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On Jane Jacobs (2017)
- languagehacker 2y agoA nice measured perspective / retrospective on the long-term impact of two of Urban Planning's big cornerstone books. Sort of suggests that the passage of time is a moderating force for both sides of the aisle.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoA lesser known book from Jane Jacobs: Systems of survivals. Really great book on the nature of corruption. And really the problem with capitalism.
- PaulHoule 2y agoSee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival which points out her own dichotomous analysis which may be related to the liberal/conservative axis being discussed in another thread which I started...
- lukebuehler 2y agoI was coming here to say the same. The two "moral syndromes" she describes are a great framework to understand why, for example, people cannot easily switch from business to government work: different moral systems apply (aka her "systems of survival").
- ninetyninenine 2y agoyeah that was really interesting. But what caught my interest the most was the hybrids. To me it was less about how "hard" it was to switch. But the really more about the horrible downside of when the two syndromes combine. A big mega corp lobbying the government is in a way, a hybrid. And that is in a nutshell one of the fundamental problems we face in society. Is Donald Trump a hybrid? Donalds business interests are combining with a system that was designed to be honorable (the presidency).
- PaulHoule 2y agoJacobs always struck me as a conservative that leftists like.
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- saalweachter 2y agoWas she conservative? I don't know much about her politics, besides that she left the US for Canada over opposition to the Vietnam War.
- neom 2y agoShe was: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/12/01/conservatives-jane-jacobs-edmund-burke-and-the-new-urbanism/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/12/01/conservatives-jane-... https://mises.org/mises-daily/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsider https://mises.org/mises-daily/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsid... (Big Jacobs fan over here, I've studied her to death)
- CalChris 2y agoI wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast. I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?
- chimeracoder 2y agoAFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism. If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics. So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? Stewart Brand Interviews Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969169 - Oct 2023 (1 comment) Jane Jacobs' Legacy (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947020 - Jan 2022 (6 comments) Jane Jacobs' Radical Legacy (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22228562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22228562 - Feb 2020 (1 comment) Jane Jacobs: The Champion of Little Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17262331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17262331 - June 2018 (15 comments) An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577008 - Feb 2017 (17 comments) Bright Lights, Small Government: Why libertarians adore Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038972 - Nov 2016 (3 comments) The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772983 - Oct 2016 (15 comments) It's the cities, stupid – Jane Jacobs' macroeconomics (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435 - Jan 2016 (26 comments) A Conversation with Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850288 - June 2013 (1 comment) (<-- posted by pg!) How Jane Jacobs saved New York City's soul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3091165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3091165 - Oct 2011 (3 comments)
- rossdavidh 2y agoThe article reminds me of commentary I have read in the past on Elinor Ostrom, another innovative thinker who the left likes because she was female and opposed the status quo received wisdom, but feel uncomfortable with because she was very skeptical of Big Plans from the federal government or other remote centers of power. If want to advocate for Big Plans to achieve leftist ideals, then being told that Big Plans From The Center Of Power are the main source of the problem, is a difficult truth to accept.
- bee_rider 2y agoIt is a shame when people let current alliances override their actual thinking on general principles. I mean, it is necessary to make compromises for the sake of accomplishing things, but we should be aware of the fact that it is a compromise. Also, I sort of wish the language around “big plans from the center of power” was more… nuanced I guess. Like we can believe that centralized organizations generally are not so bad for producing healthcare guidance but still not want them to make people’s healthcare decisions for them.
- patcon 2y agoI feel for this. There's a "bothness" that's important for organizing from the center and from the edges. Either approach in isolation would utterly fail. Either approach overrepresented beyond the other fails to a lesser degree. Finding the razor edge balance that (1) supports the best decisions to navigate a model of the future that actually unfolds and (2) that's stable in a given context, that is the whole of the work imho
- gsf_emergency 2y agoIt's hard to stay on that razor edge (except in aggregate).. There's another hidden razor edge in the call to download accountabilities. (The other side advocates for only distributing resources, for good reason: local centers of power are also ripe for abuse) Crucially, it's the abstractions themselves that need to be fine-tuned. Jacobs had her own blunt ones-- I'd even say that yours sharpens the (overly-)general prescriptions that came out of Systems of Survival :) It won't be a bad idea to fixate on oxymorons, because that's what these "life-giving razor edges" shall look to like to us mortals, for now. An older one is festina lente, due to Augustus. A center of power handing out .. Something
- kappasan 2y agoA big Jacobs fan here, but I remember reading her book (The Death and Life of...) and also about Robert Moses and thinking "hmm both sides have a point" so she'd probably hate me if she was still alive. I personally think she was a bit too trusting of the (cybernetics-adjacent?) idea of order spontaneously arising from chaos.
- ghaff 2y agoI live a ways outside of Boston. Local opposition did kill some prior projects that would have probably been unfortunate. But the Big Dig was a big net win at the end of a long day—thank you rest of the country for funding thanks to Tip O’Neill. Would never have happened as purely a grassroots thing.
- CalRobert 2y agoThe big dig seems like a profoundly expensive project that produced a small benefit for drivers compared to what building public transit and bike infra with the same money could have done
- ghaff 2y agoThe Big Dig was probably at least as much about aesthetics and reuniting neighborhoods as it was about improving driving. And indeed it succeeded in the former more than the latter though the elevated central artery was pretty much a disaster on both counts. But no one could say that out loud. There were some minor transit improvements though that was already pretty good in the area and cycling was pretty much not on anyone’s radar at the time.
- dibujaron 2y agoIt was an enormous cost, but given that there was an elevated highway there before, I don't think "remove the highway entirely" was a real option; it'd be like trying to delete I-5 from Los Angeles. Burying it was the next best option. as part of the environmental mitigation for this, several good public transit projects were legally required to be built. Only some of them have actually been built, mostly very late and to a lower standard than was promised (e.g. bad fake BRT instead of light rail). If they actually built what they were legally required to build it would've been a huge win for transit too; as it is, it's a minor win for transit too. It's a real shame they didn't do the north-south rail connector at the same time.
- MassPikeMike 2y agoJane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1471846.A_Schoolteacher_in_Old_Alaska https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1471846.A_Schoolteacher_...
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoJust sharing my favourite quote from Death and Life. On cities... "They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."