# What Makes Cities Live **URL:** **By** Joan Kennedy Taylor **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- “Cities, like people, need freedom in order to live.” Cities. The treasures of our civilization’s heritage arose in cities: art, drama, philosophy, science, political theory, legal theory, all began to develop in the Greek city-states or in the city of Rome. And our applied sciences and technologies and patterns of exchange began in medieval cities. “City air makes free,” they said in medieval Europe, because the serf who managed to get to a city was indeed beginning a new life. This lure of the cities is part of America’s history, too— our Northeastern cities have experienced wave after wave of different people from different places and backgrounds— Jews, Italians, Poles, Germans, rural blacks, Puerto Ricans, hillbillies—all coming to the city to make their fortunes. As Kate Simon said in the 1960s, in her discursive guidebook, _New York Places and Pleasures_, “The little dreams stay at home, and the big dreams come to New York.” Yet today, when one says cities, one thinks of problems. The crisis of the cities. Inner-city poverty. Drug-taking and drug-pushing. Crime. Traffic snarls and inefficient and expensive transportation. Dilapidated housing, in short supply. Devastated areas that look as if an invading army had laid waste whole neighborhoods and levelled block after block of homes. Has the city outlived its function? Are cities dying? This issue of _The Libertarian Review_ asks that question, but it is not a simple one to answer. For what has happened to the cities of America is part and parcel of what has happened to all American life in this century. Life means problems and challenges and mistakes. Only stagnation or death can protect people—or cities—from the uncertainty of constantly having to face new problems and challenges and from the possibility of mistakes and failure as well as achievement and success. And for several generations at least, Americans have followed a false dream—the dream that a riskfree life was possible, if only we put more and more reliance on government. Cities, like people, need freedom in order to live. This is a metaphor, of course; a city is not a living organism. But it is a spontaneous order, like free market exchange, like a language. These things cannot be planned by government— all that government can do is interfere with the natural processes that would have arisen otherwise, and distort and stultify them. And that is what government planning and urban renewal and zoning and monopolistic franchises and all the other bureaucratic programs and policies have done to our cities. So the answer to the question, _Are cities dying?_ has to be, Yes, if present policies are continued. But to the further question, _Can they be revived?_ we at _The Libertarian Review_ think the answer is also Yes. This doesn’t mean that any particular city will necessarily revive and live. In a climate of freedom, cities rise and fall. Some will succeed as cities, and others will not. But it is not a sentimental falsehood for cities to wear the aura of romance they have sported so proudly for so many years; as a class, they deserve it. Civilization, after all, means the life of cities. As Chris Hocker points out in his article in this issue on transit, perhaps the most interesting writing that has been done about cities has been done by Jane Jacobs, the author of two exciting and iconoclastic books, _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (Random House, 1961) and _The Economy of Cities_ (Random House, 1969). Almost alone among contemporary writers, Jacobs has investigated the phenomenon of the city as a spontaneous order. In her first book, she examined the contemporary American city— what makes streets and parks safe, the importance of diversity, how parks and streets and neighborhoods are used, the need for buildings of different ages within a city, why slums develop (and why some neighborhoods “unslum”), and the inadequacies of the conventional concepts of urban renewal, low-income government housing, zoning, and city planning. In _The Economy of Cities_, she undertook an even larger task, challenging another widely-held belief, this time “the conventional belief that cities are superficial economically while rural production and rural life are ‘basic.’” On the contrary, claims Jacobs, cities are the primary cradles of economic development, and it is they that invent rural development. Without cities, she says, no economic development will take place. For what is economic development? It is the discovery of what she calls “new work,” which grows out of old work, and not in an orderly, planned fashion. The Xerox process, for instance (she tells us) was developed commercially by a small photo-supply company, a seemingly logical development for such a business. But it was not invented there—“it was invented by a worker in the patent department of an electrical equipment manufacturer in New York to solve a problem that had arisen in his own work: the expense and inconvenience of obtaining copies of drawings and other documents used in patent research.” The brassiere was not developed by one of the companies that manufactured undergarments, but by a dressmaker who found that it improved the fit of the dresses she made. And so on. For new work to be able to develop out of old work, several things are necessary—access to many specialized businesses which can provide the back-up services and supplies necessary to a new venture, access to a market, perhaps, above all, freedom for the worker to take a chance on branching out and following the possibilities of the new work. And today, access to capital. All of this means cities. It is cities, according to Jacobs, that are “places where adding new work to older work proceeds vigorously. Indeed, any settlement where this happens becomes a city.” But the conditions that foster new work best are not the conditions that seem most efficient. They are conditions where jobs seem to be duplicated, where there are many alternative suppliers and extreme specialization. It doesn’t add to the