Dark Days Ahead: A Fresh Look at Jane Jacobs's Warnings About Urban Life in the 21st Century - The Urban Lens Newsletter

The name Jane Jacobs is familiar to many of our readers.  Jacobs, who died in 2007, celebrated almost everything about cities.  Although she was born and raised amid the economic and social decline of Depression-era Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs became a devoted believer in the positive potential of cities to overcome economic crises and create widespread prosperity and rich cultural experiences for all residents. 

Her education about cities did not occur in a classroom.  She learned about cities by moving to New York and finding work as a journalist and a freelance writer.  She became well-known at first as a community organizer opposed to Robert Moses’s plans to demolish much of So-Ho (including Washington Square) to construct a new highway into Manhattan.  She sparked a movement.

Jacobs created powerful arguments about the strengths of the older, haphazardly planned, and architecturally mixed city neighborhoods, such as her own beloved Greenwich Village, that were being bulldozed by mid-century urban renewal projects across the nation during the 1950s and 1960s. 

She argued that the complex layers of evolving social systems and built environments of American cities were essential components of the decentralized and chaotic vibrancy that propelled America’s prosperity through an ever-changing dynamic that expanded the urban economy through what she called import replacement.

Without going into a full description of her pragmatic approach to the interconnections among urban social life, morality, cultural norms, and urban economic development, Jacobs argued that America’s elite, top-down approach to urban renewal in the Post-World War Two era amounted to something akin to cultural suicide.^[i] 

Her last book, Dark Age Ahead, which was released in 2004, two years before her death, synthesized her deep critique of how late 20^th century “North American culture” was pushing itself to the brink of a tragic, new Dark Age, comparable to the so-called Dark Age of Europe in the centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. 

Jacobs argued that five core components of the “North American” version of Western urban culture had played major roles in its capacity to create widespread prosperity through the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Each was inextricably tied to the dynamics of urban life, and each was essential for continued prosperity in the 21^stcentury.

Yet despite the importance of these five components of urban culture, she argued, each was experiencing a decline so sharp that a process of “mass amnesia” was taking hold.  Within one generation, she warned, each of the five core components could evaporate from the lived experience of people.  The culture would simply forget them, and would thereby transform into something different, and substantially less, in terms of prosperity because of the importance of what was being lost.  It would be a new Dark Age.

The five core components included:

1.     Families rigged to fail.  Jacobs argued that the social structure of urban prosperity rested on a framework of tightly woven extended families that were part of a broader network of interconnected communities.  This complex, urban, social fabric allowed individuals to gain access to opportunities and to solve problems that restricted their upward mobility.  The destruction of urban neighborhoods by bulldozers, suburban car cultures, white flight, and a marketing cult that glorified the image of independent nuclear families was quickly destroying this core social structure of urban prosperity.

2.     Credentialism instead of education.  The widespread experience of urban joblessness during the Great Depression, Jacobs asserted, had spawned a deep desire to pursue jobs, jobs, jobs as the highest priority in American political economy.  This morphed into an obsession with vocationalism in higher education.  As a result, fewer and fewer colleges were teaching students the critical thinking skills that are needed to maintain democratic values and to create new sources of wealth.  The principal goal of higher education had become getting a job.

3.     Science abandoned.  Poorly trained students were rapidly losing the capacity for genuinely scientific approaches to solving the problems of urban life.  Ideologies and professional dogmas that were believed by powerful members of the status quo were no longer being tested by the rigorous, pragmatic experiments of newly educated specialists.  Consequently, the public was losing confidence in the capacity of science and engineering to solve important problems (her examples included traffic engineering, public health measures, and economic forecasts about job creation).  Pseudo-science too often had become the basis of social authority.

4.     Dumbed-Down Taxes.  Despite the primary role of cities in creating prosperity, Jacobs argued that Federal and State governments had removed most taxing and spending authority from city governments.  The direct result was that most cities were unable to invest in their own infrastructure, both physical and social, even when local voters were willing to support such public expenditures with higher local taxes.  Without smart taxes, cities were doomed to decay and decline.

5.     Self-Policing Subverted.  One of the main drivers of urban prosperity, Jacobs argues, was a level of earned trust that learned professions created in the minds of the public.  Accountants, professional engineers (PE’s), MD’s, corporate CEOs, and others were held in high esteem by the public because they were trusted to pursue public goals as well as their own private ambitions.  Yet, during the last half of the 20^th century, most of the learned professions experienced one scandal after another, thus diminishing the public’s respect for them, and for the professional associations and universities that granted them learned status.

Within the span of one generation, Jacobs warned that each of these five urban cultural components could evaporate from the lived experience of the public.  The “mass amnesia” could become so complete that within two generations, i.e. by approximately 2040, the memory of these cultural components could be erased entirely.  People would no longer imagine that they could have existed, just as the memories of Rome were erased from the European imagination in the span of only a few generations.

Jacobs based her warnings on the notion that a new Dark Age would be caused by a series of tragic mistakes and misfortunes.  Hubris would be the cause.  Consequently, she had strong recommendations for how the tragedy could be avoided, mostly by reversing the social process of physical, economic, and social sprawl. 

Urban densification was her primary prescription.  Densification could leverage population growth to transform urban sprawl into new types of urbanized social spaces that could rebuild community, which in turn could strengthen the role of families.  Densification could create new sparks of urban economic growth to assure jobs without the need for vapid credentialism. 

Densification could inspire a new generation of scientifically trained professionals to overturn pseudo-scientific dogmas that had created sprawl and restore a culture of pragmatic, scientific problem solving to urban culture.  Densification could spark a new era of smart-taxing cities and denser suburbs where residents and businesses would regain confidence that their tax dollars were being used to solve the urban problems they experienced in their daily lives and could add to the restoration the credibility among learned professionals.

Reading Jane Jacob’s final book today, it is tempting to critique her assumption that densification of our sprawled metropolitan regions could be a cure-all for each of the components of urban culture she was concerned about.  A strategy to revitalize our commitment to these components of urban culture would no doubt be beneficial, but systems are difficult to predict.

It is astounding, however, to consider that the most powerful contemporary critique of her analysis is not a critique of her recommendations, but rather a critique of her assumption that the pending Dark Age would come about primarily by tragic mistakes and misfortunes. 

A contemporary interpretation of her accounts of how each of the five core components of urban culture eroded does not yield a set of tragic tales of unanticipated consequences driven by mistakes and misfortunes.  Rather, the contemporary reader is tempted to see the deliberate results of carefully executed political strategies that were designed to undermine the dominant influence of urban culture in American life. 

Indeed, one sees many current examples of these same strategies at work today in American politics.  Jacobs argued that her five core components of urban culture need to be revitalized in American culture through densification so that growth, equity, and prosperity could be assured during the 21^st century. 

Yet it seems that many powerful currents in 21^st century American politics see these same components of urban culture as visceral threats to their alternative view of America’s 21^st century future.  American politics today is caught between those who see urbanity as the solution and those who see urbanity as the problem.  I don’t think Jacobs ever envisioned that her warning about the Dark Age Ahead would ever be a goal that any powerful group of Americans would pursue with gusto.

Bob Gleeson

^[i] Among her most popular books are The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1985), Systems of Survival (1992), and The Nature of Economies  (2000).