Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs

Author:Jane Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Why Backward Cities Need One Another

The Shah of Iran wanted an economy like America’s, Japan’s and northern Europe’s. He thought he could have it if he had the same kind of equipment they had. So he set about getting it, advised by people nicknamed masachuseti by an Iranian sociologist, meaning technocrats equipped with an education and outlook popularly associated there with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where indeed many of the Shah’s economic and technical experts had been trained.

A helicopter factory the government ordered in 1975 for the venerable city of Isfahan illustrates what was actually taking place and where, when the Shah imagined he was buying development. A contract to design a new nineteen-seat helicopter and to build and equip a factory to produce it was negotiated with an American corporation, Textron, along with a second contract agreeing to pay Textron for training the Iranian mechanics who would build and service the helicopters and the pilots who would fly them. Contracts like this were usual. Iran had entered into them with firms in Europe and Japan, as well as in the United States, for fertilizer factories, cement plants, steelworks, power plants, hospitals, automotive works, even entire agricultural villages. Some facilities were meant to produce primarily for Iran’s domestic needs. Others, like the helicopter factory, were intended to produce both for the domestic economy and for export. Iran paid for these with oil, the idea being that by the time the oil ran out, Iran would no longer need to import sophisticated manufactured goods, would produce most of its own food, and would have alternate exports in place of oil—in short, a well-rounded, self-generating economy producing amply and diversely for itself as well as for others. That was the theory.

Textron, as its name suggests, began life as a textile factory but it had become a diversified conglomerate by buying up other enterprises, among them Bell Helicopter, formerly Bell Aircraft of Buffalo, New York, which was transplanted to Fort Worth, Texas. Bell was experienced at handling big, complex projects competently, which is why Textron got the contract; the Shah and his masachuseti did not want the project to bog down in the sort of confusion, waste and ineptitude that Uruguay had experienced when it tried to establish a manufacturing economy. Textron set up a new subsidiary, Bell Operations, in Euless, Texas, not far from the parent Bell company, to devote itself to this one job. While engineers in Euless worked out the design of the new helicopter and began work on designing the factory itself, other Bell engineers and management people set up a headquarters in Isfahan to prepare for the work there. The factory was to be a vast installation, comprising fifty buildings.

In due course, Bell Operations let the contract to build the factory to Jones Construction Company of Charlotte, North Carolina, another competent and experienced firm. Jones Construction subcontracted out the various specialties involved. For example, the Howard P. Foley Company of Washington, D.C., was responsible for design, supervision and purchase of electrical equipment.

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