I have been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 city planning classic, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Drawing mostly on her experiences of metropolitan New York, the book discusses common characteristics, not of "gentrified" civic areas, but of endogenously created "healthy city neighborhoods." The book's arguments and examples have, in places, clearly aged since 1961; its essentially seditious character hasn't.
"Death and Life's" core premise, that those closest to a problem, given resources to do so, are the ones best able to solve it, applies more broadly than just to city planning; it is a cornerstone progressive value. Jacobs argues that public housing projects, for example, fail and become magnets for crime, because the big-city governments that develop and maintain them discount this basic truth.
Maybe the book has grabbed me because of its spotlight on compact city living, in the throes of the current oil shortage. Maybe it's that the discussion of the paternalistic veneer of government, wholly corrupted by the interests of big wealth, rings eerily contemporary to me. There's one passage, though, from the book's remarkable chapter, "Unslumming and Slumming," that has especially haunted me:
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