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Three Books on Cities by Jane Jacobs reviewed by ‘Rerevisionist’
Review of sociology revisionism Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961 Is she the Chomsky of urban life?, my optimistic review June 26, 2010Added below: 2023 unoptimistic details of Jewish Predictive Programs for Cities I was introduced to this book (published by Penguin) in about 1970 by a girl who'd completed an M.A. on England's first council estate. Both she, and this book, impressed me. I now have, thanks to Amazon, a plump 'Modern Library' Edition, thicker but otherwise of similar dimensions to that paperback. It was first published in 1961 as a single volume; but 'portions' were published before this. So this dates to the late 1950s/ 1960. Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was not popular with architects; I had an architect's journal of the relevant date which snipes at her. What suddenly occurred to me and causes me puzzlement now is the fact that some towns known to me, in England—e.g. Reading, Blackburn, Bristol I think, parts of London—had their Victorian guts removed AFTER 1960—typically in the 1970s. (Test yourself here: if you're old enough, and took an interest, when did rebuilding take place? If not, check the history of a town known to you. And I was struck by the fact that nothing at all, not one thing, remained of Atlanta, Georgia, from the 19th century). Suggesting, or proving, that she was ignored, or at least that greater powers defeated her. IF Jane Jacobs was so influential, how come a lot of what she preached against, took place long after her book? Let me suggest a possibility: maybe Jane Jacobs knew perfectly well—after all, her husband was an architect—that fortunes could be made by demolishing old housing and filling the land with apartments, malls, and the rest. Nothing mysterious about that. And trams, trains, buses, transit schemes could be elbowed out in favour of more profitable private transport. Why not write about this, and how, in her view, cities could be remodelled or developed or left or improved in optimum ways? In fact this book is descriptive, but low on analysis. Compare Chomsky: he wrote on the Vietnam War. How many American generals or airforce people were condemned as war criminals? What actually happened? The answer is—nothing. Even utter *** like Kissinger gets kid glove treatment. Maybe Jane Jacobs is in the same mode as regards towns? Could she have been a decoy, an irrelevance, trotted out to pretend something is being done, people's deep concerns are being addressed? Someone, please, show I'm wrong. This is a book, and Jacobs is an author, of considerable interest, but not for obvious reasons. By 1960, it was clear, or should have been to Jews, that all aspects of the USA were dominated by Jews. But this fact was kept very secret by the then-media, which of course was itself dominated by Jews. The attitude reminds me of The Catcher in the Rye of 1951, about ten years earlier, with not one of the unlikeable people in school or out of it showing the faintest awareness of great issues. Jacobs discusses US cities—New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Houston, Baltimore, Los Angeles—and their problems, mostly of rather inhuman demolition schemes and rather arrogant planners, ignoring the realities of dangerous 'neighborhoods' without neighbors, and homeless vagrants, whom she regards as inevitable, as people in India regard beggars. She is unaware of the 'Fed', wars of the most vicious types, genetic differences between populations, and Jewish use of money. She is a critic of secondary effects, such as makework in bureaucracies, the demolition of thriving but old areas, and construction of featureless buildings without 19th-century detailing. The US war economy and its harm and waste was too much for her to tackle. She was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and given hospitality by the 'New School for Social Research', and acknowledges 'many scores of persons', including Saul Alinsky. If Kevin MacDonald had been able to found a school about Judaism, town planning is a subject which ought to have been included.
Note from 2023: E. Michael Jones published The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing first in 2004. Jones is a very convinced Roman Catholic, who, so far as I know, omits or dislikes the Jewish symbiosis with Catholicism, which had such a huge impact in the Middle Ages, tending to Church ownership of ordinary land, with secret Jewish urban control.
