel. They have crowded out hardware stores, bodegas, diners, bookstores, small manufacturing shops, the unpredictable and the odd. Real estate speculation, long a New York obsession, has finally chased out most everything else but rarefied shopping and eating and looking. The diverse mixture of people with plans both humble and grand that Jacobs celebrated can find little purchase in this meager city soil.

So it goes in Toronto, too, Jane Jacobs’s second home. In the Annex, the neighborhood where she lived until her death in 2006, the commercial vitality she often celebrated feels under threat. Rents are on the rise, neighborhood businesses fold and are replaced by replicas of the most profitable uses on the street, mostly high-traffic restaurants, college bars, and bank branches. Even a Bloor Street icon like Honest Ed’s isn’t safe. A vast neon-fronted discount emporium where generations of immigrants, working-class shoppers, bargain lovers, and in-the-know ironists foraged among the shelves is soon to be leveled and replaced with a cluster of glassy condos and retail boxes. Everywhere like this, the familiar lament goes, in London, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, and other urban magnets across the Global North where money and people cluster, the city is turning on itself, its very success becoming its undoing.²

There’s no doubt, then, that this is just the right time for more Jane Jacobs. Whether it’s a Golden Age or a Dark Age, it is just the right time for more of her incomparable writings about cities and the worlds they create, just the right time to retrieve her bracing, obstinate voice for readers who’ve forgotten it or never knew it in the first place. And yet one of the chief reasons to return to Jacobs now, and to this collection of shorter works spanning her entire career as a writer, is to help us reimagine Jacobs herself as something more than a symbol of urban sorrow or urban triumph. Always idiosyncratic and unorthodox, often surprising, often willing to risk being wrong if it means reorienting stale conventional wisdom, she pushes beyond the familiar alarms to see urban transformation as a source of radical possibility and opportunity, not nostalgia and loss. More than a tribune of the ideal neighborhood, Jacobs was perhaps our greatest theorist of the city not as a modern machine for living but as a living human system, geared for solving its own problems.

Learn to look as Jacobs did at cities, as well as the other themes she considered over the course of her long writing life—economies, morality, politics, and history—and things may come to seem more complex and interconnected than we first expect, and even perhaps less dire. Cities are not only quaint stage sets imperiled by gentrification but also the medium of our collective public and economic life, the forum in which we can learn to harness change to resolve our shared problems and to produce shared opportunity. Even in an era in which our society seems ever more stagnant, marked by both the fattening of the rich and the multiplying of the poor, reading Jacobs anew suggests that the way out lies not only in rearguard actions to protect what we cherish but in reinvigorating the creative, chaotic, improvisational economies of cities.

This book offers readers a chance to see Jane Jacobs whole for the first time. Over the years she has been called many things: an urban visionary, an anti-planner, an amateur economist, a geographer, a community activist, and a radical centrist. Each label captures some facet of her work, but in hemming her in with one category or another, each fails to encompass the range, variety, and provocative power of her ideas and pursuits, not to mention the way she was able to cross and blur the lines between disciplines, often outflanking one school of thought with another. The essays, speeches, interviews, and one long-forgotten poem collected here show her first and foremost as she herself hoped to be understood: as a thinker and writer with one of the most distinctive literary voices of the last century.

Vital Little Plans is organized chronologically, following the long arc of Jacobs’s writing career. But even as she added new work to her old work (as she might have put it) she returned to older ideas with fresh insights. Each part of the book builds on the last as she embellishes her lifelong interest in cities, economies, and morality. Whenever possible we have presented her words unaltered and unabridged. We have also included notes to identify unfamiliar references and to point out some useful connections among the ecology of her ideas.

