The City of Man

THE ECONOMY OF CITIES by Jane Jacobs. 268 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Bless Jane Jacobs. Lively, lucid, blunt, original, she triumphs by being mostly wrong. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), took thousands of great-American-city dwellers by storm. Written in the heyday of urban renewal, it briskly pointed out that most big, supposedly progressive rebuilding projects were casting a "great blight of dullness" on the already tormented city dweller. In her ten years as an editor of Architectural Forum, she had seen plenty of such projects. The zesty future, she argued, could be found instead by returning to the diversity of the past, by restoring a facsimile of such seemingly decrepit neighborhoods as New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. Mix rich and poor residents, she cried, old and new buildings, add a few cultural facilities for ferment, and cherish the small shops that provide neighborhood intimacy.

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-class and lower-class city dwellers alike. U.S. city planners are no more likely to re-create old neighborhood living successfully than William Morris would have been in rejuvenating Victorian England by establishing a Utopian handicraft community on the banks of the river Wandie. No matter. Despite her mistakes, Jane Jacobs, operating as curmudgeon and gadfly, had taken grandiose assumptions of city planning and stood them on their ears with invigorating effect.

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 than statistics. The ingredient essential to the vitality of cities, she asserts, is "new work being added to old." Innovative energy comes from small, independent, hustling entrepreneurs. "The little movements at the hubs," says Jane Jacobs, "turn the great wheels of economic life."

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 century England. In the 1840s, says Jane Jacobs, Manchester looked like a model of progress and modernity. It had become a rich, gigantic industrial machine for cranking out textiles. By contrast, Birmingham then seemed outmoded. It was "a muddle of oddments," where myriad small firms busily made saddles, harnesses, tools, buttons, guns, jewelry, papier-mache trays. What happened? When other cities began producing their own textiles, proud Manchester withered. But, Jane Jacobs delightedly points out, poky Birmingham's underlying diversity allowed it to adapt creatively to changing technologies and markets.

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 to Jane Jacobs, for it has revived its stagnating economy with a swarm of small, flexible electronics and research firms. Postwar Los Angeles also draws praise for spawning new companies to produce goods and services (sliding glass doors, mechanical saws) once imported from other cities. In range of activities, though, no American city can match Hong Kong or Tokyo, whose variegated industries Jane Jacobs much admires.

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 of government not merely upon the whole economy but--through tax and credit policies, commerce regulations and contracts--upon the very obscure and nascent businesses she most prizes. It is as if Mrs. Jacobs postulated that the vitality and effectiveness of a washerwoman's work can be judged by the vehemence of her elbows, while neglecting to mention the existence of washing machines.

Despite such simplistic assumptions, Jane Jacobs succeeds as usual. Shining through every page of her book is a boundless and infectious conviction that the city is the best and noblest product of man. In one remarkable chapter she even goes so far as to reverse the traditional assumption that the first cities grew out of agricultural communities. Not at all. Citing archaeological evidence, Jane Jacobs argues that the first cities were founded on trade and actually helped create organized agriculture and animal husbandry. In an age when most Americans have been persuaded that great cities are creeping problem areas, to be deplored and if possible escaped, Jane Jacobs perceives and persuades that cities and the challenge of their problems offer a mighty and reliable means for national progress.

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