To any on the list who live near to Hamilton, Ontario Canada, we have the pleasure of Jane Jacobs coming to speak here Thursday April 13th, tickets available from Bryan Prince Booksellers (905)528-4508, or (800)867-0090. I am going and thank you Chris for your thoughts and sharing. Virginia
-----Original Message----- From: OSLIST [mailto:osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu]On Behalf Of Chris Corrigan Sent: April 3, 2000 2:01 PM To: osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu Subject: Review of Jane Jacobs' new book (long) Hi friends: What follows is a review (taken from the New York Times) of Jane Jacobs' new book "The Nature of Economies." I thought some folks on this list would be interested, as Jacobs' book deals with economies as self-organizing systems inextricably linked to ecosystems. If you are not interested, sorry about the length. There is a much beeter review in last Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail by Lewis Lapham which captures the Open Space nature of Jacobs' theory, but it's not online yet. I haven't got the book yet, but it's moved to the top of my reading list. Our house is dealing with spring flu right now...hope everyone else is doing well, and no autumnal diseases have stricken our antipodal colleagues... Chris ______________________________ Seeing Humans as Cogs In the Wheel of Nature Date: March 2, 2000, Late Edition - Final Byline: By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT Lead: THE NATURE OF ECONOMIES By Jane Jacobs 190 pages. The Modern Library. $21.95. There's a play on words in the title of Jane Jacobs's illuminating new book, ''The Nature of Economies,'' that doesn't become evident until you understand what she's up to in her text. When you first see the title, you take her to mean that her book is about the character of economies. Then, as you begin reading, you realize she means that economies are part of nature. In fact, she sounds this theme immediately when she writes in her foreword that ''the basic premise'' on which her argument is constructed ''is that human beings exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect.'' She continues, ''Readers unwilling or unable to breach a barrier that they imagine separates humankind and its works from the rest of nature will be unable to hear what this book is saying.'' As we will shortly see, those works include economies. Text: At first, this seems a departure for Ms. Jacobs, who is still best known for her first book, ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities,'' in which she argued passionately and influentially that cities, essential to the economic life of societies, must be allowed to develop freely and spontaneously. In her subsequent books, among them ''The Economy of Cities,'' ''Cities and the Wealth of Nations'' and ''Systems of Survival,'' she has worked to develop a theoretical framework for the practical case made in ''Death and Life.'' Like ''Systems of Survival,'' her new book takes the form of conversation among a small group of fictional intellectuals. Two of them, Armbruster, a retired publisher, and Kate, an editor at a science magazine, meet in a coffee shop and express concern that Armbruster's niece, Hortense, has taken up with another ecologist, one Hiram Murray IV, her previous one, Ben, having been one of those people who ''thought everything industrial or technological was unnatural and that everything unnatural was bad.'' Let's meet this Hiram, says Kate, and so they do. Of course their meeting is just an excuse for Ms. Jacobs to record their unspontaneous conversation, full of phrases like ''to be sure'' and ''in sum.'' Hiram turns out to be exploring the field of biomimicry, or ''trying to develop products and production methods learned from nature.'' Explaining biomimicry gets him started on how rooted in nature even human economies are. Development can be defined as ''differentiation emerging from generality,'' Hiram explains, citing 19th-century embryologists and evolutionists. ''Economic development is a version of natural development,'' not ''a collection of things but rather a process that yields things.'' (''The Thing Theory,'' he adds, ''supposes that development is the result of possessing things such as factories, dams, schools, tractors, whatever -- often bunches of things subsumed under the category of infrastructure.'') Systems expand by capturing and using transient energy, Hiram goes on. ''The more different means a system possesses for recapturing, using, and passing around energy before its discharge from the system, the larger are the cumulative consequences of the energy it receives.'' This principle applies to both ecosystems and economies of human settlements, which in the book's perspective amount to the same thing. ''Diverse ensembles expand in a rich environment, which is created by the diverse use and reuse of received energy.'' Human cities are such diverse ensembles, and both imports and natural resources are considered to be received energy. Unfortunately, a summary of Hiram's arguments leaves out how concretely Ms. Jacobs illustrates his points, using examples ranging from biology to technology to commerce. But a discerning eye will see what Ms. Jacobs is driving at, namely that both biomasses and economies grow most richly when nature is allowed to take its course. In short, in ''The Nature of Economies,'' Ms. Jacobs has found the most theoretical possible way to frame the vision she presented so concretely in ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities.'' Her theory works as a weapon too, with her characters challenging thinkers like Marx, Adam Smith and even Keynes, and policies like protectionism and full-employment programs. It also suggests why Los Angeles added jobs in the 1940's despite declines in exports and why Detroit lost jobs even as its automotive export work boomed. Unfortunately, she can't finally clinch her case, because, as her characters concede, no one has yet bothered to measure the vitality of cities by the gauges she would prefer economists to use. Moreover, her conclusion lets you down a bit by debating what economies are for (''I think economic life is for teaching our species it has responsibilities to the planet and the rest of nature,'' remarks Kate), as if something Ms. Jacobs has argued at length is wholly a natural process could be judged to have any purpose in the first place. Unless of course you believe that nature itself has some purpose. Still, her book does leave unusual cause for optimism. Discussing evolution, her characters point out that all successful species possess the capacity both to dominate their ecological niches and to preserve them, as parasites live off their hosts without killing them. Since humans are both entirely part of nature and supremely successful as a species, then we can expect to benefit from this paradox. We may well continue to exploit our environment and yet somehow use it to survive. -- CHRIS CORRIGAN 108-1035 Pacific Street Vancouver BC V6E 4G7 Phone: 604.683.3080 Fax: 604.683-3036