The selections begin with her first pieces of magazine and newspaper reportage from Depression-era New York and culminate with the big ideas about humanity’s past and future that she wrestled with at the end of her life. Parts One and Two, A City Naturalist and City Building, follow her first thirty years in New York, from the 1930s to the 1960s, as she learns the journalism trade and discovers the city. Many readers will be most familiar with Part Two, where we find Jacobs rehearsing the critique of city planning for which she would become famous in Death and Life. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the pieces collected here show us that early on in her career, as she rose to become an editor at Architectural Forum and an expert on contemporary architecture, she was a supporter of modern city planning and rebuilding. They reveal how she turned on those orthodoxies as she discovered that the new highways, slum clearance projects, and tower-in-the-park complexes were uprooting old neighborhoods, scattering community life, deepening racial segregation, and trampling the rough and ready city she had come to love. Her famed showdowns with New York’s urban renewal bureaucracy and her jousts with the master builder Robert Moses are here, as are her celebrations of the pleasures and necessities of everyday city life, the very chaos that modern planning looked to weed out of the cityscape.³

Readers tend to cherish Jacobs for a series of scenes from this period: Death and Life’s opening attack on current city planning and rebuilding; the eyes on the street that make cities safe; her four generators of city diversity (density, mixed uses, short blocks, and cheap old buildings); and of course the much-beloved sidewalk ballet. But this volume shows that the episodes and ideas for which she is still best remembered are the prelude to a much greater body of work. She spent the rest of her long life, in six other books, dramatically expanding the ideas she had debuted in Death and Life. In the process she forged a unique take on the interrelated life of cities, economies, and morality, one that readers can watch evolve in the pages of Vital Little Plans.

Much of that work was jumpstarted by another of her unique observations, one that is sometimes overlooked. What planners viewed as chaos she had come to see as a complex and highly developed form of order. The city, she surmised at the close of Death and Life, was an always-unfolding problem in handling this organized complexity. Rather than a simple two-variable problem as in the physical sciences or a million-variable problem of statistics, Jacobs saw the city as something akin to an ecosystem with many moving parts, each with its own relationship to the others. This idea would become a touchstone of her later work, informing all her investigations of economic and social life, but it had its roots in her earliest interests in the workings of cities at the micro scale.

In fact, readers of Vital Little Plans will discover that she had been on the trail of this idea from the very beginning of her career. Her earliest writings for Vogue and other magazines, collected in Part One, may appear insubstantial at first, but linger a bit and they shed the guise of conventional magazine reportage to come alive as limpid little gems of close noticing. In Caution, Men Working, for instance, she investigates the manhole landscape of Manhattan, uncovering the vast networks of underground spaghetti beneath the city streets. The essay gives us the indelible image of Jacobs, the city naturalist, standing at Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue feeling the mail shunting by in pneumatic tubes under her feet at thirty miles an hour. Like the other 1930s pieces collected here—on the diamond trade and the flower market—it reveals her setting out to find clues to the way individual elements of her surroundings are linked by larger processes hiding in plain sight.

What we are seeing in these pieces is the original spark for her trademark inductive method and her discovery of the city’s organized complexity. She follows anecdotes and observations up from the street, scale by scale, to discover the systems that make them go. Later she would call such bits and pieces of data fractals, renditions of a broader pattern in miniature. At the center of these stories are the relationships within particular industries; each florist and jewel merchant is a node in the self-inventing, self-organizing network of the city. It’s a first glimpse of what, two decades later, in her celebrated essay Downtown Is for People (included here) she’d call the small specialized enterprise, strung in a web of interdependencies with other diverse yet complementary undertakings. Imagine Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker city reporter, turned loose in the city to find odd occupations rather than odd characters. Where Mitchell discovered solemn urban nocturnes and disappearing ways of life, Jacobs found interlinked economic niches, messy meshes of city work and trade giving rise to cosmopolitan verve and bustle.

Jacobs’s long-standing curiosities were brought to a head in the decades after the publication of Death and Life, when, like so many others, she wondered why cities and nations in the West were in decline. She had shown that modern planning schemes were misguided attempts to revive city life. But she felt that something deeper, something more pervasive and odious, was afoot in these years. What had gone wrong? In true Jacobs fashion, she flipped the question on its head. The quandary was not why cities stagnated but why they grew in the first place. Poverty has no causes, she believed; only prosperity has causes. Figure out how economic growth worked, and the causes of the era’s problems would become clear.

