Cities and the Wealth of Nations
by Jane Jacobs
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane JacobsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1985-03-12
ISBN: 0394729110
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Cities and the Wealth of Nations
Book Review: Cities are the fundamental macroeconomic units -- not nations
Summary: 5 Stars
In The Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs demonstrated with clarity, intelligence and righteous indignation that city planners had for decades -- going on a century, in fact -- misunderstood the virtues that cities possessed, and hadn't understood why people wanted to live in them. According to Jacobs, all of orthodox city planning was built around the belief that what city dwellers most wanted was to leave the city and live in a suburb or on a farm. So they bulldozed blighted neighborhood after blighted neighborhood and replaced them with parks. When many of those parks themselves became blighted, filled with the familiar sight of the homeless and drug users, orthodox city planners could only scratch their heads; that simply wasn't supposed to happen. If anything, this only confirmed cities' incorrigibility. So they wiped out sizable sections of major American cities and built freeways out; clearly people would prefer to be elsewhere. The millions who continued to live in American cities were an inconvenient datum.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs claims that national governments repeat the same misunderstandings of their cities on a larger -- and possibly more tragic -- scale. At this larger level, they believe that they can produce economic activity just anywhere. Struggling farmland? Dam up their rivers, build schools, give them tax breaks, and invite foreign companies to build factories there. Wait a few years and watch a million economic flowers bloom.
City planners believed -- and maybe still do believe -- that a city was just a defective pasture. According to Jacobs, national planners likewise believe that a city could thrive anywhere. So they build cargo-cult cities and pray that the same thing which animates their real cities will turn their farmland into the next New York. But of course that normally fails. A real city has a good reason for being there; a cargo-cult city does not. People aren't fooled. They want real cities.
Jacobs wants to recast all of macroeconomics using these insights and others, and has the rhetorical skills to convince at least one non-economist that she's on to something. All the dynamism in a national economy, says Jacobs, comes from its cities. Even the vaunted "heartland" of the United States only survives because cities have brought industrial technologies to their farms. If you want to understand why a nation succeeds or fails, says Jacobs, look to its cities. The title of her book is no accident: she wants to yank economics off the track that it's been on ever since Adam Smith.
Summary of Cities and the Wealth of Nations
"Learned, iconoclastic and exciting...Jacobs' diagnosis of the decay of cities in an increasingly integrated world economy is on the mark."-New York Times Book Review"Jacobs' book is inspired, idiosyncratic and personal...It is written with verve and humor; for a work of embattled theory, it is wonderfully concrete, and its leaps are breathtaking."-Los Angeles Times
"Not only comprehensible but entertaining...Like Mrs. Jacobs' other books, it offers a concrete approach to an abstract and elusive subject. That, all by itself, makes for an intoxicating experience."-New York Times
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