Abstract
Any city that aspires to greatness will have something to offend everyone. That is a feature, not a bug. In the absence of perfect knowledge, people are attracted to a great city for the opportunities, imagined and unimaginable, that it offers them. But the absence of perfect knowledge means they have to experiment, and the accompanying trials and errors necessarily generate discord, confusion, and disappointment along with innovation, satisfaction, and success. Understanding how the institutions underlying successful cities—property rights, exchange, and the norms of trust and reciprocity—promote or hinder such a process is therefore essential for effective urban policy. The large-scale responses to these problems have historically misunderstood the nature and significance of cities and have ranged from Olmsted to Le Corbusier. The consequence of such “constructivist rationalist” approaches is to stifle the emergent creativity of a great city.
This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation.
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Notes
- 1.
This may be the place to forward a hypothesis of mine that the farther away from a border vacuum you go the better the quality of restaurants tend to be. That is because the high concentration of persons using a border vacuum, say a civic center, the majority of users have only a short time to have lunch, so that restaurants will cater to higher-volume, quickly prepared meals. The capital requirements, especially human capital, are generally too great for such establishments to also offer a lower-volume of diners a better-quality menu. Farther from a border vacuum these lunch-time pressures are thus lower and, ceteris paribus, we would expect the quality of restaurants to be higher. While I have not yet conducted a rigorous test analysis of this hypothesis, my casual empiricism supports it over a range of locations and for different kinds of border vacuums.
- 2.
Jacobs devotes her entire Chapter 5 in Death and Life to parks.
- 3.
Compare this with the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the densest districts in New York City, with 185 persons per acre.
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Ikeda, S. (2020). Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities. In: Callahan, G., McIntyre, K.B. (eds) Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_18
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