efficiency of any existing organization for workers to be constantly branching off and developing new projects that are only marginally related to the purpose of the organization, so such organizations will fight the tendency for new work to develop and for valued employees to leave; they will make employees sign exclusive contracts promising not to go into business on their own or “enter into competition,” they will bring lawsuits against those who do leave; they will try to make the town in which they operate into a company town, which is the most efficient environment for their purposes. It takes the diversity of a city to provide the necessary opportunities for novelty to develop. As Jacobs puts it, > The point is that when new work is added to older work, the addition often cuts ruthlessly across categories of work, no matter how one may analyze the categories. Only in stagnant economies does work stay docily within given categories. And wherever it is forced to stay within prearranged categories—whether by zoning, by economic planning, or by guilds, associations or unions—the process of adding new work to old can occur little if at all. And later, she points out that this process must not be confused, as it sometimes is, with the division of labor. It is not division of labor that creates vital cities. Division of labor, in itself, creates nothing. It is only a way of organizing work that has already been created.... Dividing existing work into tasks is by no means confined to advancing economies. It is also practiced in the most stagnant economies, where men and women spend their entire working lives at very specialized tasks: tapping rubber trees, or herding goats, or loading bananas, or twisting fibers, or dancing in temples, or mining salt, or crushing ore, or carrying baskets of dirt for public works, or cultivating corn and beans. A stagnant economy may lack almost everything, but not division of labor. But if cities need freedom to perform this function of cradling economic development, then it is no wonder that they have become stagnant. Over the years, people have not been encouraged to solve problems freely in the “chaos” of the marketplace—each new city problem that has arisen has been an excuse for a new encroachment of government, as this cities issue of _The Libertarian Review_ examines. Drugs and urban crime? Roy A. Childs asks what the truth is about the connection between heroin and crime, examines our assumptions about heroin use, heroin supply, heroin’s effects, the cost of heroin, and heroin treatment centers, and comes up with some surprising conclusions. Housing? Bruce Cooley examines the government programs that are supposed to help the development of city housing—building codes, zoning, urban renewal, and rent control, and asks, What will be the effects of these programs as the baby-boom generation comes looking for places to live in the cities of the ’80s? Transit? Chris Hocker takes a look at what government has done for the cities in that area, from trolley franchises to Flxible buses, and has a few suggestions of his own as to what direction future solutions to transit problems might take. Finally, LR’s interview is with an inner-city resident who has not given up hope, Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the organization known as the Guardian Angels, which is doing something about the problem of urban crime by volunteering to patrol the subways and parks of several cities. Will the cities survive? If Jane Jacobs is right, the question we should be asking is an even more serious one, Will the capacity for economic development survive? To both questions, the answer is the same. The individual capacity to solve problems is still there, as we can see in the rise of the Guardian Angels. But the government programs and the bureaucrats are there, too. Building codes are still enforced; huge, expensive buses are still being mandated for city use, and no competition with them is allowed; city officials fear to encourage self-help patrols. As Jacobs says, “People who are prevented from solving their own problems cannot solve problems for their cities, either.” But there is a new spirit alive in the land, a spirit of self-reliance, and there is a growing distrust of government solutions to our problems. To the bureaucrats who warn the tax-cutters that “essential services” will be cut, the tax-cutters are beginning to respond, Good. Curtis Sliwa said to LR’s summer intern, Robert Capozzi, “People have to begin assuming more of the responsibility of their daily lives themselves.” If this spirit prospers, it will succeed in cutting back the thicket of government programs and regulations and prohibitions that have grown up like brambles around the possibilities that are our cities. Then the romance that many of us feel still exists in cities, as places where the as-yet-undreamed-of can become realized, can become the spirit of the 1980s. And our cities will live. But perhaps Jane Jacobs should be allowed to have a final word, and a final warning. In human history, most people in most places most of the time have existed miserably in stagnant economies. Developing economies have been the exceptions, and their histories, as developing economies, have been brief. Now here, now there, a group of cities grows vigorously by the processes I have been describing in this book and then lapses into stagnation for the benefit of people who have already become powerful. I am not one who believes that flying saucers carry creatures from other solar systems who poke curiously into our earthly affairs. But if such beings were to arrive, with their marvelously advanced contrivances, we may be sure we would be agog to learn how their technology worked. The important question however, would be something quite different: What kinds of governments had they invented which had succeeded in keeping open the opportunities for economic and technological development instead of closing them off? Without helpful advice from outer space, this remains one of the most pressing and least regarded problems. \[_The Economy of Cities_\] Joan Kennedy Taylor is senior editor of LR.