Strong Towns Is Jane Jacobs in Action

We've often said at Strong Towns that you can't achieve Jane Jacobs ends via Robert Moses means. The problems created by bad centralized policies imposed at a large scale won't be resolved by simply imposing better centralized policies at a large scale. Even so, there are many who want to try.

There is a strain of thought that suggests that, if only it had been Jane Jacobs in charge instead of Robert Moses, we would have gotten sidewalks and transit instead of highways and interchanges. This thinking does a massive disservice to Jacobs and her brilliant insights on cities.

Very explicitly, Jacobs embraced the block-level chaos of cities as a feature, not a flaw. She explained how successful neighborhoods are organic creations, how they grow incrementally out of the actions of many different individuals. She was a fierce critic of centralized planning, large transformative projects, and programs unconstrained by economic reality.

We could say that Jane Jacobs was very Strong Towns, but we all know who influenced whom. 

Strong Towns founder and president, Charles Marohn, was invited to the Lit with Charles podcast to discuss Jane Jacobs’ seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the impact it has had on urban planning and the building of cities.

“I just love her so much,” Marohn says, at one point. If you love Jane Jacobs, too, or want to learn more about her views and how Strong Towns advocates are working to make them a reality, you will want to explore this conversation.

We have provided a full transcript below to go along with the audio version, which we share here with the permission of the Lit with Charles podcast.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Check out another episode of the Lit with Charles podcast that we think Strong Towns Podcast listeners will love!

• More episodes of Lit with Charles.

• Chuck Marohn (Twitter).

• Learn more about the 2023 Local-Motive Tour.

Read the Transcript

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  Charles Pignal (04:18):

  So I'm trying to get a sense of how influential and transformational this book was, the Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, how influential it was for urban planning and people who work in this area like yourself. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being seminal, how would you rate this book overall.

  Chuck Marohn (04:40):

  It'd be hard to say anything short of 10. It would almost be blasphemous, but it's a little bit like asking how influential is the Bible, and you would say, "Well, 10, it's very influential," but then you say, "I'm a Christian. How much do its adherence follow the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount or the simple teachings of Jesus?" And you would say, "Well, it's a lot harder than." So influential, have people read it and struggled with it and tried to understand it and apply its thoughts and insights? Absolutely. It is the most important book about cities for the last 100 years easily.

  Charles Pignal (05:20):

  Wow.

  Chuck Marohn (05:21):

  But is it easy to read and understand and apply? No, it's very, very challenging. It's really challenging.

  Charles Pignal (05:30):

  Why challenging? What exactly is difficult in the book? I mean, I did find a lot of it complicated, but from your perspective as an urban planner, what do you find challenging in it?

  Chuck Marohn (05:40):

  So I am an urban planner. I'm also a civil engineer, and both of those professions are taught and in a sense believe internally that cities are things that can be managed. They are complicated systems that can be tweaked and refined and honed. The core basis of every insight that Jane Jacobs has is that that is not true. That cities are complex systems. They are organic beings. They evolve and adapt and essentially live outside our ability to control. And that means that a lot of the insights are profound and beautiful, but a lot of them go right over the head of people who profess to love the book and find it very valuable.

  Charles Pignal (06:33):

  I mean, there is an element, when I was reading it, I thought to myself, a lot of these feels somewhat unscientific, more instinctive, like she's going with her gut of what she's noticed in her neighborhood in New York and, "Oh, well, this butcher has provide the safety on the sidewalk," or whatever. But it is not very data heavy as we might expect this kind of book would be today or not so scientific. Is that part of the charm and is that part of the challenge?

  Chuck Marohn (07:04):

  No, I think it's part of the brilliance, right? My favorite chapter in the entire book is the last one. And in the last one she gives a lesson on how to think, and it really is, it has nothing to do with cities, urban planning, anything. It's just here's how you think. I described this once as getting a golf lesson from Tiger Woods. I mean, imagine going out on the greens and having Tiger Woods say, "Here's how you do this." This is one of the most brilliant thinkers of the last century telling us how she approaches things, and she says some things that I think for a lot of people in an empirical age, one heavy in data and statistics, it is the exact opposite of that. She talks about starting with the particular and then reasoning to the general. So you start with what you see on the block.

  (08:02):

  You start with what you see in the neighborhood, and you draw out of that a theory of how it works as opposed to starting with a theory and then looking for the data to confirm or disprove. She talks about looking for exceptions. So as soon as you get a sense of how this works, look for the thing that doesn't work that way, and you can draw from that inferences about where you're incorrect and where you don't understand things. The fascinating thing about that form of reasoning is it's the same kind of reasoning that someone like Einstein used to come up with a theory of relativity.

