Notes on Jane Jacobs

I like chicken salad. I normally buy it from the deli section at the HEB, but it's a little pricey relative to what you get that way. I was thinking, maybe I should just make it myself, seems easy enough. So I just found a recipe for chicken salad. Pretty f-ing easy just hadn't bothered to check. I was reading it and then thinking of things I might want to also stick in it.

And this made me think of the economic ideas of Jane Jacobs, journalist and urban theorist, prime mover in the backlash against modernist architecture and building schemes. She also wrote some odd little books on political economy.

She said that cities are the engines of innovation and economic development, and that economics viewed in terms of nations is absurd. She also said that the best way to bring rural regions out of poverty is to citify them, extending this logic to third world development.

Cities build wealth through import-replacement.

Here's her model for the birth of civilization as we know it (and with that why my chicken salad research tangent is related):

*you start with some nomadic tribes
*they trade items
*they trade items that are found in their territories for items not found in their territories; or they develop a skill and trade the goods they produce thereby
*a hub starts to develop where someone gets the bright idea to produce a traded good in large volume, and regular trading netowrks are established to provide other goods.
*those networks start folding into the hub

By her argument, for instance the city precedes agriculture. Agriculture is something cities produce to meet their needs, it isn't a stage on the way to urban specialization.

Think that is roughly her schema.

It's very interesting. D&G like it apparently. It appears to oppose the city to the Ur-staat. Think about the basic model. Nomads swapping skills. The model of economic growth, import-replacement, follows this logic:
*a foreign commodity is desired
*that commodity is essentially reverse-engineered, a new nomad group (or whoever) studies its production with an aim of generating it locally
*in the process of learning to reproduce the thing they gain an intimate connection to the process of its production and hence can innovate, change it make static knowledge dyynamic.

So this is one of the useful functions Jacobs offers us in thinking through political economy. Rather than abstraction we have this absolute focus on the concrete, even more concrete than national economies (she even criticizes national money systems and advocates currency focused around a city). And we are given an elemental unit of human economic growth but it is not really passive consumption or a sort of disembodied self-interested rationalism. The basic unit of economic growth in this model isn't really the individual, selfish or otherwise. It's a unit of mimicking and reorganizing a practice. Repetition with a difference.

So in the base of political economy we have a swerve and a shift, difference all the way down.

I think my main criticism of what I've read of her work is too much of a bias towards what she construes as urban in her own day and age. Something about urban life as we have decided to live it radically damages and dismisses nature. I don' t think this is necessary, even my only counter-examples are large Iroquois towns and the fluid style of their agriculture. It's the old question, right? The hyper-determination of the city is itself dependent upon a layer of indeterminacy, a wild zone, and the urban world tends to degrade that wild zone articulate it as a dead or neutered space when it is actually a vital torrent. This is a peculiar criticism, but Jacobs is a peculiar economist at any rate. I wonder that her urbanism requires her to construct an undeveloped barbarous zone outside the city walls, a dead zone ripe for the taking.

The Derrideans (maybe just pop Derrideans) bring me towards this in a way, their focus on any agency being dependent upon a passivity. Self is only self with an Other etc., binary opposition,etc. The subordinate term is not just articulated, it is debased, murdered, turned into a dead and neutered thing. It feels as though Jacobs does this with her idea of the country outside the city.

And I wonder how essential this is to the concepts I find compelling in her work.

It's a question of definition. So for instance you could define the working class as primarily that class engaged in a master/slave dialectic with the capitalist bourgeoisie, or something to that effect. A binary opposition with a repressed term.

Or you could define it as the people who work and blend mental and physical experience into myriad forms of labor, extending their being beyond the boundaries of their flesh thereby. An immanent definition.

I think honestly power works through binaries and liberation works through autonomous immanence.

You could define the country as people who aren't city-dwellers, who lack its resources and wealth and sophistication. You can also define country people as those who regularly blend their labor with complex ecological systems, enhancing them in a complementary fashion.

You could also simply define the city as the zone of import-replacement and reinvention, to greater or lesser levels of intensity.

I like the import-replacement model, very much in fact, but I do think that binarism is somehow unnecessary, a product of living in an already degraded system. The two poles she develops in reality need each other draw each other together into a smooth continuum. The reverence of the country with the willpower and curiosity of the city, together they prevent torpor in one and violent arrogance in the other.

Maybe...