Jane Jacobs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Toronto: Urban Survivor and Social Organicist

\ Reviews Jane Jacobs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Toronto: Urban Survivor and Social Organicist JOHN CLUBBE Jane Jacobs. Systems ofSurvival: A Dialogue 011 tlte Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. New York: Random House 1992 $22.00. Jane Jacobs deserves her reputation as one of our foremost, if consistently controversiat students of urban life. In Systems ofSurvival, however, she says little directly about cities. Rather, she tackles an even broader field. 'This book,' she begins with customary Jacobean clarity and terseness, 'explores the morals and values that underpin viable working life,' To this end,Jacobs delves into economics, politics, and ecology in order to understand how society might change for the better. From the realm of hunters and gatherers to the post-industrial present, from African tribesmen to Asian city-dwellers, Jacobs in her challenge to our civic conscience moves with ease across time and space. But it is a challenge few reviewers have taken up. In fact, though a best-seller in Canada, Systems ofSurvival has been little noticed in the United States. Systems of Survival argues tha,t two seemingly opposed ethical systems characterize Western civilization. One Jacobs calls the 'commercial moral syndrome,' the other 'the guardian moral syndrome: The commercial syndrome informallycodifies our day-to-day relationships with each other; it extols the essentially capitalist virtues of competition, industry, and thrift. The guardian syndrome presents the philosophic ideal of human behaviour set forth by the Greeks and modified by Renaissance and Enlightenmentthought; itvaluesdiscipline, fortitude,and honour. Society views the guardian syndrome as the ideal; yet most of the world practises the commercial syndrome. Which to follow? The basic argument, developed over the course of Systems ofSurvival, is that for society to function best we need to learn from each. What can ordinary, decent, thinking human beings contribute to the great ethical and moral issues? That is Jacobs's relentless question. For her, the answer is 'Quite a bit.' Professionals either evade basic questions about society and ethics or do not have the perspective or curiosity to frame them. To present her argument, Jacobs creates five (initially six) individuals who engage in a symposium, or dialogue, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 64, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1995 JANE JACOBS 325 'primarily because this device suits the subject matter: Dialogue as a literary form goes back to Plato. The goal in The Republic is knowledge of the Ideas or Forms, which for Plato are the only true reality; in Jacobs the goal is to understand the true reality of the moral life of society. That goal, Jacobs believes, is more likely to be achieved through interaction among intelligent, concerned, inquisitive people than through slavish submission to professional authorities or to theories that work only in the abstract. After all, thinking things through for herself is whatJaneJacobs has been doing all her life. Knowing something about her life and work prior to Systems of Survival enhances appreciation of wh~t she achieves here. In the 1950s Jacobs lived in New York's Greenwich Villagel the West Village of human-scaled rowhouses and irregularstreets. Looking at the life in her neighbourhood and wandering around Manhattanl shediscovered a city vastly different from that the urban experts described. Urban planners were doing their best to bulldoze diversity, but for Jacobs the appeal of urban life consisted in just that diversity. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), depicts cities as she experienced them. Behind apparently matter-of-fact prose seethes a moral passion against those bent on destroying urban vitality. In carefully modulated sentences she presents a day in the life of Hudson Street (on which she lived). Beginning at dawn with stores opening up and ending twenty-four hours later with the impromptu sounds of night, she captures an intricate urban ballet, or dance of life, as it gradually unfolds. Jacobs, Marshall Berman points out in All Tlmt Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), skilfully adapts the literary technique of the urban montage and, in the process} gives us 'the first fully articulated woman's view of the city since Jane Addams: Critics leapt to attack it - notably Lewis Mumford in the New Yorker, learned, eloquent, and, in this...