Tom Hull: Jane Jacobs: Dark Age Ahead

I just read an interview in the February 2005 issue of the WIRE that Brian Morton did with Anthony Braxton in which Braxton comments that we are headed into a "new Dark Ages" as a global community. I'm sad to say that as a young person living in the United States, almost every aspect of my day-to-day life points to the accuracy of Braxton's statement. My work, and the work of my peers and mentors exist, for the most part, in opposition to the global trends and phenomena evoked by Anthony's comments. In a time period in which almost every aspect of humanity is increasingly defined by its potential connection to a given marketplace, the contributions of these artists has never seemed more vital to me.

Coincidentally, I'm half way through a recent Jane Jacobs book, called Dark Age Ahead. The third of Jacobs' five major signs is the loss or rejection of science as a way of trying to understand the world. On the news tonight, I saw an item about how IMAX theatres in three cities in the U.S. South have refused to show a movie about the sea floor because the movie reflects current scientific ideas about evolution. Just last week G.W. Bush offered the opinion that the teaching of evolution should be "balanced" by also teaching the anti-scientific "intelligent design" theory. People like Bush are already living in a new Dark Age. One can illustrate that in many ways -- one that seems sufficient to me is Bush's ability to utter the words "clean coal" and act like he's describing something real.

As Jacobs points out, the loss of science is matched by damage to all forms of culture -- it's just particularly striking because science is so intimately tied to reason, and because science has exceptionally clearcut standards of truth and integrity. Lehman and Braxton are jazz musicians, so that's where their focus most likely is -- or at least that's where they stake their defense of reason and integrity; also for knowledge of the tradition that they continuously build on. It is unlikely that all that (what for lack of a better term we call civilization) will be completely forgotten, but every day we see it marginalized. One example of this marginality is that two recent sets of Braxton's quartet playing jazz standards were released as limited editions of 1000 copies, on a U.K. label run by a Russian emigré.

But the losses are real and significant. Every day people die, and with them we lose their memories, their knowledge, the talents and skills they developed and honed over a lifetime. Sure, they are replaced with babies, but babies know none of that: they have to relearn everything, a task that is more and more daunting as our history accumulates and our science and technology becomes more complex, and that can only happen under conditions where we can work diligently to perpetuate and extend our culture. Many things undermine those conditions -- ordinary things like ever tightening budgets and schedules, and extraordinary things like wars and natural disasters. In recent years it's been possible to point to failed states and failed cultures, to see significant parts of the world that have become radically improverished within the last few decades. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, this has happened largely because of the wrath of U.S. warmakers. In much of Africa the causes are less obvious, but the results are every bit as graphic. But it's happening here too, where estimates of life expectancy -- about as basic an indicator as you can find -- have started to fall. One scary thing about Jacobs' book is that most of her examples are from Canada. In that regard, Bush may be as much a symptom as a cause. That's not an encouraging thought.

posted 2005-08-13

Jane Jacobs

I see that Jane Jacobs has passed away, in Toronto, age 89. She was an idiosyncratic thinker, one who made a big impression on me by taking positions that were often contrary to my expectations. Her book Dark Age Ahead has haunted my own thinking since I read it last year. Her point that civilizations forget all the time -- indeed, progress in learning is always an uphill struggle -- was both simple and profound. Her examples weren't necessarily the best one could do, but plenty of other examples come to mind.

I read her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, back when I was deeply immersed in my Marxist studies phase. I've always been a very slow reader, so the first course I enrolled in when I belatedly went to college back in 1972 was a speed reading course. The first book I tried reading with my new techniques was Jacobs. I breezed through the book in about three hours, and felt like I got it all. Next book I tackled was one by Jürgen Habermas. Read it every bit as fast, and didn't get a word of it -- can't even recall the title now. So I gave up on speed reading, and went back to my slow slog through the Frankfurters. But I never did make any sense out of Habermas, and Jacobs' view of the disorderly denseness of urban life stuck with me, even if I never reconciled hers with my other views.

Also read The Economy of Cities. Bought, but somehow never got into, one or more of her other books: Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Systems of Survival and The Nature of Economies. So I still have stuff to learn from her, but that would surely be true as well if all I were to do is to re-read those books I read all too quickly already.

Isolated paragraphs from the New York Times obituary:

At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism -- in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.

Ms. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition ot the Vietnam War and to shield her two draft-age sons from military duty. But she quickly enlisted in Toronto's urban battles. No sooner had she arrived than she led a battle to stop a freeway there.

Her major books followed a logical progression, each leading naturally to the next. From writing about how people functioned within cities, she analyzed how cities function within nations, how nations function with one another, how everyone functions in a world of conflicting moral principles, and, finally, how economies grow like biological organisms.

Patrick Pinnell, an architect associated with this school [Neo Urbanism], said "Death and Life" represented almost the last expression of optimism about American cities.

In an interview in Azure magazine in 1997, Ms. Jacobs recounted her habit of carrying on imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson while running errands. When she could think of nothing more to tell Jefferson, she replaced him with Benjamin Franklin. "Like Jefferson, he was interested in lofty things, but also in nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details," she said, "such as why the alley we were walking through wasn't paved, and who would pave it if it were paved. He was interested in everything, so he was a very satisfying companion." Years later, she realized that she had developed her talent of working through difficult ideas in simple terms by practicing them on her imaginary Franklin.

She came to see prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and building tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space to replace them, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians' belief in bloodletting.

She perhaps perceived of herself as an intellectual adventurer ready and able to follow her quixotic, often brilliant instincts into ever more fascinating terrain. In "Systems of Survival," one of her characters worries that he is not qualified. "Why not us?" replies the man who has invited the group together. "If more qualified people are up to the same thing, more power to them. But we don't know that, do we?"

One thing I got from Jacobs was a sense of the limits of trying to rationalize cities, communities, life. That was a hard lesson to swallow for me, someone who sometimes thought he might be happiest working as an architect. Jacobs was a contrarian, a critic, an exception to the rules, and to the rulers, but she was also in her own peculiar way a systematizer, one who searched high and low for true rules. So she had to be peculiar -- it's not like the straight rules ever really worked.

posted 2006-04-25