At the mid-20th Century, Jane Jacobs stood almost alone as a critic of urban planning. Instead of seeing cities as elegant, or as “works of art,” she saw cities as diverse. Instead of seeing cities as formed by a master plan involving functional areas such as housing and commerce set by zoning laws, and connected by roads and public transportation, she saw cities as evolutionary. She liked “short streets,” on which people actually live, work, rush and saunter. She enjoyed both the anonymity provided by cities, and the “eyes on the street” that help to police them even with this anonymity. She liked a certain amount of economic inequality and, in particular, she thought run-down neighborhoods gave opportunity to artists and others of limited finances. She liked ethnic enclaves that expand and contract along with the changing demographics of the city. From a distance, cities may appear to be elegant, as in the skylines formed by their tall buildings. But, up close, cities are intricate. They are the result of a series of solutions to problems that are constantly changing.
Preceding Jacobs were urban planners including Jacob Riis and Robert Moses. Jacob Riis addressed the problem of urban tenement buildings. Building codes were to assure that apartments would be healthy (but perhaps more expensive than some could afford). Robert Moses saw cities as spaghetti bowls of highways, with residences and places of work in whatever spaces were not yet paved over. By the mid 1960s, urban renewal – sometimes called “Negro Removal” – became a thing. Entire blocks of once fashionable, but run-down brownstones were bull-dozed and replaced by soulless high-rise apartment buildings in which welfare recipients were terrorized. Jane Jacobs gave voice to an altogether different vision of the city and, implicitly, to a radically different approach to urban planning. Her major works were written during the 1960s (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, and The Economy of Cities, 1969), and she remained a vibrant writer into the next century. Her methodology was mostly case study.
In A City Cannot be a Work of Art, Sanford Ikeda reinvigorates Jacobs’ vision of the city informed by the insights of the modern Austrian School of Economics into spontaneous order. Ikeda recognizes the big difference between the equilibrium method of classical economics and the problem of urban planning. While mistakes are made in all parts of the economy, in many parts, these mistakes are relatively short-lived. These short-lived mistakes might be viewed as part of the process of learning and subsumed into the economics of knowledge. But, in urban planning, mistakes are relatively permanent. Not simply because roads and other transportation systems, and buildings are long-lived. But, because of the many decisions that are made subsequent to the design of the urban infrastructure. A train station, for example, attracts other modes of transportation, as well as the co-location of certain businesses. Opportunities to re-think the design of a city used to be provided on occasion by conflagrations and other natural and man-made disasters. But, today, such opportunities are rare. Thus, Ikeda says that cities are not efficient as that is understood by classical economics.
Ikeda isn’t slavish in organizing his book about Jane Jacobs and, so, produces a book of his own that efficiently re-states and re-freshes her work. His book is mostly an intellectual history. It would be interesting that some of the insights into urban planning covered in the book were tested; and, if these insights were used to consider the challenge to cities posed by the digital revolution.
Clifford F. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Professor of Economics and Finance at Shenandoah University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston College.
