Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Jacobs is a fascinating writer. She’s passionate about making cities vibrant, and deeply curious. Together with her training as a journalist, these characteristics turn what could be a dry tome or trend-driven screed into something that is both very readable and still relevant to today’s urban planning debates.

Jacobs takes aim at the predominant school of urban planning at the time, which sought to enable isolated aristocratic lifestyles at high density or escape the city altogether. Instead, Jacobs sees the beauty in the diversity, variety and community of cities, evocatively referring to their rhythm and coordination as a “ballet,” where others may see only bustle. What particularly sets her apart from her adversaries in this book, and what has leant the work staying power, is her view of cities as dynamic and interconnected, like living organisms. She directly makes this comparison in Chapter 22, where she philosophizes on “The kind of problem a city is”:

Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

Jacobs sees how issues like mixed-use neighbourhoods, foot traffic, building age, density, and road and park structure are all related questions. Failures for an urban region to thrive arise from these material factors, and often result in feedback loops. One example I found particularly compelling was her analysis of a hot restaurant scene falling victim to its own success. By chance, a mixed-use area became known for its handful of restaurants. Because the area was seen as a good bet for investors, it attracted other restaurant entrepreneurs. The area became busy during the dinner hours of 5-9pm, but there was little foot traffic outside of these times. The empty streets during the day and late night made the area feel dead and unsafe. As a result, the restaurant traffic died off too, as diners moved to livelier locations they discovered during their walks around the city.

Her solutions to the problems she identified are limited. For example, as an alternative to the decaying restaurant scene, she uplifts a wise landlord who carefully selected tenants with varying business models, rather than optimizing for who could pay the highest rents. Hoping thoughtful individual capitalists will forgo profits is a naive and unsustainable model for creating thriving cities. Jacobs believes strongly in the power of the markets to solve problems, disapproving of public housing and strong central governments. She values self-determination and democracy, pointing to various neighborhood councils as models for creating communities that respond to the needs of their members. However, it is unclear how these models of democracy should interface with the “wise landlord” to produce the desired mixed use neighborhoods.

It is this intersection of private property and democracy that challenges social organization at all levels: the cities Jacobs studies, as well as nations and larger structures. Jacobs avoids interrogating this question directly, keeping her writing carefully nonpartisan (beyond its general commitment to western capitalism — she was of course writing at the height of the “Cold War”). Her incisive critiques but vague politics have earned her fans as diverse as socialists and neoliberal Hayekians. Her continued relevance to the urban planning questions of today is part condemnation of her approach: despite inspiring generations of urban planners, we have still not cracked the nut for how to balance private property and social wellbeing, and our cities bear the scars of our continued commitment to individual freedoms over communal good.

Review: Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence by Yves Winter

One should reproach a man who is violent in order to ruin things, not one who is so in order to set them aright.

— Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

I, and I think this is common to most of us in the West, feel a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the concept of violence. “Violence is bad! I won’t condone it!” I feel I need to yell in my own defense, when spotted reading this book. “Instead, we must fix the unequal socioeconomic conditions of our society by…..” And here, I falter.

While elite actors can frequently mobilize significant forces to pursue their objectives, popular actors must rely on numbers and on tactics that specifically target elite properties: their privileges, wealth, reputation, and social standing.

How do you target the privileges, wealth, reputation and social standing of the elite? It’s either shame or violence, isn’t it?

Machiavelli’s writings on violence are portrayed, in Winter’s reading, as a necessary antidote to liberal perspectives on violence. Necessary, because the threat of violence is one of the few tools popular (plebeian, proletariat) forces have at their disposal to achieve their objectives against the elite. In the liberal world, violence has been depoliticized primarily through four methods:

1. Marginalization: Violence is either a fundamentally human weakness, a remnant of our bestial, pre-civilization roots; or, an inhuman or pathological urge. In either case, violence is not a political tool because it is not something wielded by thoughtful, strategic, justified humans.
2. Technicization: a favorite of the political realists, violence is a mechanical tool, that can be precisely dialed in impact and scope to achieve the desired ends, so obviously necessary for enforcement of law that it is trivial to discuss in its particulars. As it is obviously required, fully controllable and transparently applied, it is not a political tool.
3. Moralization: Violence is evil — but when is it justified? Philosophers invent a slew of thought experiments for when it is morally justified. Because in these hypotheticals, violence is abstracted away from the power structures and historical context in which violence is actually deployed, this violence is no longer a political tool. (Often accompanied with portrayals of violence as an apolitical acid that eats away at the foundations of functioning political systems).
4. Ontologization: Violence is transcendental, mystical. According to Derrida, even naming something can be violence. Violence can be anything, which makes it not a political tool.
   