  Charles Pignal (08:38):

  Oh, right.

  Chuck Marohn (08:38):

  Einstein did not start from large, massive theories and derive new insights out of it. What Einstein did is he observed. Said, "These things don't line up with classic Newtonian physics. How would I explain this to myself?" I feel like Jane Jacobs is like the Einstein of urbanism and city planning, and her reasoning process is very much the same.

  Charles Pignal (09:05):

  Let's maybe take a step back, and I'd love to hear from you more about the context in which this book was developed and how Jane Jacobs got to influence the debate in urban planning. What's the context? When this book was published, what's happening in 1961 that prompts Jane Jacobs to write this?

  Chuck Marohn (09:27):

  I mean, this is the explosion after World War II, right? We went through the Great Depression in World War II. And when we got out of World War II, the economists in the country were freaked out that we were going to slide right back into the Great Depression. Instead, what we did is we had the largest boom in human history, really. We did it by transforming a continent around a new idea of how to build cities. Cities are these ancient things. If you think of human evolution, well, think of it this way.

  (10:02):

  Let's say that an alien species comes and studies life on Earth. They would see bees living in beehives. They would see ants living in anthills. They would see whales living in oceans. And they would see humans building these cities starting at the very small tribe level up into very, very massive things. But around the world for tens of thousands, some even suggest longer than that, cities would've looked very similar in terms of their layout and design and scale and the different things that humans would have to have in them. All of a sudden, at the end of World War II, we started to build cities in a radically different way.

  Charles Pignal (10:42):

  Can you quickly illustrate some of the radical departures pre and post-World War II?

  Chuck Marohn (10:47):

  Yeah. I think that the easiest one to grasp, and it's easy and it gets oversimplified often, is just the automobile, right? I mean, cities prior to the Great Depression were scaled around what a human could walk in a day. Or in very large cities, what a train or a trolley system could get you to. But even those places when you got on and off, you walked, and so the neighborhoods themselves were scaled and built around people who walked. This means that the way the buildings addressed the streets, the way the architecture is laid out, the symmetry of the buildings, how far your park is to your cemetery, to your collection of waste, all this was all scaled to what humans walking would grasp.

  (11:37):

  Think of even just like a sign on the street. Your sign would be handwritten. It would be so someone walking by could see it. Now all of a sudden inject the automobile into cities, and the city becomes not only very mechanical, but it becomes scaled in a different way. You're driving by in a car and your sign needs to have three-foot letters so that you can see it as you pass by. Well, take that and magnify that over everything, and you get a radically different place.

  (12:09):

  Now, add to that, the post-war finance that we did, the fact that we did this not incrementally over time, but at scale, radically everywhere, all at once. Jane Jacobs, a lot of what animated her was the fights over urban renewal and the highway building that would go right through the middle of neighborhoods and take out whole entire blocks of fabric of a community and just bear waste to it. This is a radical, radical departure from thousands of years of, in a sense, accumulated wisdom of how to build places. We tossed it out and came up with a brand new system and did it in a couple of of decades.

  Charles Pignal (12:55):

  I'm surprised that in this answer, you didn't mention one name about the context.

  Chuck Marohn (13:01):

  I'm guessing Robert Moses, right?

  Charles Pignal (13:03):

  Exactly.

  Charles Pignal (13:03):

  ... [inaudible 00:13:00] context.

  Chuck Marohn (13:01):

  I'm guessing Robert Moses, right?

  Charles Pignal (13:03):

  Exactly. Can you explain to our listeners maybe who he is? And in a way, if I understand correctly, he was Jane Jacobs ... they were nemesis, they were archenemies, I guess, in their way of thinking about [inaudible 00:13:16]. And she's ultimately Jane Jacobs, as I understand it, the lady who led the campaign to bring down Robert Moses.

  Chuck Marohn (13:24):

  Yeah. They are opposites in so many ways. And I think every good story needs a villain. Robert Moses is the villain, but he is the villain in a way that I think any good villain is, is a way we can all relate to. I think, if modern planners and modern engineers don't see themselves in Robert Moses, they're not paying attention.

  (13:48):

  So Robert Moses was, at one point, he was the parks commissioner, then he became basically the public works director of New York City. He was the architect, he was the designer. He was, in a sense, the urban planner of New York. And all the major public works projects, from the large bridges to the highways running through Central Park and running through all the neighborhoods of New York, these were his visions, these were his executions, these were the projects that he led to fruition.

