A "virtual" ideal city
Jane Jacobs described a world of creative and explosive city growth in her 1969 book, The Economy of Cities, and her subsequent efforts, especially The Nature of Economies, published in 2000. Jacobs was concerned with the question of how economies grow, and how people can collaborate to increase wealth, safety, health, social well-being, urban beauty and diversity. Her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, describes some of the conditions necessary for urban economic health: a dynamic optimism and openness to outside knowledge, goods and people; environments that foster interaction and communication; a lack of regulation in setting up new businesses and exploring new ideas; a sufficiently sized population so that even minor interests could support a club dedicated to them; and the capital resources of a large economy to foster these differing paths.
Jacobs was describing the then-still-vibrant urban economies of the United States in the immediate post-World War II era, especially her adopted home of New York City. Today, however, we can see many of the aforementioned components of her ideal “city” in a virtual place: the World Wide Web. Jacobs had begun to realize this fact, citing the work of Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in The Nature of Economies, discussing how self-organizing communities can come together to achieve their goals, often more effectively than centrally controlled organizations like software behemoth Microsoft®.
I first discovered these linkages while working in another area that could well be considered a Jacobsian ideal city, the Online Learning System (OLS) forums for the Foundations of Information Systems Management course in the School of Advanced Studies. The open interaction, with learners and their instructor collaborating on enhancing their knowledge, seems much like the new-firm-generating economy of Brooklyn in the 1960s so carefully examined by Jacobs. An instructor might propose an original topic, but a learner will then expand that topic area and open new areas of research through a bifurcation—a forking of the original idea—in effect homesteading a new area of research.
These linkages have been reinforced by my involvement with the University of Phoenix Jersey City Campus Facebook Page, where social networking helps build a self-organizing community even more rapidly than Jacobs’ ideal city.
These thoughts are coalescing into my research study of Jacobs and information systems, tentatively titled Jane’s World: How Web 2.0 and Modern Communication Tools Promise to Rebuild Community, Science, and the Economy in the way of Jane Jacobs’ Ideal Urban Environment. This will be an interdisciplinary study drawing on fields as diverse as evolutionary psychology, economics, biology, information theory, leadership studies, Popperian philosophy and Austrian social theory. It also will draw extensively from lessons I’ve learned from my students in the School of Advanced Studies.
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