Winter’s Machiavelli instead views violence as a political tool, and as inherent to a social structure with class inequality (the populi and the grandi):

Those serious, though natural enmities, which occur between the popular classes and the nobility, arising from the desire of the latter to command, and the disinclination of the former to obey, are the [origin of] all the other evils which disturb republics (Machiavelli, 1532)

Unlike in Weber’s construction of violence, in which violence is a coercive force between an object/subject pair, Machiavelli views violence as tryadic: object, subject, and audience. From this key insight emerges most of the rest; how violence is perceived becomes the key question (violence as cruelty, violence as spectacle, violence as catharsis, violence as justified).

Machiavelli considers there to be four political emotions: hate, love, hope, fear. Hope is relegated to foreign policy and conquest, for reasons that Winter didn’t really make clear to me. The relationship between hate and fear, and the way violence mediates this switch was of particular interest to Machiavelli, because it is crucial to strategy both for Princes and for the masses.

Politically, the power of fear lies in its capacity to isolate individuals. We hate collectively but we fear individually. (...) Unlike fear, which tends to individualize, hatred produces the possibility of unifying a multitude. (..) From the point of view of the prince, this yields the problem of how to deploy violence without generating hatred. (...) From the point of view of the rebellion, it yields the opposite problem: how to nurture collective hatred and avoid fear, especially in the face of repression.

This switch between hate and fear poses one limit on violence. The other limit is long-term stability and succession. For this, laws are necessary. Political systems are continuous – even in times of turmoil – and the violence of founding a state sets the stage for the laws that develop over time.

I learned far more about civil unrest in Florence in the late 14th and early 15th century than I thought I would. It was a fascinating time, with the beginnings of a proletariat class, and Marx’ and Engel’s axiom, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, was brought to the foreground of Winter’s presentation of Machiavelli’s analysis of the times. 

Applying Machiavelli’s perspectives on violence beyond the 15th century is left as an exercise for the reader.

Review: The Shame Machine by Cathy O'Neil

 I loved O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction, and went into this one hoping for something more of the same, but maybe with a narrower focus. The Shame Machine veers a little more into the self-help realm than I anticipated: understanding shame so you can handle your own shames better, so you can be more empathetic. There's less about Silicon Valley and how it harnesses shame in its algorithms than I was hoping for. There's a lot more about the author's own journey coming to terms with being fat than I expected. A lot of the pop sociology and pop psychology described in the book was familiar to me, although it was clearly expressed and an easy read.

A concept O'Neil develops throughout the book is the concept of "good shame"; shame is a tool for encouraging behaviour that leads to a better society. She highlights the need for interperson-shaming to be within a community (and ideally in person, not online) for it to not be toxic. She also argues that "good shame" requires "punching up" and not "punching down".

In summary, good shame requires: (1) choice (the behavior being shamed must be elective), (2) change to be possible (does the shame target have the tools to make a different choice in response to shame), and (3) assessing if the shame is necessary (versus virtue signaling; is changing the behavior the goal of your shaming?).

I liked the chapter where she developed how "punching up" shame can also be used by people against institutions to elicit change. She used examples of how facebook was shamed into better handling misinformation and how Gandhi's movement shamed the British government into ceding rights to the people. I wish she'd gone a little more in depth in this topic.

A thought I had while reading this book is that there are essentially two "negative" tools at your disposal for enforcing a certain behavior: violence and shame. Violence requires an imbalance of power (some have defined the State as being the entity with a monopoly on violence; physical power or weaponry would be the analog in a person-to-person situation rather than state-to-person). Shame requires a voice. If you have a voice but no power, then shame is likely the only tool at your disposal.

I think shame is important to understand. Our culture, from our humour to our fashions, is strongly shaped by shame. To use "good shame" is itself a little shamed, but it's a powerful tool.