  (14:20):

  And he had an outsized impact, not only on New York City itself, but on New York State, in general. The book about him, The Power Broker, is about his life, and I think that that is the term you would use. He was the power broker of post-World-War-II development and his approach and his ideas and his way of doing things was, in a sense, copied across the entire continent. The things that he pioneered and did became the basis of not just state policy, but federal policy and copied wholesale by Robert Moses acolytes all around the country.

  Charles Pignal (14:59):

  So it seems, on the one hand, we've got Robert Moses ... And I've read The Power Broker and it's an absolutely fantastic book, and it's actually my pathway to this conversation. He seems, as I understand it, to represent a very rational, structured, calculated way to design cities around automobiles, as you pointed out. And Jane Jacobs, it seems, is a more grassroots thinker and more attached to the human aspect of cities. Can one resume it, more or less, like that, the dichotomy between the two?

  Chuck Marohn (15:37):

  I find myself not wholly rejecting what you just said, but I find myself pushing back on it because I feel like part of the oversimplification of Jane Jacobs is reducing her to an anti Robert Moses. Robert Moses was for cars, Jane Jacobs was for walking. Robert Moses was for huge apartment buildings and big projects, and Jane Jacobs was for the incremental and the human scale. I think that that actually undersells Jane Jacobs so, so much.

  (16:08):

  She has this term that she coined that is quoted often in planning circles, the sidewalk ballet. In using that term, she describes the way someone navigates a street, a ballet on a sidewalk. And they will be walking amongst other humans, there's an interaction there between the humans, a ballet. They will interact with the storefronts, they will interact with the windows and what's inside of them, they'll be repelled by the things that are out of place, they'll be welcomed and warmed by the things that fit in the neighborhood.

  (16:46):

  A lot of planners and a lot of urban advocates see Robert Moses as being the car person, so he's anti sidewalk, and then they take out of the term sidewalk ballet, sidewalk, sidewalk's the most important thing. But for Jane Jacobs, the most important thing was the ballet, it was the dance, it was the complexity of the whole operation. If you don't start with the ballet, the sidewalk is as ... Robert Moses provided sidewalks.

  (17:16):

  So I feel like the tension between the two is less over a lot of the things that we even fight over today, like sidewalks or not, or how much space is given to cars versus people walking. These are mechanical things. I think the actual fight was over Robert Moses's vision of a city that was mechanical, that could be fine-tuned like an automobile engine. If we just move this here, we can get flow over here, and if we just knock down this building here, we'll get this redevelopment in this spot.

  (17:51):

  And Jane Jacobs, I think, more challenging, more honest, and more accurate view of a city as this organic system that defies our ability to tinker with it. Jane Jacobs is a humble vision of what our capacity is and a grand vision of a city. And I think Robert Moses's vision is a grand vision of humans, but a very limited and shortsighted view of what a city actually is.

  Charles Pignal (18:21):

  So with hindsight, what are the key elements where you think she's really been validated with the passing of time and in which areas, if any, do you think she was maybe wrong in her assessments of the city?

  Chuck Marohn (18:36):

  Wow. Okay. This is the challenging part of Jane Jacobs, is that she has not been invalidated by anything, but nothing that she has really put forth has come to fruition. I'll go back to the Bible, which I mentioned at the beginning. And I'm not trying to turn Jane Jacob into a Messiah figure, but I do think that you look at the simple teachings of Jesus to love your neighbor and blessed are the poor.

  (19:06):

  Have these been invalidated over time? Well, I don't think so. I think they're more relevant today. Would you say that they have been embodied by humans that have come after? Well, there are whole books about western culture and how it's descendant from Christian values and Christian ethics, but it would be very hard for me, as a Christian, to look around and say we live in a society that elevates the poor, we live in a society where we are, in a sense, reinforced every day to love thy neighbor. These are challenging, challenging human teachings.

  (19:41):

  I feel like Jane Jacobs's teachings, Jane Jacobs's insights, the things that she shared with us when she was here are really ... I don't want to say incapable of being invalidated, they are observations of humanity, but I think where she was wrong is I think she felt like we would perhaps return to this or perhaps this was a state that humans would desire. And I think humans, in general, seem to desire a more Robert Moses type approach, a more Robert Moses kind of set of responses. And we tend to embrace, even the most ardent advocates today of cities and urbanism and walkability and all this, embrace a Robert Moses mindset when it comes to that.

  Charles Pignal (20:30):

  So it almost sounds like Jane Jacobs, in a way, her thinking and her writing is almost normative, i.e. it ought to be like this, it could be like that, it should, we should try to build cities like that, but it's not a question of whether it's actually been done or not, it was a teaching of what could and should be done.

