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Title: The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 0-394-70584-X Publisher: Random House Trade Pub. Date: 01 February, 1970 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Still highly relevant.
Comment: This book, written in the 1960's, couldn't be more relevant today, in our age of outsourcing and loss of jobs. In Jacob's thesis, cities must constantly evolve, developing new products, or they will stagnate and decline, as their old exports wither. She makes a good case that efficiency, as reflected in the large scale, focused enterprise, can often be the enemy of innovation. This kind of logic has been incorporated into mainstream thought, in that many large corporations try to foster growth by establishing small entrepreneurial units. Jacobs provides a historical basis for this paradigm, as well as the detailed economics which shows it is not simply a matter of encouraging people to be entrepreneurial. Even more interesting to me, was Jacob's well supported argument that the earliest cities preceded and fostered the development of agriculture, not the other way around. I have read Robin Wright's Non-zero, The Logic of Human Destiny and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, both great books, yet Jacob's thesis was still new to me. The Economy of Cities has a certain amount of unnecessary repetition, but not as much as Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I would also highly recommend despite that problem. Also, and this is not a major point, Jacobs recognizes that exports may contain inputs which have to be imported, but does not seem to see that import substitution may also rely on increasing the import of certain inputs - thereby overemphasizing the importance of import substitution relative to development of new exports (although if we could find a substitute for oil......). Despite having a mathematics and economics background, I did not find Jacob's D,N,A equation particularly enlightening, and advise the reader not to get hung up on it. Jacob's use of history as a series of case studies, and her ability to extract the proper lessons even when they defy conventional thinking, is far more important than any mathematical tools.
Rating: 5
Summary: inspiring fresh inquiry into "development" processes
Comment: Economic theory has never been so engaging, so grounded, or so directly oriented towards social systems dynamics rather than broad extrapolations from decontextualized production and pricing statistics. Jane Jacobs develops a common sensical systemic description of the economic development cycles of urban communities, drawing on illustrative examples from the prehistoric to the contemporary to expose the dynamics of innovation and trade through colorful, down-to-earth stories. Her abstract models of import-substitution and invention dynamics emerge organically from the histories she analyses to explain the social processes of technological transformation.
She makes especially compelling points in her analyses of the different trajectories followed by neighboring Manchester and Birmingham during the industrial revolution. Manchester, quick to maximize the industrial efficiency afforded by large-scale production specialization, outpaced Birmingham in the short-term growth of its exports, but fell into economic stagnation the instant its sole production process was rendered obsolete by competitors abroad. Birmingham maintained low-level but longer-lasting economic growth by remaining inefficient as a local economic community, fostering diverse small-scale business ventures. Each of these small businesses had poorer prospects itself, and the net productivity of the city never approached Manchester's climax production level. But Birmingham's rag-tag assemblage of both diverse and in many cases redundant micro-industries proved far more resilient altogether as a hub of economic activity, allowing continued growth long after Manchester had decayed into poverty. The lesson Jacobs highlights with this tale of two cities is akin to modern environmentalists' rationale for treasuring biodiversity: a more varied and complex system of interdependent organisms or economic actors is less likely to be devastated by a change in conditions (such as the introduction of a new import which renders some major local industry uncompetetive).
Rating: 4
Summary: Relevant for complexity science and software development
Comment: As one who has a newfound interest for complexity science, I felt that this book gave me the keys to observing cities as examples of complex systems. I don't know whether Stockholm qualifies as a "great city" (concering its size), but I think what she writes applies well to what I have observed here. Being able to apply what Jacobs writes about to what I see every day has reinforced my understanding of complexity science.
I also read the book with the hope to find out whether urban planning could serve as an analogy for software development. I think that it can, but I haven't thought about this enough to express the ways in which it's relevant. Jacobs writes that neighborhoods which have particular properties (short blocks, diversity of primary uses, etc.) will "work" -- that there are properties which, when present, almost guarantee that neighborhoods will thrive. I have a feeling that such properties exist for software development teams and the systems they develop; the question is what they are.
This book is one of those that stay with you, and influence your thinking in other areas.
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Title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 067974195X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 0394729110 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1985 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 0375702431 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 13 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford ISBN: 0156180359 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1968 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics by Jane Jacobs ISBN: 0679748164 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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