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Jones's book, which I haven't read, appears to look at four US cities, and appears to regard the 1930s-1960s 'urban renewal' projects as ways to move blacks into Catholic areas, and to demolish interesting lively areas: 'more houses were destroyed than were built'. It's an analogous comment to that of people who state all architects of monstrous tower blocks around the world are Jews; of the Arno Goldfinger type. And to Biblical thunderings on deleting all trace of habitations and dwellings. Population movements are another long-term Jewish interest. John Norris' book Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor (1712) is quoted by hexzane527 in 2019-02-12- What is the Real Jewish Project?, where of course most ethnic traditions, however long-established in their homelands, would be erased. Thirteen Years Later: newstarget.com/2023-05-30-death-of-the-american-city-nine-trends.html (May 30, 2023) ran an alarmist online piece on American cities. 'Alarmist' because of its use of language and absence of quantification. Most of the themes are the results of Jewish hate policies, something which Jane Jacobs of course would not touch. I'll try to summarise:
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 Review of Jane Jacobs on cities Jane Jacobs: The Economy of Cities 1969 Wealth-generating cities: the true atoms of economics?, June 28, 2010
Jane Jacobs (born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which may well have directed her life's work) wrote on American Cities in 1962 and 1969. This book was written when she was aged about 68 and I think therefore must count as her economics chef d'oeuvre. Subtitled 'Principles of Economic Life', 'Cities and the Wealth of Nations' tries to reorientate the whole 'science' of economics. In effect, she asks—what is the simplest atom of economic productivity? A farm or fishable sea, perhaps? Or a factory? A mine, or oil well maybe? Her answer is no—it's a city. In contrast with many people who view cities as dirty or dangerous, she is an optimist about them. In fact she thinks all economic progress is based on cities. The reasons aren't spelt out, but by implication, I think she claims [1] there are people in cities with multifarious skills, and their synergy gets things done; [2] people can also produce novelties, and these are essential; [3] cities also have multitudes of objects which can be bought without too much effort—Jacobs many times gives convincing lists of things which cities can provide, but which backward areas [her phrase] couldn't supply. Think of a taxi in the Sahara—no fuel, no parts, no water, no roads... In summary, most products need a more or less complicated mixture of raw materials, processing, tools, skill, and transport; as it happens, only cities can do this. And only cities with a creative approach will not stagnate. Her books started with observations on American cities—New York, Boston, Pittsburgh... Then she broadened into Rome, Tokyo, Paris, St Petersburg, Manchester. There are many piquant examples—including settlements which became neglected and emptied—in this book, taken from rural France, Japan, Venice, Rome, Glasgow—and many more. The Economy of Cities was published in 1969, tens years or so after The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which suggests she may have visited other countries, or travelled around the world, or read human geographical books on cities. Her chatty style gives few clues to her methodology, or even if she had one. Another important view she has is that agriculture was invented in cities (or at least towns). When I first read this, I thought it was absurd: one thinks of rural areas with villages growing wheat or rice, with some domestic animals; and then towns slowly growing out of them. Jacobs says tractors, ploughs, hoes, winnowing equipment, everything, was a town product. I don't know if she would have pushed this view right back to prehistory, but it certainly makes sense. (She describes Çatal Hüyük in what's now Turkey in one of her first books. And claims that the mutant form of wheat with multiple ears on the stalk may have been identified by a farmer—not accidentally spread). With these approaches, she identifies five aspects of cities which are 'import-replacing' (i.e. create their own net wealth): markets, jobs, transplants, technology, capital. She makes a convincing case why countries all have one capital—Holland, France, Britain, Sweden. She also looks at pathologies of these—there's interesting material on cities as subsidising poor areas, which sounds convincing; on VAT as a damaging force on small industries, as tax is extracted at each stage of production—advantaging huge businesses where VAT is only charged at the end; on weaponry as ultimately damaging and military bases as unhelpful; and on national