  Chuck Marohn (20:54):

  This is a great question because I've referenced the Bible a couple of times here and I do feel like this is a huge divergence from this because, when you listen to Jesus, Jesus was talking about a heaven on earth, what could be, and Jane Jacobs was talking about what was and worked and then has been destroyed by, in a sense, a modern approach or a modern thinking about cities.

  (21:17):

  So Jane Jacobs is describing the way cities actually work and the way that they have historically worked. And maybe a better analogy is to go to a beehive. It would be as if the bees woke up one day and said, "You know what would be really great for honey production, is if we created bee cul-de-sacs over here and bee strip malls over here, and tore down this, and made a bee hallway through the middle of our hive," and then the bees all went nuts and neurotic, and someone stood up and said, "You know what? It worked a lot better when we did it this way." I feel like Jane Jacobs is pointing us back to the way cities have traditionally worked and giving us those sets of insights. It's up to us to hear that and embrace it.

  Charles Pignal (22:00):

  Since the days of Jane Jacobs in the last 60 plus years, what are some new issues in urban planning debates today that are not featured in the book or that you feel have evolved since then or what new elements are at stake today in contemporary discussions around urban planning?

  Chuck Marohn (22:19):

  That also is really interesting because I feel like the answer is the evolution of a lot of the things Jane Jacobs pointed out have, in a sense, come to fruition. What's the number one urban issue today? I would say it's a housing affordability problem. In Jane Jacobs's day, I'm not going to say there were no housing affordability issues, but really, housing was cheap, it was abundant, it was affordable. It wasn't very high-quality. And Jane Jacobs talked about the evolution of the quality of housing, and she laid out a case that I think would be anathema to a lot of advocates today for housing because she talked about needing, basically, starter housing. You needed lower-quality housing as a way for people to get their start.

  (23:08):

  Today, what we have done largely is taken out that bottom rung of starter housing and we've made the bottom rung very, very high. You have to have a mortgage, a reliable job, all this to get most housing now. And what this has done is it's created an epidemic of homelessness, it's created epidemic of housing affordability, it's created a very stagnant system. She, in many ways, foresaw all of this. She laid this out, but these weren't the issues that animated her because they hadn't yet come to pass.

  Charles Pignal (23:40):

  She has some quite specific policy ideas around that and around the financing sources of new housing. In fact, for me, that was almost the most specific aspect of the book, the most direct policy element where she outlines quite a program, it seems.

  Chuck Marohn (23:59):

  Yes. I love her so much.

  Charles Pignal (24:02):

  I can tell.

  Chuck Marohn (24:03):

  Yeah. I can imagine people today, because I am, in a very, very tiny, tiny, insignificant way, doing a similar project to her in the sense that I've been writing this blog for 15 years now. And it's funny because, when I talk about things of planning and engineering, people listen and they're like, "Oh, okay, I might agree with you or disagree with you," but if I ever talk about anything with finance or economics, there's always a group that stands up and says, "You are not trained in this. You don't know what you're talking about. Stay in your lane," and it can be actually cruel and mean.

  (24:44):

  Every time I get this feedback, I imagine her going through this because you're a woman in the 1960s who is a journalist, who has no training, in a sense, in urban planning or engineering, like I have, or economics, and you're dealing in a world that ... this was the time of America where ... What did Kennedy call the Kennedy's cabinet, this collection of geniuses?

  Charles Pignal (25:12):

  Oh, yeah, the best and the brightest.

  Chuck Marohn (25:12):

  Right, the best and the brightest. We had this vision of America that, if we just got the best and brightest together in a room, the most highly educated, highly influential, the top graduates from the major universities, that they could figure out all of our problems. And here's this humble woman from the middle of a city saying these profound things, and I have to believe that a lot of the pain that she probably experienced was in the feedback of, "Stay in your lane. What are you talking about? You don't know anything about this."

  Charles Pignal (25:44):

  This is interesting because it comes back to my earlier question. A lot of the book feels so unscientific and driven from the instinct and the gut of these observations. So how did she manage to build this credibility in the face of these people that you describe, the best and the brightest, the ...

  Charles Pignal (26:03):

  In the face of these people that you described the best and the brightest, the Robert Moses boys who thought they knew better, they had all the data to prove it and so on. How did she bring out this book and build this influence? Was there a political angle or was there a sort of social angle? I struggled to understand how she emerged.

