Mother of invention

If you happen to be among the many people who are born and raised in the countryside, chances are that you have found yourself at some point in your life quarrelling about city people who seemed to imagine themselves to be naturally more innovative and progressive than the rest of humankind, your good self included. The juxtaposition of supposedly polished metropolitans and rugged rustics is at least as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and probably as ancient as cities themselves. What’s more, a host of urban theorists have borne tribute to this idea, from geographer Edward W Soja (in Postmetropolis) to economist Edward Glaeser (in Triumph of the City). Its most ardent advocate, however, was a writer, civic activist, and eager urbanist, who also claims fame as the only major theorist to base an economic thesis on an archaeological excavation.

Jane Jacobs shot to fame in 1961 with the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Taking her cue from the struggle to spare New York’s Greenwich Village from high-rising redevelopment, she launched a frontal attack on purported planning and ‘urban renewal’, which she argued drained the very lifeblood of urban societies. Instead, she presented a vision of cities as motors of self-organising power fuelled by bottom-up action. When today’s architects or developers talk of ‘eyes on the street’, the ‘sidewalk ballet’, or ‘mixed-use developments’, they can thank Jacobs. As doggedly as Jacobs had leapt into urban planning, she then set out a few years later, in 1969, to rewrite economics in The Economy of Cities, a little book that she always held to be her greatest achievement. This bold statement did not go unnoticed. Economists still refer to it when they speak of cross-fertilisation between industries as ‘Jacobs externalities’.

Jacobs’ central inspiration for this book had come from a highly unexpected corner. During the 1960s, the legendary – and legend-spinning – archaeologist James Mellaart had discovered and revealed the extraordinary remains of the early Neolithic settlement Çatalhöyük, in modern-day Turkey (Türkiye), today a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most widely debated prehistoric sites on record. Jacobs had read Mellaart’s fascinating book Çatal Hüyük: a Neolithic town in Anatolia, and formed a vivid idea of this Anatolian township as the origin of human cities, with intriguing art and artefacts, and trade in the black gold of the Neolithic economy: obsidian. Mellaart stressed Çatalhöyük’s extreme antiquity, and noted that its earliest levels seemed even to have preceded the origin of agriculture.