Wednesday, May 4 would have been Jane Jacobs 100th birthday. Globe columnist Marcus Gee interviewed her in 1993 about her interesting working methods.
On July 14, 1970, Jane Jacobs came across a small item in the back pages of the New York Times. The item recounted the strange experience of public telephone users in a prosperous quarter of Manhattan. It seems they they had encountered "something disgusting" in the telephone change chutes, making it impossible to retrieve their coins. When the police investigated, they found that a gang of young change thieves, no older than 11, had been filling the chutes with egg whites. "The thing is," said one, explaining the trick, "I know what's in the chute and the customer doesn't."
Like dozens of other little things that she encounters in her daily life - from street scenes to museum displays to snippets of everyday conversation - the item struck Jacobs as fascinating and, just possibly, useful. She stuck it away in her files, hoping that someday she would find a place for it in one of her books.
This, developed over half a century of thinking and writing, is the Jacobs Method. "Seek truth from facts," said Deng Xiaoping, and Jacobs takes the slogan quite literally. "I don't make up my mind about things and then look for examples," she said over the breakfast table in her bright turn-of-the-century Toronto home on an ice-cold morning this week. "I look for examples of behaviour first. Eventually, when I start to see patterns in them, I begin to generalize."
The Method took shape in her first and most celebrated book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961. At the time, city planners across the United States and Canada were razing old neighbourhoods and replacing them with huge, modern housing developments. Jacobs, then a little-known New York writer, observed that such complexes quickly became crime-ridden, run-down and lifeless. She observed that older, unplanned neighbourhoods, in which people both lived and worked, were teeming with activity, people and life.
Her common-sense conclusions - that cities are living organisms unsuited to rigid planning; that healthy communities need busy, lively streets; that good development mixes commerce, housing and other functions - are orthodoxies now. In 1961, they were revolutionary. Although Jacobs had no academic credentials, her book quickly became the most influential work on urban planning in a generation. Her subsequent books, The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), confirmed her reputation as a leading thinker on urban issues.
Now, at 76, she has unleashed The Method on a new subject and the result is her new book, Systems of Survival. New, at least, to her public. As long as 20 years ago, Jacobs began thinking about doing a book on the moral codes that govern the working world. "I kept running into these puzzles," she recalls, "puzzles about commerce and morality and business and politics." She thought of doing a chapter, then realized the subject was too big and put it temporarily aside. "But all the time I was taking note of things and thinking of them and saving clippings."
As usual, she drew on a kaleidoscopic array of sources. She talked to her father-in-law about his father's Civil War experiences. She listened to the story of a frightened photographer who had been threatened after accidentally taking a picture of a Mafia clubhouse in New York. She discreetly observed a meeting between two high-level mobsters at a Caribbean resort.
And, of course, she read. She read Plato and Lao Tzu. She read the Bible, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the United States constitution. She read autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin (a favourite) and crime boss Joseph Bonanno. She read about English youth gangs, the prehistoric cultures of India, the Third World debt crisis, medieval chivalry, Roman imperialism, the practices of British barristers and the customs of a primitive East African tribe, the Ik. Above all, she read the daily newspapers: The New York Times, The Globe and Mail and, religiously, from front to back, The Wall Street Journal.
Always, her questions were the same: What does it mean? Where are the connections? What are the patterns of behaviour? And where, oh where, do the little boys and the egg whites fit in?
The result, after seven years of concentrated work and years more of study and observation, is her most ambitious and, she says, most serious book. Subtitled A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, it seeks answers for a host of urgent contemporary questions: why governments are so bad at running commercial enterprises, why Communism collapsed, what led to the leveraged buyout binge of the 1980s, why governments can't keep their hands off agriculture, when, if ever, it is permissible to lie and deceive, and who should be allowed to do it.
