“In the 1950s, Robert Moses bulldozed a swath of the South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, displacing an estimated 60,000 residents and gutting one of the most economically diverse urban neighborhoods in the country. The logic of the time was efficiency: move cars faster. By the time the expressway was completed, the same idea was imposed upon the entire city: rationalize land use and separate urban functions into legible zones. What was lost in the process was harder to quantify: the density of small businesses, the overlapping networks of suppliers and customers, the informal economic relationships that give neighborhoods their vitality.
While Jane Jacobs is widely known for her critique of midcentury urban planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she applied a similar analysis to urban economies in her underappreciated second book, The Economy of Cities. She made the case that the hyperfocus on market efficiencies comes at the expense of economic innovation, growth, and shared prosperity.
The neighborhoods that planners considered chaotic were in fact some of the most productive environments human beings had ever devised. The “inefficiencies” planners sought to eliminate were the friction that generated new ideas, new businesses, and new economic sectors. Rationalize the city, Jacobs argued, and you rationalize away its generative capacity.”
Read the full article here: https://commonedge.org/how-u-s-cities-lost-the-economic-development-plot/