Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Back to Nature
By Andrew Hacker
The Nature of Economies
by Jane Jacobs
Modern Library, 190 pp., $21.95
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 279 pp., $24.95
Jane Jacobs, who turned eighty-four this May, has won a large and devoted following since the appearance of The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. There she maintained that, until relatively recently, cities responded to elemental human needs, even as they seemed to evolve aimlessly. Hence her defense of older neighborhoods, which preserved a stability and identity once provided by rural villages and tribal communities. Her targets were professional planners who bulldozed aging streets in the name of space and sanitation. This displacement, she argued, eliminated the complex street life of shops, small businesses, and pedestrian movement that made city neighborhoods both safer and more interesting. It also brought high-rises and suburban tracts, both of which Jacobs condemned as sterile and constricting. (How much more human public housing would be if projects could rent space to shops at their street level.) In effect, she was saying that cities are natural growths, and should be left to evolve spontaneously. If it were not for her warnings and her persuasive advocacy, a new highway might have been ruinously blasted across lower Manhattan. Her work has inspired other campaigns against urban folly from San Francisco to Paris. Jacobs's influence confirms that books matter. It isn't easy to cite another writer who has had a comparable impact in our time.
Review, 3096 words
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