Review: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 4/5 stars

While others squabble about racial sensitivity training for cops and corrections officers, or body cams, or what the appropriate amount of educational/vocational programs for felons is, in Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis zooms out and questions the role prisons play in society entirely.

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

(...) First of all, we think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on imprisonment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two million people who are currently being held in the country’s jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers.

She points out the strange assumption at the heart of most criminal justice reform movements - that some form of locking people away must always exist. As in Race, Women & Class, Davis does a fantastic job at cutting to the heart of the issue, and showing the intersectionality of race, sex, and capital versus the working class. 

Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun.

She then traces the origins of the current American prison industrial complex, from the "Enlightenment" philosophy that drove the current structure of the institution through the role of the prison in perpetuating oppression of Black Americans.

It was after these first few phenomenal chapters that I found the book wavered a little for me. While the chapters on reform and on gender weren't uninteresting or bad, I felt like it could have been a little more data driven. However, she did a good job at humanizing the men and women who have been disproportionately abused by the system - and perhaps if it had been exhaustively founded in numbers and statistics my critique would have been that she left out the human element. She also makes an excellent point that to use statistics - which come primarily from the very prison industrial complex itself - one must in some ways adopt the same injustices, such as lumping together in one number those who have been imprisoned for possession of minor amount of drugs with those who have raped and murdered and ignored those who have committed state-sanctioned crimes.

The chapter on the prison industrial complex is excellent. Angela Davis carefully demonstrates how closely tied the prison system is with the rest of the economy, and convincingly makes the case that those that wish to reform or abolish the prison system must expand the scope of their activism to target corporations and the capital class more broadly.

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison.

The final chapter, on what abolition of prisons would look like, is also fantastic. The solutions she proposes include expansion of mental health services and addiction services free of charge, decriminalization of sex work and drug use, and changes to how punishment and force are used in educational systems. Many of these same solutions tie in with the current (Summer 2020) calls to abolish the police. Interestingly, she doesn't discuss abolition of the police or reform of the court system - but I suppose she left those similarly weighty topics for another book.

She ends on the following quote, by Peter Biehl, the father of a murdered woman.

“We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen? ’ instead of simply reacting.”

What would it mean to have a plan to make things better, rather than just reacting to things that go wrong? That same question could be applied to medicine, to economics, to psychology, to politics, to software engineering at most companies. It makes me wonder what exactly it is about humans or society that makes us so ill-equipped to tackle this question.

Review: Race, Women & Class by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 5/5 stars

I am so glad I read this book. Women, Race & Class does exactly what the title suggests it would: thoroughly investigates the interplay between race, gender and class at key moments in American history, from slavery and the abolition movement, through the women's suffrage movements, to modern issues like birth control. Davis identifies structural and systemic issues, and pulls no punches in pointing out the failures of the labor movements and the feminist movements and how these stumbles harmed people at the intersections of race, gender and class.

Davis' Marxist-Leninist angle adds so much to the examination of race and gender. It was exactly the gap I wanted filled after being disappointed in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, a yearning that was mollified somewhat with the delightfully data-driven yet philosophically-limited Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. I've often found myself frustrated at the presentation of "women's issues", where women are assumed to be white middle- or upper-class women, with little more than an acknowledging nod towards women of colour. It was such a relief to find this book, and to read about how this rich-white-women-first philosophy has impeded social progress historically.

It's a 40-year-old book now, and I imagine it has shaped the views of many writers whose work I have read elsewhere. There were no new earth shattering revelations here, nor blazing hot takes. Still, Davis does a fantastic job at boiling issues down to their essence. In the intervening 40 years, we have progressed despairingly slowly on issues of race, sex and class, and I think this book is still very much worth the read.

It is organized into 13 chapters, which can be read as 13 separate essays. My favourites were: 

• Chapter 1. The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood
• Chapter 2. The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights
• Chapter 3. Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign
• Chapter 4. Racism in the Women's Suffrage Movements
• Chapter 10. Communist Women
• Chapter 12. Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights

Review: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

 Rating: 4/5 stars

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men  is a great overview of systemic biases that harm women. It's a little like a cultural version of the more biological Delusions of Gender; it's a well-organized, well-referenced, approachable/conversational synthesis of a broad range of sexist beliefs/sexist structures. Criado Perez did a fantastic job in tracing how small biases or assumptions, power imbalances in who makes decisions, individual choices, etc, translate into much broader social injustices. I also appreciated that she would highlight positive efforts and the benefits they've already brought; it's easy to criticize something, and harder to fix it.