Her essays and speeches from the 1960s to the 1980s see her returning to the scenes and concepts that informed Death and Life—she was often asked to play the hits—but always with an eye to asking the broader questions she pursued in her two major works of the period: The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). Across Parts Three and Four of this volume, How New Work Begins and The Ecology of Cities, readers will find Jacobs distilling the chief lessons of her years spent thinking about city economies. She considered these ideas the most important of her career, and near the end of her life she returned to them in Uncovering the Economy, a book she hoped would fully explain her vision. She never finished it, but the opening section of that book, published here for the first time (in Part Five) reveals her final understanding of how economic growth unfolds. In short, Jacobs argues that healthy cities are where new work springs up. Their dense fabric of interdependencies incubates economic expansion and innovation at large. Cultivating vibrant urban centers with small, diverse commercial and industrial enterprises is the linchpin of any meaningful strategy to combat decline.

But how to actually do this on the ground, in existing cities? Little seemed to be working. Like many of the so-called free market advocates, those devotees of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman who rose to public prominence in the wake of the economic downturn of the 1970s, Jacobs believed in the self-organizing capacities of economic life. Organized complexity could produce order without orders from above. She was also dubious about the forms of aid offered by various national or international plans for economic development—the War on Poverty, World Bank lending programs, massive federal spending on the defense industry—seeing them as just more prescriptive dictates unleashed from on high, sure to deaden urban economies. But unlike the neoliberals whose market fundamentalism has, until recently, dominated public life in the United States, she understood how these strategies tended to plow subsidies to already entrenched interests. In that sense, she saw a more active role for government as what she called a third force in the market, ready to protect young enterprises from established players. Instead of obsessing over stabilizing the business cycle, she advocated for policies that would enable self-organizing networks of small producers to solve problems in new ways and overturn the socioeconomic status quo (see The Real Problem of Cities, included in Part Three).

Jacobs’s ideas went largely unheeded in the halls of power, but they led her to think more deeply about the classic tussle between commerce and government. Cities, she told an audience of Amsterdammers in 1984, lived or died by the web of trust between people in their everyday working lives (see The Responsibilities of Cities in Part Four). In order to preserve the open-ended possibility inherent in vital cities, societies had to recognize that this trust depended on a system of morality—she came to call it the commercial moral syndrome—and carefully delineate its relations with government and other watchdogs, which were guided by a different, opposed set of morals, the guardian syndrome. As she says in her 1992 book Systems of Survival (and here in Two Ways to Live), guardians value loyalty, tradition, and the right to use deception and force, while those who work under the commercial syndrome prize honesty, novelty, and collaboration with strangers and aliens. These syndromes, Jacobs argues, govern society at every level, from public policy to individual decision-making. Not all businesspeople are honest, nor are all police officers loyal, but to violate these tenets—or worse yet, mix them in a moral hybrid—is to court disaster.

While she thought government should intervene in the market as a nimble regulator, she also believed it was perverse for it to engage in commerce and industry itself.⁴ Given that much public policy by the 1980s and ’90s—particularly in cities—was carried out by way of public-private partnership, it’s no surprise that she found the prospects for vibrant city growth in these years wanting. What was lacking, she argued, was a proper vision of the symbiotic relations between the two moral syndromes. They had to remain separate but mutually beneficial. To her, that balancing act was the very art of civilization that we all negotiate in our everyday public lives.*

Beyond the lifelong quandaries she pursued in her books, Vital Little Plans reveals that Jacobs had a host of incisive things to say about issues she’s not often remembered for. In Metropolitan Government she delivers one of the first popular exposés of the cross-purpose jackstraw heap of local sovereignties that continue to hamstring cities today. The Sparrow Principle sees her thinking aloud about the linked histories of imperialism and globalization. Elsewhere in this volume she takes on any number of topics that still resonate: civil disobedience and the dynamics of social movements, the perennial predicament in public finance of ample money for building things and little money for running things, the future of suburbs and skyscrapers, the politics of cycling in the city, the coming boom in urban agriculture, the trouble with zoning, and many more besides, including feminism, environmentalism, and immigration, not to mention the gentrification troubles so vexing to city lovers today.

