Jane Jacob\u27s Moral Explorations

This essay reviews Jane Jacobs’s three major books: The Death and Life of Great American Cities,Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and The Nature of Economies. It traces her development of a hierarchy of places from neighborhoods to city regions to nations and the earth. All her places are defined by their predominant social activities, not by geographical boundaries. The themes of diversity, experimentation, adaptability, and democracy inform all her writings and form the basis of her moral analysis. Jacobs’s methods are contrasted to those of Lewis Mumford and the similarities of their moral concerns noted. Her latest book, a review of the basic hypotheses of ecology, successfully presents the idea that through self-correction, differentiation, and diversification, humans and their fellow organisms can best find sustainability

To Dwell Is to Garden

One of the more welcome changes in Boston's urban landscape has been the recent transformation of abandoned lots in to flourishing community gardens. In To Dwell Is to Garden, a distinguished scholar and a veteran photographer join forces to provide a history and a celebration of these urban oases and of the people who have made them possible. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., traces the origins of Boston's urban community gardens back to the English allotment gardens created to keep country folk from starving during the first great wave of urbanization. Warner suggests that today's urban community gardens owe their existence not to philanthropy or patriotism but to an activist impulse stemming from the civil rights movement, which emphasized self-help, local autonomy, and personal dignity to combat the problems of urban decay. The spirit of today's urban community gardens is captured in Hansi Durlach's compelling photographs of those individuals, young and old, who have worked together to clear the rubble and till the soil. From China and Chile, from Italy and Arkansas, from the suburbs and from next door, their comments, recorded by Durlach, linger in the mind and in the heart. Originally pubished by Northeastern University Press in 1987. With a new foreword by Jill Eshelman

the American experiment:perspectives on 200 years

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