Mixing Fact and Fancy
STARR, ROGER
Mixing Fact and Fancy THE ECONOMY OF CITIES By Jane Jacobs Random House. 251 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by ROGER STARR Author, "The Living End: The City and Its Critics"; Executive Director,...
...We are informed at some length and with vivid human detail about the growth of a settlement Mrs...
...She does not tell us, for example, what the experience of the Small Business Administration has been, and if it has not produced what Mrs...
...But I cannot claim that the economic health of the city depended on their survival, nor do I believe this any more after reading Mrs...
...Jacobs aligns her proofs to support what seem almost self-evident truths...
...that the economy in turn prospers when the city exports goods and services...
...There are several other questions that I cannot report on, for Mrs...
...Ergo, urban innovation is essential to human survival...
...Even if we were convinced that urbanization was a condition precedent to agricultural development, we could choose to disagree that the products of the city today must have primacy over the products of the farm...
...She does not indicate, however, what criteria a government official should follow in deciding which loans might bear fruit, and which will only get him in trouble with the newspapers...
...Jacobs leaves them untouched: Who would have received the loans...
...Jacobs has given us...
...I am happy to report that the $300 million would have financed 10.510 loans, ranging in size from $10,000 to $1 million...
...Or whether the investment market for new over-the-counter issues has failed to provide adequate funding for worthwhile new business ideas, causing promising enterprises to be snuffed out irretrievably for lack of capital...
...Jacobs calls New Obsidian...
...Manchester, on the other hand, was regarded in the mid-19th century as the epitome of city efficiency...
...Most of the complaints have been generated by accounts of the intense human hardship visited on the owners—which does not, of course, attest to their potential for developing goods and services...
...One wonders what kinds of enterprises are destroyed by this urban upheaval...
...By the application of elementary arithmetic, Mrs...
...The majority, I regret, seem to have been proprietors of small commercial establishments that had barely been making their way as the patterns of retail distribution shifted around them...
...Jacobs wants, how it could be improved upon...
...The author believes that the near-history of New Obsidian proves the validity of what she takes as a necessary minor premise: that urban life had to develop before the development of agriculture became possible...
...The demise of these small commercial stores, where the proprietor talked to you, saddens me much as it saddens Mrs...
...Jacobs suggests that modern governments would do well to stimulate the process by granting loans to small enterprises seeking to expand into new fields...
...What, based on the experience of the Small Business Administration, might the loss ratio have been...
...What would happen to low-cost loft buildings if Mrs...
...In the course of this, she makes an interesting point about the rivalry between Manchester and Birmingham...
...From this we are led to conclude that inefficient arrangements in the city are a positive benefit, partly because efficiency is the result of over-specialization...
...Jacobs continues the circumambient and somewhat unsettling proofs by describing the historical forces that have caused cities to flourish or die...
...Equally important, the more inefficient the city is the cheaper the rents in its old buildings, making it easier for new businesses to start their innovation development...
...Jacobs loathes because of its destruction of small businesses (as well as for other reasons not gone into in this volume...
...instead, she takes us back thousands of years to an Asia Minor that appears to be part archaeological fact and part Jacobs fancy...
...Birmingham, she tells us, suffered from gross inefficiency, a widely heterogeneous mix of products, and wholly antique and unsatisfactory spatial arrangements...
...that new goods and services must continually be developed because the older products constantly grow obsolete...
...This sum would have become available for loans, she explains, if the government had refrained from wasting it on the construction of low-rent public housing projects in East Harlem...
...And what would local government have said to the East Harlem voters to lead them to abandon their demands for housing improvement, and to welcome in its place a program of loans and advances to private businessmen...
...To what extent, in fact, have new business ideas been springing from small enterprises...
...And if established, what does it tell us about encouraging innovation in cities...
...If I understand her argument, it tells us that city life—about which she writes with tender affection?flourishes when the city economy flourishes...
...No one can top Mrs...
...Following a discussion of how new industries grow from old, Mrs...
...How much would the loans have contributed to an accelerated economy, with higher wages for East Harlem-ites that might have enabled them to procure housing on the private market...
...In any case, how can one begin to substantiate the claim...
...Jacobs' loan program went into effect, and 10,150 borrowers in New York City suddenly started to expand their manufacturing space...
...Jacobs' talent for making the city exciting, but her conclusions lack the kind of documentation that a serious study requires...
...Jacobs' book than I did before...
...She does not start with the current evidence of how new goods and services originate...
...This, we are told, indicates the primacy of urban life...
...It seems too plausible...
...and that therefore the city's health depends not only on protecting small businesses but on encouraging their birth and growth...
...it was devoted to the products of a single industry-weaving—and avoided all the pitfalls of insufficient layout and heterogeneous economics...
...Few, I think, will volunteer to argue with the basic thesis set forth by Jane Jacobs in her new book...
...A special word should be devoted to the urban redevelopment Mrs...
...The trouble begins only when Mrs...
...Executive Director, Citizens' Housing and Planning Council of New York, Inc...
...Mrs...
...Jacobs then observes that today, 100 years later, Birmingham is thriving because its heterogeneity has produced new enterprises, while Manchester lies prostrate because of an overcon-centration that made it vulnerable to textile development in those remote and nonindustrial lands which once provided its best markets...
...It is a fact that vacant, obsolete store spaces abound in areas adjoining those where renewal has taken place, and in the cities generally...
...Primacy means preeminence rather than precedence...
...that small business enterprises are likely incubators of new goods and services...
...Jacobs assembles a model loan portfolio with a $300 million ceiling...
...We have, of course, been mildly gulled, for primacy is not proved by the order of appearance, which is all that Mrs...
Vol. 52 • May 1969 • No. 10