currencies as not providing valuable feedback—she seems inclined towards local currencies, though she isn't very clear on this: she has a biological analogy of several people all forced to breathe at the same rate by some centralised system, irrespective of what they're doing. She also has material on groups forced to subsidise others; Vietnamese under the French being one example—but readers of this may empathise also with taxpayers in the west subsidising immigrants. Another pathology is clearances—the Scottish Highlands were one example, but much the same happened in parts of the USA. Another pathology is abandoned places, and abandoned centres of empires—Portugal, Turkey. She has convincing-sounding material on risks of cities: epidemics, fires, food and water supply problems, which it occurs to me may be part of Jewish belief systems. Yet another pathology is capital in the money sense used thoughtlessly: the Shah of Iran, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Tsar Peter the Great, and dams built around the world are some of her illustrations. There isn't room here to outline everything in the book; however it's well worth five stars. I don't know if anyone took up and developed her work; my guess is that academic economists would simply be too financially in a rut and intellectually timid to risk it, though I would guess some of her ideas were/are used without acknowledgement. A problem I have is that she is so accustomed to her material that she's too brief with her analytical comments. (This does not apply to her descriptions of places, which are lovingly prolonged). For instance, this seems rather unclear to me: 'We learn this, for example, from the desperate competition, now occurring almost everywhere, for transplanted industries that are up for grabs, which suggests that investments in capital facilities for transplants to plug into have been far out of proportion to the numbers of transplantable industries generated.' (p 107). The book's Appendix tries to diagram the process of city growth, starting with its exports and imports; then new work added internally; then multipliers; then more added work. There are implications that some 'work' is taken from its hinterland, and so 'work' exported back in an updated way. She is not a mathematician and her diagrams seem logically incomplete or wrong to me; for instance, the way she writes makes it seem there are no upper limits, so that a few generations should lead to splendid wealth for all. Maybe she's influenced by the pervading idea of money value. Maybe her diagrams are valuable and new and point the way to proper analysis of human activity. I don't know, unfortunately. Important: quick overview of her revisionism to show agriculture started in towns: Some of the Meyer Lansky effects are described on page 209 of the Pelican paperback. 'In American cities, new immigrant groups other than those coming from Protestant North Europe have always found it hard to get initial capital for enterprises of their own. ... capital has been derived from extortionate slum landlordism ... organized crimes, and ... political graft. ... This is one reason I think—perhaps even the principal reason—for the extraordinary toleration of organized crime and graft in American society.' It's worth noticing that, although the USA is a relatively young country, Jacobs has no theory of the way pioneering states are built. Possibly this reflects her Jewish outlook. But it's a big hole. Seven years after writing this, and pondering the Jewish trait of deception, and wondering about the USSR and the Jewish century, I finally observed an unnoticed, untamed elephant in the room of discourse. In a time of huge wars, the equipment, machinery, delivery systems, record keeping, feeding, guarding etc of what is variously estimated—perhaps 25% of GNP—occurred to me as an object to be noticed, then studied, in its own right. I'm assuming Jews in the USA shipped factories, equipment, rifles, motor vehicles, buildings, and what-have-you to ports, probably in the Baltic Sea, with port handling equipment and river, rail, road and communication links to unpublicised forts and small cities: not cities in Jacob's usage, but bases, dumps, munitions stores, air support - not cities at all. All omitted from Jane Jacobs. What is perhaps more obvious is Jacobs' failure to consider money, and its control. The Death and Life of Great [North] American Cities, written a generation after WW2, should obviously include the Fed. |
 Review of More of Jane Jacobs's potentially important economic history revisionism Jane Jacobs: Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Principles of Economic Life 1984More on the growth and decline of settlements