  Chuck Marohn (26:26):

  I mean, first of all, she was touching into something very real. But I think the enduring part of it is easy to understand. This speaks to the real experience of human beings living in cities. A lot of people can get their minds wrapped around going to a public meeting for a road expansion project, or today we're going to add a bike lane here, or we're going to remove parking over there, or we're going to build this apartment building here, and listen to all the people show up against every little aspect of it and have the project advocate show up with their data and their charts. And when you sit through this once, you realize that this is theater and circus, and it really doesn't make any sense to the reality that you live.

  (27:14):

  When you sit through it multiple times, you start to recognize that there's something deeper here, there's something like broken about these institutions and systems that we've set up. I think Jane Jacobs work resonates so deeply, because it actually explains the absurdity, the circus of treating the city as it's a mechanical machine, right? As if there's some levers you can pull or processes you can set up to mitigate what... It was really a bottom up kind of human creation. So, when she was writing this stuff, the thing that has given it its longevity and its resonance is not her credentials and it's not the data that she provides, it's just the fact that people can relate to everything she says.

  Charles Pignal (28:04):

  There was something authentic about it, I guess.

  Chuck Marohn (28:05):

  Well, and not in a populous kind of way either. Not in a, like, this is unfair and unjust-

  Charles Pignal (28:11):

  Rabble-rousing.

  Chuck Marohn (28:12):

  Right. It's not a rabble... It is deeply intellectual, but it's deeply intellectual in a powerful way that people who grapple with these problems find solace in. Here's someone who's done all the heavy lifting for us, right? Here's someone who sat and struggled with things that were deep and painful, and then emerged with this so that we in a sense can start where she left off. And, I think that's why it resonates so much.

  Charles Pignal (28:42):

  The title and the scope of the book is focused on America, as its title suggests. I'm curious on a global perspective, what are some major differences between American cities, European cities, Asian cities? What are some of the notable differences?

  Chuck Marohn (29:01):

  That's an interesting question. I'm, in many ways unqualified to answer. I've been able to travel a lot, but Asia has alluded me thus far, and Africa's alluded me, and I hope to change that soon, but let me speak from my understanding and my observations. Much like American culture, America has exported its vision of prosperity to a lot of the world. And what we see is that you go to European cities, they existed. My house here in my hometown is 110 years old. That would be a relatively new structure in much of the world. And so most other places around the world were built and matured and experienced successive generations before kind of the emergence of this American suburban experiment. But we see the appendages of it in places. I was in Ireland back in the early part of the millennium, like in 2000, 2001, and you'd see these little towns that were just the old like a... People for hundreds of years had to be having a drink in this pub.

  (30:11):

  And then you go out on edge of town and there would be 10 American homes, lined up with the garages and the cul-de-sac and all that. And like, what is this? And that became their housing bubble, right? That just destroyed their economy. You see this all over Europe where when affluent people have an opportunity, they copy America and they build American style of development in ways that are perplexing. I've seen the images from the Middle East. I have friends that have worked on this stuff throughout the Gulf region, and they attest the same thing. When you become affluent, you copy American styles of development. And whether this is a cultural export, which I think is one argument that is a cultural export, another is like, this is what happens when you get enough money to pretend that you're God, right? When you get enough money to pretend that you can fix things, this is where you end up.

  (31:09):

  I say that fix things, there's a lot packed into that. Jane Jacobs would argue that cities can never be perfect, they can never be fixed. They are always works in progress, harmonizing different stresses and tensions. When you get sick of that, like I'm done with that, like I don't want to have to work out problems, I don't want to have to think, I'm just going to build the perfect thing right the first time and be done with it. You come to what we try to do at the end of World War II, and so you go out and build, here's the ideal suburb, here's the ideal development, here's the ideal city. And you wind up with places that work for a brief period of time, and then become really, really nasty. And that is the thing that we see repeated over and over and over around the world. Is it a byproduct of our culture? Is it a byproduct of our affluence? Maybe it's a combination.

  Charles Pignal (32:03):

  Which then brings me to my next question, which is to ask you about your organization, your podcast, Strong Towns. You have a certain vision and idea around the city that I believe conflicts with what you just outlined in terms of this American export of these very widespread suburbs. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on and what your beliefs are with regard to the city?

  Chuck Marohn (32:30):

  Yeah. I started writing a blog back in 2008 trying to explain why cities were going broke. And it has grown into this international organization now. We advocate for a different style of development and we're talking about Jane Jacobs, I would like to think that Jane Jacobs would look at what we're doing and say, thank you, this is exactly what I would like to see. But we advocate for a bottom up approach to city building as an antidote to the breakdown and the struggles and the problems that we see in cities all over the world. And so we do a lot of podcasting ourselves. We do writing. We have a website that is a couple million visitors a year, where we publish two, three articles every day of the week. We're active on all the social media platforms.

