stevenberlinjohnson.com: Jacobs and Mumford go for a drive

Anyone who has read Emergence knows that I have a minor obsession with the feud between Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs that broke out after she published her Death and Life book in the early sixties. The other day I stumbled across this fantastic, amazingly wide-ranging interview that James Howard Kunstler (another big influence on me) conducted with Jacobs in 2000. She talks a little about her interactions with Mumford, who was the "Sky Line" architecture and urbanism columnist for the New Yorker for many years. I loved this little tidbit -- one of those stray personal details that changes your whole assessment of someone's work:

I had my doubts about him because we rode into the city together in a car. And I watched how he acted as soon as he began to get into the city. And he had been talking and all pleasant but as soon as he began to get into the city he got grim, withdrawn, and distressed. And it was just so clear that he just hated the city and hated being in it. And I was thinking, you know, this is the most interesting part.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

Live SBJ

Recent Essays

The War On Error
Discover column on the web's bottom-up response to Katrina.
Air Purifiers For Data Smog
Discover column on software that helps you focus.
Why The Web Is Like A Rain Forest.
Discover column on Web 2.0.
Finding "Lost"
London Times piece on the mysterious hit show "Lost."
The Urban Long Tail
Discover column on the diversity of cities.

My Books

The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

There's a more general revelation that Jacobs' anecdote speaks to. When I was writing about debates over children's television a few years ago, I was astonished when I started reading a lot of the scholarly literature on the relationship between children, television and violence. Partly because at least some of it was much more methodologically shoddy or tentative than I had been led to believe, but also because it was pretty clear that a significant body of experts who studied childhood and children, including some of the most prominent, really disliked childhood and children.

Deborah Blum's book Love at Goon Park, about Harry Harlow (the man who did the famous experiments with the rhesus monkeys, where they were presented a wire-mesh mother with milk and a 'comfort' mother that had no food), notes something similar about its subject, that a man who proved that love and affection were vital necessities was fairly incapable of love and affection in his own life. Similarly, Benjamin Spock turns out to have been completely unable to follow his own advice in his parenting. And so on.

There's clearly a powerful 20th Century tendency for some of the most seminal thinkers on a number of key subjects to have been drawn to their subject not by abiding love and excitement but by discomfort and distaste. What is more difficult to tell is whether this a result or a cause of their connection to their favored subject matter.

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