The contents: her overview is that import-replacing cities unleash great forces—markets, jobs, transplants, technology, capital; her chapters follow these effects (roughly) as these chapter headings and summaries try to suggest– 1 FOOL'S PARADISE [survey of econometric projection failures etc] 2 BACK TO REALITY [Cities as real] 3 CITIES' OWN REGIONS [Hinterlands including Tokyo, which spreads for miles, some cities like Glasgow without them. Toronto farmers market - rather typical of her slightly scatty approach] 4 SUPPLY REGIONS [E.g. Uruguay; Zambia and copper; oil countries - illustrates no 'import-replacing city'] 5 REGIONS WORKERS ABANDON [Wales; Sicily; Spain; Napizaro - Mexico - also illustrates no 'import-replacing city'] 6 TECHNOLOGY AND CLEARANCES [Highlands; USA; Soviet Union - somewhat similar to Biblical thing - in the highland case animals get precedence over people] 7 TRANSPLANT REGIONS [areas where factories etc are simply planted; includes battles within US states ego South Dakota angling for Minnesota industries to move] 8 CAPITAL FOR REGIONS WITHOUT CITIES [TVA as a disaster - they ended up trying to sell cheap electricity/ southern Italy] 9 BYPASSED PLACES [Places that sink - she quotes a few people who don't believe it happened] Egypt without papyrus/ American subsistence in North Carolina, retrogressing/ Ethiopia p 130/ medieval Europe] 10 WHY BACKWARD CITIES NEED ONE ANOTHER [Iran and Peter the Great failed to modernize; Venice with fragile small places grew/ Japanese example p146] 11 FAULTY FEEDBACK TO CITIES [includes idea of multiple currencies] 12 TRANSACTIONS OF DECLINE ['.. the very policies ... that are necessary to win, hold and exploit an empire are destructive to an imperial power's own cities and cannot help but lead to their stagnation and decay.' 13 THE PREDICAMENT/ 14 DRIFT/ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS/ NOTES Engaging descriptions though much on examination (see endnotes) is second-hand, eg Bardou in the Cevennes—though this turns out to be taken from a newspaper! Uruguay as a once-flourishing region, a 'supply region' and its fall when the EU protected against its meat, and plastics replaced some leather. This book was written at the time of 'Can Russia Feed Itself?' by Alex Nove. Volta dam in Ghana is listed as one of many hopeless projects. Jacobs does not however blame engineering companies and builders for grabbing pointless contracts. She is very blame-free, possibly wrongly: she just assumes they acted in good faith but got it all wrong. Iran buying e.g. a helicopter factory, and Peter the Great, trying to buy then-modern economy, both got it wrong through not understanding about what I'd call infrastructure and the network of detail - as do people naturally trying to plonk a factory in high unemployment area. NB she thinks the EU was modelled on USA's states—presumably she couldn't imagine anyone copying the USSR. Also French farmers subsidized by German industries (and Britain). She predates mass immigration—for example at one point comments on famine in Ethiopia, the people having nowhere to go... The book has no illustrations. It is indexed, and has End notes, largely from Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Toronto Globe and Mail; and books. She's not a systematic thinker—the endnotes show much of her work was taken from newspapers. I visualize her as having collections of suggestive clippings, which she then shaped into her books, no doubt with feedback from her architect husband. |
Note 21 December 2019, 30 March 2021: When I wrote these reviews, I was rather Jew-ignorant. Jacobs can be regarded as a wilful liar about Jews, who appear to have played a large role in the Mediterranean, and since about 1500 in the western hemisphere. Such issues as the Federal Reserve, which she omits to mention I think; and the possible use of money power to promote wars and bases and gulags; and Jews and settlements, population movements and the rest of it, may have been intentionally omitted. She certainly comments in typically Jew ways, for example puzzled over the pretended toleration of violence by white Americans, who of course were coerced by Jews. She underrates weaponry: much of the "rust-belt" must be the remains of US weapon manufacture when Jews in the USSR were supplied with vast factories and materiel. And of course the entire system of Christianity, churches, and land ownership by supposedly religious people plus the intersection with Jews is unmentioned by Jacobs.
But her empirical approach to cities, their positions and activities and changes and rises and declines, seems right to me. A sort of near-archeological sifting of evidence, looking at human activity in their millions, synthesised over time, testing hypotheses, must be a legitimate study.
The books' blurbs say she was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and given hospitality by the 'New School for Social Research', and acknowledged 'many scores of persons' in her prefaces, including Saul Alinsky.