  (33:24):

  Over the last couple of years, we've started to now actually work with and coach cities, train different action teams and different groups within cities to respond to their problems in kind of unique noble ways, taking the things that they do and sharing them out with people. We've had a bunch of local groups start in our name, so we started to see these Strong Towns Tulsa, Strong Towns Dallas, Strong Towns Seattle pop up, and we started to organize those groups. We now have a couple of hundred of them and we have 800 that are in formation process right now. So we have hundreds and hundreds of groups around the world that are working to put Jane Jacob's style of ideas to work in cities at the block level, at the neighborhood level, starting and advocating from the bottom up.

  Charles Pignal (34:15):

  And if I've done my homework correctly, at the heart of this is a drive towards more density in the city to make cities more dense, or am I getting this right or is that only one element of it?

  Chuck Marohn (34:29):

  No, no, it's okay. It's funny because I wrote an article, density is not the solution. This is one of those places where I think Jane Jacobs is oversimplified, right? Like Jane Jacobs was talks a lot about density and how density is part of the answer to our problems and density solves a lot of things. And a lot of people read life and death and they take away from it. Well, we need more density. And I think if we look at urban planning in general, urban planners tend to use the blunt instrument of zoning, to say, well, we can just create more density here, we'll be doing what Jane Jacobs said and we'll get good results. The reality is is that density is a byproduct of good development form. And so when you set out to create density and you use Robert Moses kind of means, you end up with places that are of great density metrics, but are ultimately very despotic and inhuman and don't endure. If you start out with urban form, with bottom up kind of approaches, if you approach things incrementally and say, how do we do the next level of intensity, how do we build a place that is more productive, you ultimately end up with density, but density is not the thing you were shooting for, it's a byproduct of success.

  Charles Pignal (35:51):

  I see.

  Chuck Marohn (35:51):

  So, that's like a strong town's nuance. Those are the kinds of things we talk about a lot.

  Charles Pignal (35:58):

  We've recently seen in the last few years, one of the biggest challenges to urban areas in the form of COVID. A lot of cities around the world and in the US were really painfully affected by that. For example, here in London, one of the major developments of the eighties, a business district called Canary Wharf is under a lot of stress because people don't want to go to offices anymore. And so you brought a lot of empty towers. And what are some of the lessons and future outcomes that you think come out of the COVID period in terms of urban planning? How did the world of urbanism pivot, if at all, in this time?

  Chuck Marohn (36:41):

  I hope that the lesson is not that COVID killed Canary Wharf, for example, right? Because to me that is the wrong lesson. The lesson is that Canary Wharf and other similar, I mean, I'm in Minnesota in the United States. I was down in Minneapolis recently, and the core downtown is a lot of office towers. And we have a skyway system because it's very cold. And so the second story basically is the winter sidewalk area. It's dead, it's completely empty. And that wasn't the case pre-COVID. You can look at that and say, well, COVID killed it, but actually it was a development pattern that was really, really fragile, that was not kind of designed to endure. It was a development pattern, it was a way of building, these office towers and have commuters come in. And, this was something we came up with that we thought would be a good idea, but hadn't been in a sense, tested over time, hadn't evolved out of something.

  (37:44):

  It was something we created, and largely, I'm going to say this, it was a financial product that we could sell that worked really well from a GDP standpoint. These were never buildings designed to endure. These were never places that were adaptable, resilient, could become different things. If we look at traditional development, what we see is that the bank can evolve and become an apartment building. The hotel can evolve and become condos. The little bakery can evolve and become an attorney's office, can evolve and become a clothier. This pattern of development that Jane Jacobs centers on, is one where you don't have to be able to predict the future. And if things go bad, it can adapt and change and become something else. Canary Wharf, downtown Minneapolis, these big office complexes that we have, they are in a sense dinosaurs. And you can look and say that COVID was the meteorite that wiped them out, okay. But the reality is that a lot of things survived the meteorite, but the dinosaurs didn't because they weren't able to adapt. They were too big and clumsy and had too much nutrient demand to be able to survive.

  Charles Pignal (38:56):

  Talking of books around urbanism, I'm wondering if Jane Jacobs book is the bi...

  Charles Pignal (39:03):

  I'm wondering if Jane Jacobs book is the Bible, are there other books, more recent books, that you might recommend to our listeners that you feel are particularly influential in the field of urban planning?

