Vital Little Plans by Jane Jacobs

Author:Jane Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2016-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

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*1 In a similar speech for the 1970 Alan B. Plaunt Memorial Lecture, Jacobs expresses her hope that the Canadian tendency toward sober second thought would help avoid what she perceived as stagnation south of the border. Citing philosopher Marshall McLuhan, she observes that America acts as Canada’s “built-in Early Warning System” for urban problems of all kinds, a remark she repeats in “Pedaling Together” in this volume.

*2 The Carveyor, developed by Goodyear and a conveyor belt company called Stephens-Adamson, would have been a system of conveyor belts carrying a series of ten-person cars. Aside from the 42nd Street route, it was proposed for a variety of other projects, including Victor Gruen’s scheme for East Island/Roosevelt Island, which Jacobs takes to task in “Do Not Separate Pedestrians from Automobiles” in this volume, but it never found widespread use. The Alden staRRcar system did, on the other hand, find one permanent incarnation as the Personal Rapid Transit system of Morgantown, West Virginia; it opened in 1975.

*3 Struck from the final manuscript:

Everybody is feeling good about the great outpouring of environmental concern during Earth Week. I have my doubts. In some ways, it looks to me more like Accepting-and-Planning-for-Stagnation Week. Troubles that are the results of stagnation are being analyzed all too thoughtlessly as troubles resulting from progress and affluence. But the affluence is already vanishing like the progress. Stagnant economies inexorably and gradually become poorer as their unsolved problems and undone work pile up and the numbers of their idle people grow. This is happening now in the U.S. economy. To be sure, stagnant economies have very rich people; the rich even typically grow richer as the stagnation deepens, but the numbers of poor increase. Nothing works as well as formerly; even the old services perform less well and cost more. And in the profound absence of creativity, even money becomes of little avail to improve matters. It operates like the vast subsidies that have been poured into our hospital and medical systems through Medicare and Medicaid, to little purpose except to inflate the costs of medical and hospital care and frighten the wits out of everyone who examines the system to see where the money is going.

The reason I fear this may be Accepting-and-Planning-for-Stagnation Week is that, under the delusion that progress and affluence are causing the rape of the environment, the popular answer is to control the population and reduce its growth. Put bluntly, the argument says that overabundance of automobiles is caused by overabundance of people. Put more abstractly and comprehensively, the argument says that our per capita use and abuse of energy and resources cannot continue unchecked; therefore the answer is reduce the population growth. This is planning for protection of the status quo, and stagnation. Of course, life always becomes cheap in stagnated economies, with their mounting problems, persisting poverty, undone work, and idle angry people. Unless the people are drained off by emigration they become an increasing threat to the established arrangements.

*4 Inspired

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