Overview
- Offers the only extended, scholarly treatment of Jane Jacobs’s economics and social theory
- Connects Jane Jacobs's ideas on trust, social cooperation, and innovation to social-network theory
- Combines in an accessible way insights from economics, sociology, and urban planning and design
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
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About this book
This open access book connects Jane Jacobs's celebrated urban analysis to her ideas on economics and social theory. While Jacobs is a legend in the field of urbanism and famous for challenging and profoundly influencing urban planning and design, her theoretical contributions – although central to her criticisms of and proposals for public policy – are frequently overlooked even by her most enthusiastic admirers. This book argues that Jacobs’s insight that “a city cannot be a work of art” underlies both her ideas on planning and her understanding of economic development and social cooperation. It shows how the theory of the market process and Jacobs’s theory of urban processes are useful complements – an example of what economists and urbanists can learn from each other. This Jacobs-cum-market-process perspective offers new theoretical, historical, and policy analyses of cities, more realistic and coherent than standard accounts by either economists or urbanists.
Keywords
Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Economics and Social Theory
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Front Matter
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Diversity, Social Networks, and Development
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Front Matter
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Planning and Revitalization (and a Coda)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This book is original both in revisiting Jane Jacobs’s thought and in freshly contributing to urban studies, urban economics and planning theory. I believe it is the best critical presentation of Jacobs’s work ever written.” —Stefano Moroni, Professor of Planning, Polytechnic University of Milan.
“Sanford Ikeda makes two unique contributions in his book. First, it provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for Jane Jacobs' observations about more livable cities; second, it makes a convincing assessment of the significant impact of Jane Jacobs's ideas on modern urban design and planning. Ikeda reminds us, however, that if Jane Jacobs won the battle against Robert Moses, the struggle continues between two different concepts of cities: top-down technocratic city planning as opposed to a recognition of cities as the emergence of spontaneous order as described by Jane Jacobs.” —Alain Bertaud, Senior Research Scholar,Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University.
“Jane Jacobs is best known for her impact on how people view and plan cities. But she considered her economic writing her most important. Few people focus on her economics. Sanford Ikeda does it thoroughly, with great insight, and is a rare voice in this area. Thus, this work is a very important addition to the application of Jacobs' thinking.” —Roberta Brandeis Gratz, Award-winning journalist and urbanist, Author of The Battle for Gotham, 2010.
“This book masterfully articulates what many of Jane Jacob’s writings can be boiled down to: that cities are, in the words of another great thinker, “the result of human action, but not human design”. One cannot truly understand Jane Jacobs without understanding economic concepts, such as spontaneous order, radical ignorance, and social capital, among others. Sanford Ikedaelegantly bridges the gap between economic theory and urban planning, explaining complex ideas in an accessible way. An absolute must-read for professional planners and urbanist aficionados.” —Vera Kichanova, PhD, Senior Economist, Free Cities Foundation, Researcher, Zaha Hadid Architects.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: A City Cannot Be a Work of Art
Book Subtitle: Learning Economics and Social Theory From Jane Jacobs
Authors: Sanford Ikeda
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5362-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-99-5361-5Published: 15 October 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-99-5364-6Published: 15 October 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-981-99-5362-2Published: 14 October 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 400
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: Human Geography, Social Theory, Public Policy, Economics, general, Urban Studies/Sociology, Regional/Spatial Science