  Chuck Marohn (39:14):

  Oh, influential books. Anything like Christopher Alexander is not going to be a good read, but is essential. It's not designed to be read like a novel, but the greatest insights, my epiphany came with Suburban Nation.

  Charles Pignal (39:30):

  What is the fundamental direction of these books?

  Chuck Marohn (39:34):

  What Jane Jacobs has done for thinking in cities, Suburban Nation, just disassembles the suburban experiment of the US. Here's why it doesn't work and here's why you're experiencing the frustrations you are. I feel like Jeff Speck's, Walkable City, Charles Montgomery, Happy City. Happy City is a wonderful book that touches on so many different aspects of urban planning. These are phenomenal books.

  Charles Pignal (40:08):

  We're going to move on to our quick section question where I ask you, not so much about cities anymore, but more about your personal literary tastes and what you've been reading and enjoying or not enjoying lately. We'll start with the question, what's your favorite book that I probably have not heard of?

  Chuck Marohn (40:27):

  Okay, let me throw one at you and this is Jane Jacobs related, but you probably haven't heard of this. The Lives of a Cell.

  Charles Pignal (40:35):

  Nope, never heard of it.

  Chuck Marohn (40:36):

  I don't even know who wrote this book. The Lives of a Cell is essentially microbiology, but as applied to cities and systems and humans. It's like a fractal look at the world, so here's how the world functions and here's how a cell functions and a cell is like a small fractal version of the world. It's almost like an analogy, but it has a little bit of science and a little bit of observation, kind of Jane Jacobs insights into the way systems work based on what we know about cells.

  Charles Pignal (41:14):

  Interesting. Thank you. What's the best book that you've read in the last 12 months?

  Chuck Marohn (41:21):

  I'm going to have to say The One.

  Charles Pignal (41:23):

  Okay.

  Chuck Marohn (41:24):

  It's The One. Hang on, I've got it right here. How an ancient idea holds the future of physics.

  Charles Pignal (41:31):

  That sounds heavy.

  Chuck Marohn (41:32):

  It's by a guy named Heinrich Päs, I think is how you would say that. Okay. Physics as an undertaking has been stuck for 60 years. There was a bunch of insights after Einstein, a bunch of insights about quantum mechanics, but since then it's been all kind of experimental and all mechanical. There's not been any new theory that has emerged, that has explained things. Anytime you get a great insight like Einstein's insights, what happens is that it solves the problems of the prior insights. Newtonian physics explains most of the universe, but then all of a sudden there were all these things that it didn't explain and Einstein explained those, but now over time there's a whole bunch of gaps that Einstein's theories do not explain. There's something else, there's something missing and The One kind of explores, not just the current state of physics, but it explores a way forward for physics to get out of its rut and to recognize that humans... Well, let me give you this. If you think of a movie projector, an old time movie projector, we think of a movie projector as projecting the movie based on the film going through the projector, but strip away the film and what is the projector? It's just light. It's just shining light on a screen and so the movie itself is the absence of light. It's actually taking out some of the light to animate what is there.

  (43:06):

  The One explores the idea that we are a part of this larger whole, The One and the reason we exist in the three-dimensional plus time, four-dimensional world that we exist in and the way we can touch the table and not go through it and have consciousness and what have you, is because a lot of what exists has been taken out and we are what remains and what we perceive in our experiments and everything else that we're not able to explain, is the rest.

  Charles Pignal (43:39):

  Wow. Okay, so there are gaps in our world of things that might've been there before and our world is the absence of those things?

  Chuck Marohn (43:48):

  Yes. Instead of us being and then things springing out of us, like consciousness, it may just be that these things exist and we are but the projection of them. The One explores this and explores it from a philosophical standpoint, from a physics theoretical standpoint and it also explores it from a theological standpoint.

  Charles Pignal (44:10):

  On the flip side of that coin, what's a book that you find overrated?

  Chuck Marohn (44:15):

  I don't know. I have to tell you, I realized years ago that I could read about 50 or 60 books a year and that meant I had about 2000 left in my life.

  Charles Pignal (44:27):

  I have exactly the same theory. I'm not going to waste my time on bad books.

  Chuck Marohn (44:31):

  Yeah. I will tell you, there's a book called The Doughnut Economics or something like that, that was given to me by eight people. Like, oh Chuck, you need to read this and I read it and I tried to like it and I tried to find insights in it and there's some in there that are really good, but I think for the most part it misses the mark. The people who gave it to me had really good intentions, but I think that they are stuck in a Robert Moses mindset about economics and Jane Jacobs, to me Death and Life of Great American Cities is a wonderful book. It's not Jane Jacob's best book. I find The Economy of Cities to be her most brilliant work.

