In one paragraph, Jacobs is talking about the Mycenaeans; just before that the difference between the shift away from agrarian lifestyles in the west as compared with the abrupt colonial imposition of postagrarian culture. In the next she drops this gem:

At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true. “Dark Age Patterns” Dark Age Ahead (p169-70)

June’s over. So is Dark Age Ahead. I’m sure I’ll be turning back to it as I work through The Death and Life of Great American Cities and her other works. I hope I’m at the height of my craft at age 87. If anyone claims Jacobs peaked in 1961 at Death and Life, surely they’ve never read this great tome:

• Stern voice
• Able to knit together a complicated, but comprehensive and readable narrative on potentially divisive topics
• Wry
• Able to sow seeds of optimism in the midst of pessimistic and dire warnings
• Shorter than either Diamond’s Collapse or Guns, Germs and Steel (you might not need to read those if you’re satisfied with what you learn about his works here)
• Brilliant capstone
• Too much already proven true only 4-5 years since publication

President Eisenhower championed the construction of the interstate highway system.Jacobs had, as the cliche goes, an axe to grind about the theories that led to the interstate highway system and the ignored human and community costs with these improvements for a “public good.”

That was evident in the work she published late in the 1950s and early 1960s that The Death and Life of Great American Cities collected, contemporaneous to the system’s genesis. 50 years later, she’s still bringing it up.

Yesterday, I highlighted her comments regarding our shortsighted jettisoning of the streetcars and the consequent impact on family and community life. She promises to come back to the point, and does:

The shortsighted destruction of community in America was easily trumped by the righteousness of full employment. “Credentialing versus educating,” Dark Age Ahead (p59)

Jacobs gets back to this point in a roundabout way as she is discussing the shift in university business from education to credentialing. I’ll save more on that for tomorrow.

Credentialing, she claims, is an indirect outcome of the Great Depression. She draws the same line between that era and the overwhelming good of full employment - which highway projects were purported to assist. We sacrificed much to achieve full employment - including the communities these interstates bisected and the way of life we replaced with automobile “freedom.”

The picture is substantially more complicated than she painted it back in the Introduction to Death and Life. She tore into the planning theories encouraging decentralization and Corbusian towers (and the highways that feed them).

It’s no longer just about theory. She’s witnessed much over 40-50 years of sprawl. As an economist, she’s observed the financial, social, and even psychological incentives that fueled decentralization, or sprawl. So, I’ll try and collect a list of these incentives as she brings them up.