—

THERE IS A MUCH-LOVED photograph of Jane Jacobs sitting in jail, awaiting booking. She is side by side with the writer Susan Sontag, who looks characteristically defiant. Jacobs appears calmer, and a bit world-weary, as if she were barely enduring the regular idiocy of bureaucratic authority. They ended up there, along with more than 250 other demonstrators, after an antiwar protest at New York’s Whitehall draft induction center in December of 1967. The picture puts her at the heart of her times—it’s a snapshot from our collective idea of the Sixties. And it’s all the more poignant when we know what is on the horizon: A year later the Vietnam War would bring to a boiling point the frustrations Jacobs first felt at the onslaught of modern planning a decade before and push her family to flee the United States for Canada.

Jane Jacobs sits in a jail cell next to Susan Sontag after being arrested during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at an armed forces induction center in New York, 1967. They were arrested alongside more than 250 others, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsberg.

Death and Life remains a great predictor of the era’s upheaval, one of the first in that remarkable early Sixties run of seismic books—Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man—that would start to rearrange the minds of a whole generation. Like so many writers and thinkers in those years, she made her name skewering received wisdoms. By the end of the decade, when she found herself sitting with Sontag in central booking, her distress with New York and America had reached a tipping point. In 1970 she would find herself, in The Real Problem of Cities, endorsing battles against urban freeway construction with that trusty Sixties slogan, Power to the People!

But look again and the overall picture becomes murkier. For all her disgust with the abuse of power, incandescently apparent in On Civil Disobedience in Part Three, her intellectual work sits uneasily next to the radical thinkers of the moment like Sontag and Fanon or Baldwin and Marcuse or Norman Mailer or Shulamith Firestone or Michel Foucault. While others were exposing hierarchies and celebrating the seditious rush of excess, making strange the normal and questioning the given order of things, Jacobs set her sights on revealing the beauty and necessity of underlying norms. Her work is cousin to critical theory and social history and the other radical visions of the era, but Jacobs was ultimately working to reinvent the principles by which we understand urban and economic life. She was not afraid to shatter settled thought, but she was set on fitting the shards back together, too, with ideas some of those other Sixties icons would have found altogether bourgeois.⁵

Her politics, like her urbanism, tended toward the pragmatic. She distrusted most visions of utopia. For her, the rallying cry of the 1968 Paris general strikes—Under the paving stones, the beach!—wasn’t likely to inspire. Beneath the city streets, she might have retorted, was nothing more than the dirt to which we will all return. Another world isn’t possible, certainly not if it’s some eden of plenty and ease, reachable only by revolution or the utopian imagination. A better world is here already, in the streets themselves, waiting to be discovered and brought forth by all of us, not just a radical vanguard.

Jacobs looked askance at any situation in which people were spoken for, rather than allowed to speak for themselves. Like many who came of age during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, she had watched the authoritarian drift of the Soviet Union with dismay and feared that orders, violence, and censorship from on high were endemic to utopian plans of that sort. She was even wary about the social movements she joined and led and for which she is now often remembered and revered. In The Responsibilities of Cities, she worries that too often, popular movements have to claim that they speak for people who, in fact, have never given them a mandate to do so. Protest was a necessary hassle—and she always resented the way campaigns to stop what she called absurd plans disrupted her writing life—but the very need for demonstrations, she thought, was a symptom of institutional bankruptcy.

The truth is that Jacobs offers little comfort to established political traditions, whether radical or conservative, or to official scholarly pursuits. She inspires and frustrates in equal measure. The left loves her community rabble-rousing and her democratic spirit but distrusts her faith in the private sector; the right thinks her a closeted ally, keen to promote privatization, but ignores her concessions to government. Mainstream economists have assimilated her account of the added benefits of competitive, diverse clusters of industries to economic productivity—Jacobs externalities, they call them—but they also fault her for her willingness to flout (some say misinterpret) long-established economic principles and practices, like supply and demand or statistics-driven analysis. Architects and planners have taken her critiques to heart but sometimes feel that she threw the baby of planning out with the bathwater of modernist city building. Historians and sociologists appreciate her close attention to the details of everyday city life, but fault her for a failure to understand the way that the social power of race, class, and gender has shaped both public policy and private markets. Stratified social relations, they argue, will always undermine the self-organizing networks Jacobs hoped to uncover and nurture.

