Jane Jacobs in Washington Square Park, New York, 1963. Photograph: Fred W McDarrah
The 45th Annual Schumacher Lectures with Samantha Power and Tyler Wakefield were described as a watershed event for the re-emergence of the Bioregional Movement. Once edited the video will be posted for all to view. Continuing with our attention to the subject of regional economies, we share this 2010 essay by Susan Witt. It was written for the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs,New Village Press.
Jane Jacobs served as a beloved mentor to the BerkShares Local Currency project, but sadly passed in April of 2006 just before the currency went into circulation.
What I first noticed about Jane Jacobs was the power, breadth, and mobility of her intellect. Only later did I recognize the equally great warmth of spirit that informed her thinking and turned it to a force of change. She stands as one of the most visionary economic thinkers of the last part of the twentieth century.
Her intellect was breathtaking. I first heard her speak at her 1983 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture “The Economy of Regions.” From the podium at Mount Holyoke College she painted an image of regional economies in which myriad small industries produce for regional markets—small industries that depend on local materials, local labor, local capital, local transport systems, and appropriately scaled technology to conduct business. She pictured the fruits of this regional industry spilling over to support a rich cultural life in the city at the hub of the region. This bustling creative energy would then foster new innovation and industry, filling in the “niches” of the economy.
The products of a regional economy would be particular to it, using the woods and stones found there—cherry tables, white cedar decks, and granite steps. The choices in the marketplace would vary with the seasons—eagerly anticipated summer berries, autumn apples, the new maple syrup in February, and spring garlic and parsnips.
The diversity of products would require a diversity of workers with a diversity of skills, all part of a face-to-face economy of place with its multiple sidewalk contacts “from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.” Citizens would have direct knowledge of working conditions in offices and factories and home industries; they would see the results of manufacturing practices on hillsides, fields, and rivers. Landowner, banker, shop keeper, entrepreneur, laborer, secretary, teacher, craftsman, and government official would sing together in the community choir, carpool one another’s children to school, and meet at the farmers’ market. They would see the complexity that shapes the regional economy, understand its various elements, remain accountable to each other in maintaining the web of connections that sustains it. Practiced conservationists, they would recognize the necessity of protecting and renewing the natural resources that form the basis of their economy.
Yes, there would be products exported to other regions—but only the excess, and in moderation. Yes, there would be imports for their variety, exoticness, their sweet breath of other cultures and places. But at the core of these robust and vital regional economies would be the capacity to meet the economic, social, and cultural needs of the people of the region from within the region, not in a spirit of isolationism but in a spirit of self-determination and with the hope that other regions could achieve similar economic independence. In such a scenario the wealth of one region would not depend on exploiting the natural and human wealth of other regions.
Jacobs believed that the best way to achieve such sustainable economies is to examine what is now imported into a region and develop the conditions to produce those goods from local resources with local labor. She referred to this process as “import replacing.”
By contrast, the typical economic development model is for a city to use tax credits and other incentives to lure the branch of a multi-national corporation into its environs. Yet without deep roots in the local economy and local community, the same corporation might suddenly leave the area, driven by moody fluctuations in the global economy, and abandon workers and families.
Building a regional economic development strategy based on import replacement will require appropriately scaled economic institutions to meet the needs of the local businesses.
The elements of any economic system are land, labor, and capital: land and other natural resources are the basis of all production; labor transforms the raw materials into products; and capital organizes the labor and facilitates distribution of the goods.
New import replacement businesses will require:
affordable access to land on which to locate the enterprise and gather the raw materials used in production;
capital in amounts and on terms tailored to the business;
a trained, engaged, and supported work force.
How a society shapes its institutions for land, labor, and capital will determine if it can meet these requirements. These regionally based economic institutions will not be government driven. Rather they will be undertaken by free associations of consumers and producers working cooperatively, sharing the risk of building an economy that reflects shared culture and shared values. Small in scale, transparent in structure, designed to profit the community rather than to profit from it, they can help facilitate a community’s desire for safe and fair working conditions; for production practices that keep air, soil, and water clean, renew natural resources rather than deplete them; for innovation in the making and distribution of food, clothing, shelter, and energy; and for a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The essay continues with examples of citizen driven tools to galvanize the regional economies imagined by Jane Jacobs. Read more here.
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