Jane Jacobs/ Dark Age Ahead/ 2004

by Eriq F

In these times of economic strife, everything seems pretty crazy, and no one's really surprised by much these days, it seems. A business losing a few billion dollars is "better than expected," and perhaps reason for a large reward. If I were to pick a Jane's Addiction album title to sum it up, it'd be "Nothing's Shocking". Still, even these days, it's a bit odd that one of the best analyses of our current situation was written 5 years ago by a woman who's been dead for three years now.

Most well known for her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as being a perennial pain in the ass of many a city planner, Jane Jacobs died in 2006. Her final book, 2004's Dark Age Ahead, predicts the current economic/financial/housing/everything crisis pretty accurately. This fact on its own isn't necessarily remarkable, since there were a chorus of ignored voices predicting the colossal bursting of the housing bubble. As I've already mentioned, Dark Age Ahead was written five years ago, so its focus is not on this financial crisis (which, if you're like me, you're tired of hearing about). The financial crisis is mentioned in passing, as being rather inevitable. It's a red herring compared to her large point, which is that North American culture is heading towards a dark age, where the culture will be forgotten, and even the memory of what was lost will be lost. Since this is a pretty bold claim, Jacobs spends the first part of the book laying out her argument for how this would even be possible. The rest of the book details five pillars of our culture which she argues have fallen from grace.

If all of this sounds pretty depressing... well... yeah, it is. But it's no mistake that the first sentence of the book "This book is both a gloomy and hopeful book." Jacobs does outline how things can be turned around, a touch of optimism which saves the book from being a complete downer.

What makes Dark Age Ahead interesting is the same thing that made The Death and Life... a classic: Jacobs' clear-eyed ability to take several steps back from the problem and look at the underlying causes. I can't help but think that this approach should not be as refreshing as it is. It's been almost fifty years since the publication of The Death and Life... in 1961, and city planners have only recently started taking her suggestions into account in projects (and in each instance, there's plenty of astonishment when her suggestions almost always work). We can only hope that either someone heeds the warnings of Dark Age Ahead a bit sooner, or that the book is not as accurate of an analysis.