Book except from "Becoming Jane Jacobs" (Penn Press, 2016), by Peter L. Laurence

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In many ways, Jacobs was as much a functionalist as Le Corbusier and other modern architects—possibly more so, because she was not overly concerned with aesthetics. Indeed, while Jacobs first described her idea for the book that became Death and Life as a study of the relation of function to design in larger cities, it was in New York’s working districts that she first came to understand how ‘‘diverse city uses and users give each other close-grained and lively support,’’ as she later described the phenomenon. And as Le Corbusier charged architects to see again, Jacobs would do the same. She wrote in Death and Life, ‘‘To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding,’’ and she learned this early in her New York experience. Looking down from the roof of her apartment in Greenwich Village, she watched the garbage trucks on their rounds and thought ‘‘what a complicated, great place this is, and all these pieces of it that make it work.’’ Even garbage collection, no small task in the great city, made her think about how the city functioned at its most basic levels.

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Attentive to the networks of productivity and geography, Jacobs revealed the bouquet on the Vogue reader’s windowsill as more than a pretty arrangement: It was emblematic of the city’s station in international commerce. Though not native to the city, all of these goods—furs, leathers, diamonds, and flowers—were city products, products of the city’s networks of process and exchange. Having recently experienced living in a subsistence economy, Jacobs understood the significance of the city economies, the tremendous physical and social infrastructure that brought raw materials to market. Indeed, she already had some latent understanding about the relationship of city and rural economies. As she wrote years later in The Economy of Cities, ‘‘When we see a factory out in the country, we do not automatically assume that the kind of work being done in the factory originated and developed in the country.’’ Such observations were, intellectually speaking, not far out of reach of the young Jacobs; her interests in economic geography, explored in courses at Columbia University not long after writing these essays, were already well established within her first few years in New York.

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