Jane Jacobs and City-regions

I am always amazed, when I go back to reading her work, how incredibly innovative Jane Jacobs was.  It's no wonder a truly brilliant Nobel Laureate, Robert Lucas, says she deserves a Nobel prize in economics.  Read the incredibly concise and thoughtful summary of her ideas on cities and economic development, here. It is absolutely required reading for anyone who thinks about either.

Comments

[Fred]

Great summary. Reading the part about how national currencies limit individual cities it occured to me that innovative cities generate lots of IPOs and that the stock in these new companies acts like a city based currency.

[Wendy]

Thanks for the link. That is a great summary. It's intriguing how "ahead-of-her-time" Jacobs was. Yet, there are also some aspects of her work that fit the time in which she wrote such as linking import-substitution-industrialization to urban development.

That worked for the world of the 1950s-1970s, but I'm not so sure it works when time-distances between cities are smaller.

I wonder what Jacobs thought about economic clusters?