Jacobs was one of my University discoveries, in the late 1980s. Her views on urban currencies led me to suspe t that the Euro wouldn't succeed. Her and Margaret Thatcher's critiques are disconcertingly similar.<p>There are modern academics who've continued in a similar vein including a chap from, if I recall, Harvard, who has a great lecture given in New Zealand on urban vitality and innovation. Edward Glaeser: <a href="http://fixyt.com/watch?v=r3Mvz-Mg2_A" rel="nofollow">http://fixyt.com/watch?v=r3Mvz-Mg2_A</a><p><a href="https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3uGHCweFxEy" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3uGHCweF...</a><p>And sadly, Jacobs is no longer with us, she passed a few years ago. But her books and thinking remain powerfully vibrant and original.
> The Shah thought he was buying development, making Iran into an advanced nation. But all he was buying was a factory, though an immense one. What he needed in order to actually be developed was what he couldn't buy: the web of thousands of companies that together enabled to US to build that factory.<p>This brings to mind the economic development of southern Korea under the Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee dictatorships. Rather than buying just a factory with their available capital they used it to fund the expansion of what are known as <i>chaebols</i>, Korean firms involved in a wide range of enterprises. You'll have heard of Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Daewoo, to name a few. Those are examples of chaebols. To be clear, that system can have problems, but it is an amazing contrast to courting transplants [0] or buying factories.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2014/09/04/nevada-strikes-billion-tax-break-deal-tesla/15096777/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rgj.com/story/news/2014/09/04/nevada-strikes-bill...</a>
<i>The missing process-- the engine Jacobs finds for all economic life-- is import replacement.</i><p>What does it mean for the US, when we can't keep up with our demand to import qualified employees?<p>EDIT: <i>"A city region is used to change, is constantly innovating; a supply region is not. It treats its resources as God's gift, a presumably eternal windfall; it prepares only half-heartedly for the end of the boom, and when it comes it's caught short."</i><p>Substitute "city region" and "supply region" for something and "worker" and maybe we have something that relates to another article about how workers rent their resources for pay. (Which I can't find right now.) In other words, is being a conventional worker like being a "supply region?"<p>Perhaps people are the opposite of cities? When people start to prosper, they seem to be outsourcing tasks.
More recent research on networks of producers (for example Birmingham, northern Italian textile firms, and silicon valley) supports her analysis in many respects.
The San Francisco Bay Area is a huge economic engine, however, there is a severe housing shortage which could potentially disrupt this.<p>What would Jane Jacobs recommend in this situation?
The way I understood it: transaction costs matter much more than most people think they do.<p>City is efficient because transaction costs (transport and communication distance for workers and suppliers) are low. However, that's a function of technology. The cost of communication is getting more and more independent of distance; with full vr, it's going to be zero. Price of transport as function of distance would get to zero with teleportation technology.<p>Unless I missed something, it seems weird that several books were written on such a simple observation.