networks + cities
Jason Kottke's been on a
Jane Jacobs kick lately, which has gotten me to thinking. I came to Jacobs' work late during a summer course I taught on spatial rhetoric, and wished I had known of it in time to include some of her work. Her book
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is classic, and I mean that in the "everyone should read it" sense. Anyhow, Kottke links to an
interesting interview done with Jacobs, parts of which I'll probably drop into the mix for the course on networks I'm teaching next spring. For example:
Q. Are people puzzled that you are now into economic theories and even biology? Many people thought you were just into city planning and building neighborhoods. Do people shake their heads and not get it?
A. No, people seem to get it. They don't really find it outlandish that one would also bring in biology. Lots of people have been thinking, in some ways, along the same lines. You know, I think we are misled by universities and other formal intellectual places into thinking that there are actually separate fields of knowledge. And most people know that there aren't. But they are always getting victimized somehow by the idea that there are. And they are delighted when in some respectable way it becomes clear that there are not separate fields of knowledge, that they link up. That life and the Earth and everything in it really is a seamless web, and that's not merely a poetic expression. It is a very functional thing, that it is a seamless web, and that it is possible to understand something about these webs.
Posted by at May 27, 2004 03:29 AM
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