The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What Jane Jacobs is really responding to, and criticizing is the spreading of the capital through what John K Galbraith calls the technostructure. Since capitalism’s main drive is technology, as technology reduces cost, affords greater material agency through large capital investments, this is no small subject, although it is a somewhat hidden angle. The megalopolises that exist today are really only possible because of major advances through technology, major investments in infrastructure and major innovations through technological advancement. For this reason, it makes sense that the planners of cities will also invest in the aesthetic of knowledge the technostructure affords us: expression of good design.
Design is really only the highlighting of a particular axis of an independent logical relationship. That is to say, if there are three mutually exclusive choices, their presentation in design as three separate but equatable types is good design. Good design allows us to equalize non-differentials by allowing their containment within logically more important groupings. If we are looking at a series of individuals, it makes sense to present information about these individuals in such a way that highlights through equitable features of however the information is being presented so that these individuals can be arranged to be easily sortable. So that we can make decisions about these individuals. It would make less sense to cram the information together in logically independent relations that have very little to do with our ability to make decisions.
In this sense, much urban design as criticized by Jacobs holds along the axis of decision making for individuals, or at least from the planning perspective, to equate logically independent relationships that have little to do with the ability for common urbanites to make decisions about their environment. For Jacobs, which may be dated these days, urban designers thus, have little understanding of the walkable experiences of urbanities for community building, community strengthening. In short, their knowledge is based more on aesthetically “cold” principles from a bigger view. There’s a good quote from this book: That a region “is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution” In other words, such bureaucracies are too abstract to understand small problems, thus their knowledge and their creation of models is based on these “cold” aesthetically split models that do not demonstrate interactions that stand outside of their modeling. They “average” out too much data, and end up with an impoverished but clear picture that is unsustainable as it is not supported by an exterior topology their model cannot account for.
Galbraith uses the term techostructure in order to denote the melding of planned economies with technologies. This means that administrators and managers need to be able to organize their information according to technologies and functional uses. While regional governments will lag behind the development of new technologies, their division along previous lines of technological influence, their division according to technological functionality will deny the collected effects of their management. Such administrative bodies deny confluence. Early on in the book, Jacob goes to argue that it is in the intermix of diversity, technologies, and mixed uses (where an area is used one way by a population for a time, and then later on, has a different use at a different time) that creates a strong community, enriches its citizens and promotes good economic and social growth.
One of the geniuses of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx was their recognition that value and phenomenon are created synthetically. This is to say that all topographies are determined by their exterior. As Jacobs notes, communities are generally held around a few key socialites who are able to navigate the interstices of different circles of interest that are geographically aligned by otherwise do not mix. These key individuals carry with them an excess of value since they provide the nexus to which communities and built around and attain cohesion of vision, value and identity. These individuals, like key spaces, be it a park, a mall or otherwise, are not the product of a singular focus, but a mix of logically related cues that deploy individuals together, forcing them to interact, create friendships and build trust.
In a technostructure kind of language we can claim that the very thing any technologically influenced management structure — that relies on the creation and management of specific “expert knowledge” — must necessarily miss the very object they are attempting to manage as a whole. There is department of community, or department of individuals — there is no management of human interaction (socially or economically) as these are the very values that a techostructure wishes to maintain. Rather, this element is destroyed by a technostructure as it is split between departments that have conflicting authority to manage their immanent spheres. The result of this, is understood as chaos as each sphere of influence manages its immanence but in the process of doing so impacts (through the excess of its immanence) other spheres as this influence organizes parts of society that impact other spheres of influence. This excess of planning can only be understood as chaos in reference to the rigorous “planning” of each sphere… what is unplanned is the outside impact.
While Jacobs does not talk about society and cities too much at this abstract a level — her book is more examples of various principles along separate dimension (each chapter is a meditation on each logically independent feature, such as streets, parks, sidewalks, age of buildings, and so on) I think her book would have been more cohesive if it were able to address the issue from a large standpoint of aesthetic philosophical division, as a concept like technostructure would afford. Nonetheless, while dated in some examples, and in use of language, Jacob’s book remains a good marker for the consideration of the interstices that make up society, that any logically independent axis is in fact not truly independent in how that value is created even if we organize it along lines of presentation that appear to be wholly independent. Cities die and grow by chaos, even as this chaos is technologically created through capitalism, forming new social alignments all the while, it is poor understood by existing bodies that use dated models. One wonders how this would have played out should Jacobs had written this in the present age of the internet.
So the 4 stars is really only because she lacks a unifying feature of the book explicitly, even though it is beautifully thought out, and written with rigorous passion. This book is somewhat dated and will be even more so in the near present.
