Apart from reading her and hearing her, I met her once and saw her in public a few times. She was one of those people you instantly understood to be irreplaceable. Now she’s gone.
Much mention is made of her Death and Life of Great American Cities, and deservedly. But today I'm thinking of a later book called The Economy of Cities, and of a historical argument she made there: cities came before agriculture.
It’s a thought experiment she did, mostly. She posits a settled community arising from control of a trade in a local supply of obsidian. (It might have been copper, or a reliable supply of fish that could be dried, or potter’s clay, or anything unevenly distributed and worth trading for, but for her example she imagines a community she calls "New Obsidian" arising somewhere in Neolithic western Asia.) It’s in this kind of settled community, she hypothesizes, that there would be time and opportunity to observe and reflect and experiment on seeds, or even animals, and how they could be kept and cultivated and gradually adapted to human needs. That’s where agriculture would arise, she argued, not among hunters and gatherers. Later, farming would have been farmed out to the countryside. Cities came before farms, not after.
This idea flows from Jacobs’ fundamental insight about cities as generators of economic innovation, particularly random, unpredictable, unplanned innovations. As a way into Neolithic history, it’s always seemed thoroughly plausible to me. Jacobs’s insight came back when I read Jared Diamond on the unbelievable complexity of breeding corn from the wild teosinte plant of Central America. Or when I looked into the trade networks of non-agricultural Native North Americans before European contact. But I’ve never seen it picked up seriously by historians of early civilization.
Her Systems of Survival has a theory of cultural formation that is challenging for historians too.
Jane Jacobs was a model of what a public intellectual should aspire to, I’d say. Did you know she consistently declined honorary degrees? Every time I see a university giving another one to a celebrity broadcaster or nouveau-riche potential donor, I remember that.
