J is for Jane Jacobs
If you were to write about business, politics and morality, how would you set about it? The usual approach would include chapters that covered the key issues and principles, followed by several exploring the complexities with helpful examples, and end with a set of conclusions. You might offer an introduction, sketching out the major themes, and your concluding analysis would include a summary and reiteration of the major points. Overall, somewhat boring! However, when Jane Jacobs decided to write about the basis of morality, she reached back to an earlier approach: Systems of Survival addresses the topic through dialogue. [i]
Jane Jacobs is best known for her work in urban studies, and for pioneering a planning approach which includes respecting and responding to the needs of city dwellers as critical. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she proved to be a rule-breaker from early on. After high school, she enrolled in the School of General Studies at Columbia University, taking a variety of courses (all the way from geology, zoology, law, to politics and economics). She got good grades, but “This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high-school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.” [ii] From such a beginning …
She was clearly destined to make a difference. An article, ‘Downtown is for People’, appeared in a 1958 issue of Fortune, and it brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation [iii] He invited Jacobs to begin work as a reviewer for grant proposals, and later in 1958, the Foundation awarded her a grant to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the U.S. She spent three years conducting research and writing drafts. In 1961, Random House published the result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a non-fiction best seller.
I first read her book back in the 1980s, and it was exciting, linking sensitive thinking with trenchant criticism. It was Jacobs who may have been the first person to refer to the term ‘social capital’, a concept I have made use of over the years, which she used to accompany her emphasis on linking primary uses (neighbourhoods that contained businesses, leisure facilities and homes all mixed together) together to create real neighbourhoods. By suggesting that cities were living beings, a form of ecosystem, she argued for bottom-up planning, and criticised “slum clearing” and “high-rise housing” projects, the approach that had been a universally-supported planning practice in what she described as the pseudoscience of the male dominated planning profession. It made her the object of continuing criticism, even to the present day, while also establishing her as one of the leading advocates for ‘cities for living’. Despite attacks, she isremembered as an advocate for the thoughtful development of cities, and for leaving “a legacy of empowerment for citizens to trust their common sense and become advocates for their place”. [iv] That legacy remains strong, still informing the approach of many people working in urban planning.
Jane Jacobs wasn’t just a writer. In the 1960’s she built up a network of local protests against slum clearance development and the destruction of neighbourhoods, often undertaken to rebuild areas. She gained notoriety arguing against proposals for the first stage of the Lower Manhattan Expressway. A local hero, she was arrested in 1968 for energising a crowd at a public hearing on the project, and was accused of inciting a riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. After months of trials conducted in New York City (to which Jacobs commuted from Toronto), her charge was reduced to disorderly conduct. The project was abandoned. She moved to Toronto in 1968, mainly to protect her draft aged sons, but partly to stop constantly leading fights with the New York City Government, living in Toronto for the rest of her life.
Although most of what she wrote on planning concerned New York, her arguments had an impact in many countries. For example, her opposition to the demolition of local neighborhoods for projects of ‘urban renewal’ was taken up in Melbourne in the 1960s, where resident associations fought against the large-scale high-rise housing projects of the Victorian Housing Commission, arguing the plans had little regard for the impact on local communities.[v] She, and they, were right in their objections, but the horrible high-rise projects still went ahead, leaving blots on the Melbourne landscape that are only slowly disappearing today.
While she is best known for her impact on urban planning, her concerns grew. In emphasising the importance of community and a vibrant city life, she saw many trends as threatening and in 2004 she published Dark Age Ahead, in which see foresaw a continuing decay of five key ‘pillars’ in the USA: community and family; higher education, science and technology; taxes and government responsiveness to needs; and professional self-regulation. It was a dark view, one in which she foresaw a “mass amnesia” where even the memory of what was lost was lost. [vi]
Fifteen years later, her worries read now with what seems an alarming prescience: [vii]
- “On Community and Family: People are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare, that is: consumption over fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of community welfare.
- On Higher Education: Universities are more interested in credentials than providing high quality education.
- Bad Science: Elevation of economics as the main “science” to consider in making major political decisions.
- Bad Government: Governments are more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the population.
- Bad Culture: A culture that prevents people from understanding the deterioration of fundamental physical resources on which the entire community depends.
Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of “ideology” is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum the ideology reflects. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become “unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, and simply fall back on their beliefs for “pre-fabricated answers” to any problem they encounter.” Sounds familiar?
And so we return to Systems of Survival, which was written nearly 12 years before Dark Age Ahead, and is a signpost to her interests beyond the city. As a dialogue, it involves six people, who have been brought together (almost tricked into doing so), to debate morality and work. Early on, Kate, a scientist, whose easy to read book on animal memory has been criticised by her academic colleagues, produces what she describes as two radically different moral systems of work: the commercial and the ‘moral guardian’ syndromes. Each contains 15 moral precepts, and each precept in one of the syndromes has its opposite in the other. Through Kate, Jacobs proposes the commercial moral syndrome underpins the views of business owners, scientists, farmers, and traders, and the guardian moral syndrome informs government, charities, hunter-gatherers, and religious institutions. In her dialogue, she explains there are other moral ideas and principles that are not related to work, and which apply to people under both syndromes.
