Year with Jane Jacobs

Entries in Recession (2)

Friday

Aug142009

Commercial Syndrome: Be optimistic

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Friday, August 14, 2009 at 5:50 PM in

Systems of Survival

[T]he government did such a really good job of scaring the jeebers out of us that this recession has creating what he called a legacy of doubt. And that may be the case.

~Bob Moon, “Economy really not as bad as it looks” Marketplace

Through Kate, Jane Jacobs points out that newspapers formed for the sake of business:

Business people are forever trying to protect themselves from nasty surprises. They try to penetrate the future with forecasts, surveys, and voracious consumption of the news. “Kate on the Commercial Syndrome” Systems of Survival (p43)

This would be why I enjoy the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, even though I don’t always agree with their viewpoint: their coverage of the world’s events is excellent. This obsession with security and forecasting may not seem in line with one of the virtures of the commercial syndrome: be optimistic. However, Kate makes the point that the very preoccupation suggest that commercial people aren’t fatalistic, which will come up in discussion of the guardian syndrome. Rather, they hope to forstall misfortune.

Failing to follow other attributes of the commercial syndrome, commerce failed. Recession. Optimism has been in short supply. The government has been catapulted into fulfilling the roles of both the guardian and the commercial syndrome, doing better at the former than the latter.

That should be worth exploring next week.

In Pittsburgh, reading news about Cleveland

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Monday, July 13, 2009 at 7:09 PM in

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Detail, Daniel Chester French’s 1904 Bronze, “Labor Reading” - Pittsburgh (cc) Jim KuhnAaron Renn over on The Urbanophile has a good post on Cleveland. He explains the motivation behind publically-subsidized real estate development as the preferred economic development strategy.

In short, it’s good for the politicians; it’s good for the “transactional” business sectors that have survived and taken civic leadership - the lawyers, architects, advertisers, etc. The city leaders are no longer the newspaper magnates, nor the downtown department store owners, nor the local bank because of mergers and acquisitions. More money sustains more transactions sustains more of this sector.

Both the Columbus and Zanesville dailies I found on the way to Pittsburgh picked up the AP article on Cleveland’s waterfront planning. I found this a bit much:

“This is potentially one of the great waterfronts in the world,” said Stanton Eckstut, EE&K’s [Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Kuhn Architects of New York City] senior principal.

I’m dying for some context on this statement. At face value, it looks like client bait. That is, it justifies a great(er) expense on the planning, design, and even the public subsidy on the real estate development itself. Who would leave such “potential” behind?

Jane Jacobs might do so. Last week, I mentioned a bit about cataclysmic versus gradual money in a post about Robert McNamara. Aaron Renn hits a similar point near the end of his post:

With the current financial crisis, bigness, as a strategy, is out of favor for the moment. Also, the gimmicky financial transactions that underlie much of the crisis are calling the entire transactional model into question. There’s an increasing alarm at the precipitous decline of manufacturing, particularly the auto sector. And people are questioning whether we as a country can survive simply through services, or whether we need to revitalize the concept of the operational business and actually making things. Plus, real estate deals are tougher to get done because of tight credit, and it seems unlikely that the go-go days of recent years are coming back soon.

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