  Charles Pignal (45:09):

  Is that right? Okay.

  Chuck Marohn (45:10):

  Yeah. When you get into that and you start to apply the same frame of thinking to economics and The Economy of Cities, you end up in a place where a book like... The latest economic fad becomes kind of silly.

  Charles Pignal (45:25):

  What single book would you take to a desert island?

  Chuck Marohn (45:29):

  I mean, I would take the Bible, just because it's the book I read the most and that I struggle with the most. The reason why the Bible endures thousands of years, whether you're theological or not, is because it has insights that people can struggle with over and over. If you took out the Bible and said something that you could read again and again and again, I do tend to read the Lord of the Rings every year just because I find that at a certain time of the calendar cycle it refocus my brain.

  Charles Pignal (46:03):

  In what way does it refocus your brain and in what part of the calendar cycle?

  Chuck Marohn (46:08):

  I tend to read it in the middle of Lent. I tend to read it as you get closer to Easter. It's one of these books of, I think if you read it in a trite way, it's a fantasy novel. That's certainly not how Tolkien wrote it. If you read it in, I think, a less trite way, you get a story of good and evil, but with a lot of gray area on the margin. There's clearly a good and there's clearly an evil, but the characters that you grow intimate with in the story struggle with their own, I'm going to say humanity. They're not humans, that they struggle with that-

  Charles Pignal (46:45):

  That dichotomy.

  Chuck Marohn (46:46):

  Yeah. You can hate orcs and want to kill them, but then you find out that they're actually elves who have been abused and you can say that the Hobbit is the hero, but the Hobbit questions himself and doubts himself and it is a beautiful, beautiful book.

  Charles Pignal (47:04):

  Finally, last question. What book changed your mind?

  Chuck Marohn (47:08):

  Well, there's a lot of books that have influenced my thinking and changed... I feel like there had to have been something back in the late 1990s. I'll give you one. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book called What the Dog Saw and it's just a collection of his essays. There's an essay in that book called Blowing Up and it is the story of Nassim Taleb and Victor Niederhoffer and I do think that one particular essay in that one book did more to change my worldview than anything else. I didn't read that essay and go, "I believed one thing coming in and then afterwards I believed another thing", but I read that book at a time where I was struggling and not to overstate my struggles, but I think of Einstein walking down the street and looking at the clock and having the epiphany about space time as being like, "I'm struggling with this and then I had this epiphany and it moved me."

  (48:10):

  I felt like I was struggling with my life as an engineer and my life as a planner and doing very mechanical things and not having them work out and not really having an explanation of why. When I read that article called Blowing Up from What the Dog Saw, it gave me this massive boost of, okay dummy, here's why. I have read that or listened to that on audiobook 100 times because they were talking about the world of finance and derivatives trading and options trading and all that and I was working in the realm of cities and places and engineering and planning, so the idea of taking this two different ways of viewing the world, the Niederhoffer way of everything can be tested and verified and use data and be empirical and the Taleb way of looking at the world, which is, it's very complex and you have to know the limits of what you can know and you have to work within that. To reconcile that into the world of planning, took me a decade. I kept going back to that essay over and over and over to kind of help reinforce the path I was on.

  Charles Pignal (49:16):

  Yet you express that connection so well today. We have limits to our understanding, limits to the science and thinking in new ways as Jane Jacobs wrote in her book. On that note, Chuck Marohn, thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed speaking with you about the book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Thank you so much for your insights on urban planning and your great book recommendations.

  Chuck Marohn (49:42):

  Thank you.

  Charles Pignal (49:47):

  The first book I'll mention in this recap is Chuck's book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity published in 2019, which outlines his ideas around cities in the United States. Chuck mentioned that actually his favorite book by Jane Jacobs was The Economy of Cities published in 1969, which he described as her most brilliant book. His favorite book, that I'd never heard of, was The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas, published in 1974. It's a collection of essays that connects biological principles to other disciplines like music, communications and computers. The best book he's read in the last 12 months was The One, How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, by Heinrich Päs, published in 2023, which presents the idea that everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole. The book he found disappointing in the last 12 months was Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, published in 2017, which examines new ways to look at economics and its objectives. The book that he would take to a desert island was the Bible and finally, the book that changed his mind was What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, published in 2009, especially the article Blowing Up, which he found inspirational.

  (51:16):

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Lit with Charles. If you have any suggestions or comments, you can always DM me on my Instagram account @LitWithCharles. I try to reply to all my DMs. If you enjoyed this episode, you should definitely subscribe or follow me and more importantly, tell your friends and family.

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