Jacobs delighted in irking all the specialists and ideologues, from planners and sociologists to libertarians and Marxists. She was wary of traditions of political thought and suspicious of rigid modes of disciplinary academic knowledge production. Despite her interest in the systems by which life organizes itself, she nevertheless kept systems of organized thought at arm’s length. As a result her work often feels sui generis, crafted from her various enthusiasms, her eye for details and processes, and her wide-ranging, unstructured reading in history, philosophy, economics, science, and literature. One thing, however, underpinned all her work: a basic faith that the market is not inherently exploitative. Inequality and economic crises are problems to be solved. They are bugs, not features, of capitalism.

In fact, reading Jacobs, some may feel that the last three hundred years never quite happened. Where, some might ask, in her world of streets and sidewalks and plucky small firms, is the rise of capitalism and its twin products, great wealth and great inequality? Where is industrialization, with its steam engines and railroads and smokestacks plunging the day into sooty dark? Where is the rise and fall of slavery, the formation of the working class, the commodification of human labor, the power of race to immiserate whole classes of people due to the color of their skin? Where are finance and credit as instruments of accumulation or the political and legal fabrication of the corporation as an entity akin to a person? Where is the great consolidating sweep of modernity, rushing ahead to forge an economy of great power and violence, an economy in which, just as Jacobs was coming of age, industrial unions were facing off against bosses over the conditions of work in the great assembly-line factories? And what about the world-altering forces that shaped the troubled cities she surveyed during her own career: deindustrialization and the mobility of capital, globalization, and outsourcing?

Of course, many of these great processes were present in her work. She had read Karl Marx and Adam Smith; she wrote about Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, General Motors, and the rise of Detroit. She told the story of Eastman Kodak and Xerox in the making and unmaking of industrial Rochester; she analyzed the way new technologies could devastate whole regions and make people redundant. But these case studies never quite formed up on the page in any of the usual historical narratives of industrial growth or inequality in the modern age. In fact, Jacobs favored an ahistorical take on economies, looking for principles that stretched across all of human history. Many of her models, for instance, were drawn from antiquity or the Middle Ages. As sources of telling patterns she favored the digs at prehistoric Çatal Hüyük in what is today Turkey, or the story of ancient Rome, or the rise of the medieval trading towns scattered along the rim of the emerging Atlantic world. And when it came to the big factory cities of the past two centuries she looked for inspiration in what she called the unaverage clues offered by places where small firms rather than giant assembly plants predominated: Birmingham not Manchester, New York not Detroit.

Jacobs tended to look at history the way she did a cityscape. She scouted around for promising examples of individual phenomena, situations in which city or economic life seemed to have been working, and then sought to understand the processes that organized these data into constructive systems. Large, amorphous categories, particularly those that carried with them guarantees about how people would behave, left her cold. Class, capitalism, the division of labor—in Jacobs’s view these have descriptive but not explanatory power. They are neither the driving forces of history nor the fundamental conundrums of human life. And for her they risk shackling us to preformed narratives that restrict our ability to understand how actual people make and remake the market in everyday life.

At its core, one might say, Jacobs’s vision is one of markets without capitalism. It’s a theory not of historical development but of always existing possibility.⁶ Markets are a source not only of alienation but of exchange and contact, not simply building blocks of national productivity but wellsprings of new ideas and self-making in concert with others. She rested her conception of human social life not on the struggle between workers and capitalists or the laws of supply and demand but on the struggle of humans to forge new work from old in a society that favors established interests. Small, young enterprises and their employees, particularly those engaged in unglamorous work producing necessary goods and services that solve everyday problems behind the scenes—industrial adhesives, for instance, or a new kind of window frame—need protection from corrosive concentrations of bureaucratic power, whether corporate or governmental, private or public. And not only the innovators we fetishize today. While innovation often solves our pressing problems, Jacobs argues, all kinds of new local work drive our economy. Creative imitation, not innovation, in her words, is the major driver of economic expansion. This, in a way, was as close as she came to utopia, her vision of power to the people. The just city and nation is a place where anyone’s creative impulses to dicker and improvise and reinvent themselves would be unleashed, where everyone would have the opportunity to make their own vital little plans.

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BY THE END OF HER LIFE, Jacobs had begun