Jacobs argues that human behaviour is ruled by two distinct moral "syndromes," one for commercial life, the other for government. The commercial syndrome emphasizes respect for contracts, inventiveness, dissent for the sake of the task, competition, industry, thrift, optimism and the peaceful resolution of conflict - all qualities vital for successful business and trade. The guardian syndrome - which covers government leaders, organized religion, judges and police - stresses obedience, hierarchy, exclusiveness, fortitude and prowess. Guardians, as Jacobs calls them, dispense largesse, treasure honour, adhere to tradition and, when necessary, deceive for the sake of the task.
Enter the egg-white boys. In Systems of Survival, Jacobs uses the incident to illustrate a point about deception. Hunters, she notes, have always used decoys, traps and other forms of trickery to best their prey. But in civilized society, such behaviour is considered unacceptable if it is used against other members of the society. Only the guardians can use deception, as the police did when they loitered around the phone booths disguised in plain clothes to catch the boys. They were "deceiving for the sake of the task" - a central precept of the guardian, but not the commercial, syndrome. Both syndromes work fine in their own spheres. It is when they overlap, Jacobs believes, that trouble starts. When government tries to run an energy utility such as Ontario Hydro, for example, the result is inefficiency, bureaucracy and indebtedness. She says the same thing is true of government subsidies to depressed regions, or to agriculture. "Subsidies don't accomplish anything," she argues. "They just corrupt people. To mistake subsidies for productive investment is just to get lost in swamps of wishful thinking and disappointment."
Canadians, she says, fool themselves when they think they are good at mingling private and public enterprise. "We aren't any more talented than any any other country, and for good reason: We have the same things going against it."
Jacobs says the results are equally disastrous when commercial values are imposed on government - when Latin American oligarchs seize the controls of government, say, or when policemen are given arrest quotas and rewarded for meeting them. "You can't run government like a business," she says. "That's just as much as a fallacy as the idea that governments can run businesses. The whole system of values and morality of government is so different from that of commerce." Mixing the two, she argues, creates "monstrous moral hybrids" - creatures which good public policy should aim to slay.
It is weighty stuff, and the author is plainly apprehensive about how it will be received. But, as always with Jane Jacobs, there is a leavening element of whimsy. As she talks about her theory, surrounded by plants, books and toys for her young grand-daughter, her soft features frequently break into an almost girlish smile. She laughs easily - often at herself.
The whimsy finds its way into the book through its format. Jacobs began writing it in her standard essay style, but soon decided it sounded too preachy. She settled, instead, on Platonic dialogue: an extended conversation among six characters - Kate, an expert on animal behaviour; Ben, a quick-tempered environmentalist who flavours his mineral water with fresh kumquat; Quincy, a pin-striped banker; Hortense, a lawyer; Jasper, a successful author of crime novels; and the man who brought them together, Armbruster, a publisher with a fondness for cheese at lunch.
Jacobs says she wanted to set the book in Toronto, her home since 1968, but that the characters, being Canadians, were too polite to argue. "You would think that you could make your characters do anything," she laughs, "but I couldn't. They were far too civil."
She decided to move the whole bunch to New York. It worked. "They grabbed the bit in their teeth and didn't mind saying what they thought, no matter how uncivil. And that's what I needed." The result is a book full of good, sometimes bitter argument and, toward the end, a surprising whiff of romance.
Jacobs says that in contrast to most Platonic dialogue, with its know- it-all teacher and cast of robotic disciples, hers puts the conversationalists on an equal footing. The decision was deliberate. She fervently hopes that people will start holding similar discussions on ethical issues and test her theory against what they see in their lives and read in the newspapers. "Nothing's more important than that we understand these things," she says. "Morality bears on everything."
Jacobs continues to make tests of her own. In the course of a 90-minute interview, she picks up the newspaper four times, pointing to stories that caught her eye. "You know," she says, "the whole book could have been written from this morning's paper."
Of course it usually takes her a bit longer than that - an average of eight years a book. And the clippings do tend to pile up. But there are compensations: after 23 years, Jacobs has finally found a place for the little boys and the egg whites.
Marcus Gee