It's the Cities, Stupid

It's the Cities, Stupid summarizes "Jane Jacobs on cities," looking not just at her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but also at The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations:

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

And the dynamic regions are centered around cities.

Even agricultural progress spread outward from cities. Jacobs describes the inability of Ireland to turn itself around after the disastrous famines of the 1840s:

There were no ports to receive relief food... There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops...

To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection — and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless — was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies.

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