In the preface, Jacobs explains, “This book explores the morals and values that underpin viable working life. Like the other animals, we find and pick up what we can use, and appropriate territories. But unlike the other animals, we also trade and produce for trade. Because we possess these two radically different ways of dealing with our needs, we also have two radically different systems of morals and values – both systems valid and necessary.” [viii]
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Reproduced from Wikipedia, op cit
What follows is a witty, passionate and sometimes aggravated debate, as Kate; Armbruster (whose first name isn’t given), a retired publisher and host for the conversations, Jasper, a crime novelist, Ben, an environmentalist, Quincy, a banker, and Hortense, a lawyer, meet together. The dialogue explores Kate’s two syndromes and the precepts, trying to understand both how these arose and their implications. As views are challenged and analysed, so the Guardian Syndrome is seen to be demanding and fundamentally impersonal, the Commercial Syndrome opportunistic and fundamentally exploitative.
To where does the dialogue lead? Unlike in her books on planning, where Jacobs sides with the community, fighting against both regulations and commercial interests, this is a more nuanced view. In an analysis familiar from other writers, we see that moral behaviour is both complex and often inconsistent. At one point she examines the role of deception, and as the debate develops it is clear that deception can be both morally and practically beneficial, to achieve a diplomatic outcome, or to advance a government agenda; at other times is morally unacceptable, when a business lies to gain unfair, illegal or misleading advantage.
Do the two syndromes have to be kept separate: governments following the Guardian Syndrome, business the Commercial Syndrome? She suggests it is only a theoretical apartheid: governments deliver services and seek efficiency and the benefits of competition, while commercial ventures seek the comforts that come from tradition and loyalty, especially through the rule of law. Can we hold both syndromes in our heads, and switch flexibly from one to another? She uses history to suggest this raises moral conflicts that, eventually, may lead to one precept dominating the other, but surely there can be a middle path. [ix] The dialogue is undertaken following one rule, personal and private morality were removed from the debate. However, as the book progresses, it becomes clear it is impossible to excise the personal from the social, each influencing the other. Jacobs seems to want to end with a sense of flexibility, with people being allowed to shift perspective as needs and situations require. Since 1992, we have an abundance of evidence to show that personal self-interest exploits both syndromes for individual advantage.
I mentioned deception a moment ago. In many ways deception is the converse of loyalty, and I have previously written about the competing pulls of loyalty, to a system of fair and impartial rules, or to intimate personal relationships; being loyal to the family, or to society and its set of impersonal laws. In the last few decades, that division has become increasingly difficult to manage. Many years ago, Robert Greenleaf [x] and Peter Block [xi] wrote about the manager of the company as a trustee, a steward, seeking to ensure both the company and its staff are nurtured and supported, not just for now, but for the future. That businesses should be ‘guardians’ is central to today’s agenda as companies are asked to consider climate change, increasing income inequality, and longer-term sustainability. Many young employees are concerned about business morality: should they be loyal to the company, even if it’s actions are far from moral; loyal to the government, even if it is self-serving, avoiding commitment to the nation as a whole; or loyal to their own private moral or ethical principles? Do they have to deceive themselves to survive?
Back in July 2016, President Obama had to address the shooting of two young African Americans by police officers, and the persistent feeling by many people of colour that they are second class citizens. Memorably, he said “we can do better than this”. [xii] In the 21st Century, surely we can manage to address moral issues with insight and flexibility. We don’t live in an ‘either-or’ world: we can do better than this. Jane Jacobs wanted us to think carefully about our public transactions, and, inescapably, about our personal principles. Systems for Survival is an elegant and clever way to help us down that path.
[i] Vintage, 1994, originally published in 1992, by Random House
[ii] From: Allen, Max, ed. Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs: Ginger Press, 1997
[iii] Peter Lawrence, The Death and Life of Urban Design, Journal of Urban Design, June 2006, vol 11, no 2, 145-72
[iv] For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs#cite_note-academia.edu-20
[v] R Howe, The Spirit of Melbourne, O’Hanlon & Luckins, Go! Melbourne in the Sixties: Beaconsfield 2005, 218-30
[vi] Dark Age Ahead, Random House, 2004
[vii] This comes from Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead#cite_note-Jacobs-1
[viii] Op cit, p. xi
[ix] For an interesting perspective, see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor, Penguin. 2019
[x] Robert K Greenleaf, Servant Leadership, Paulist Press, 1977
[xi] Peter Block, Stewardship, 2nd Edition, Berrett Koehler, 2013
[xii] https://time.com/4397611/president-obama-sterling-castile-shootings-we-are-better-than-this/