This book was not without it's own biases. European languages were the emphasis of studies like how language shapes perception of gender. Western countries, or charities/NGOs based in western countries, made up nearly all the examples of pro-women initiatives; many of the examples of injustices in western countries were very much "white collar" sexism, while examples of sexism in developing countries were very much centered around sanitation issues. Despite being the home for one seventh of the world's women, China was virtually ignored. Despite housing another seventh of the world's women, discussion of women's issues in India was largely limited to the availability of public toilets - certainly a very, very, very crucial issue... but in contrast, the life of a woman in the UK was sliced and diced in pretty much every way imaginable.

The chapter on politics was, I thought, a little disappointing. The author advocates for women taking up a broader proportion of parliamentary bodies, citing, as far as I can tell, as single study that found that governments with more women pass legislation that promotes education and healthcare. Her summary of this study doesn't describe whether these women are from progressive/left wing parties, but later the author indeed describes how in many countries, the conservative/right wing parties have poorer representation of women. One might imagine that it is not the balance of women, but the overall political persuasion of the government that is the causal factor in both a pro-education/pro-healthcare policy as well as a more gender-balanced governing body. The author translates this into a shakily-founded critique of Bernie Sanders/ advocacy for Hillary Clinton (c. 2016 democratic primary). According to the author, Clinton would, by virtue of her gender, be a better leader for women - with no investigation of the two leaders' policies, nor even a glance at the gender make-up of their aides, assistants and advisors (the people who typically write the legislation proposed by the leaders and interpret the legislation voted on by the leaders). I'm a little bit exhausted of reading liberal feminists working through their 2016 Democratic Primaries grief, but at least this section wasn't as bad as Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Still, this type of bias makes me question the author's interpretation of some of the fields she discusses that I am less familiar with - and that's a shame!

Despite these flaws, I think it is a book worth recommending and worth reading, and even those familiar with literature on how medicine, technology, law, etc propagate injustice against women will probably come away with something new.

I read the audiobook, which was narrated by the author, and her reading was enjoyable.

Review: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

 Rating: 5/5 stars

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is well organized, thorough, approachable, and has a delightfully sarcastic voice. Parts of the literature I was already quite familiar with, after a few psychology courses and a decade of reading feminist books/articles, but other parts, particularly the child psychology aspects, were new to me. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone that teaches men and women, manages men and women, or has/plans to have girl or boy children. So virtually everyone.

I finished the book both really wanting to invite Fine over for coffee, and wanting to tell everyone I know things I had learned in the book.

Review: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

Rating: 5/5

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is very much a quick and approachable intro into basic linguistics concepts, and how these concepts apply to the development of internet-specific communication mores. Although the culture of the internet develops so quickly, by anchoring her observations/study about the internet in theory, Gretchen McCulloch really gives you the tools to think about new developments in internet communication. For example the etiquette of social distancing Zoom calls isn't covered in the book, but now I have Thoughts about what she might have written. I think this approach will also give the book a little more staying power - it isn't a description of the rules of a particular meme, or a guide to when and how to use phrases like "I can't even". It's much more about how technology and communication needs intertwine to produce new quirks of informal internet speak. Her writing tone is funny, thoughtful, and informative. I loved it.

I think my favourite part of the reading experience was recognizing a bit of a kindred spirit in McCulloch. For example, she's daydreamed about a research project involving the variation in the language of "missing cat" posters around Montreal neighbourhoods. She's a "full internet" person, like me, and fluent in internet culture. Many of the aspects of internet communication she highlighted are things I've used, seemingly naturally, and then picked apart and analyzed. (Why did I use "hahaha" there, "hahahaaaa" there, but "lol" in the response before? Why two :joy: emojis there? It feels better to correct my phone's autocorrect there to use a lowercase to start the sentence... but why?) Her nerdy delight in research and understanding the world around her was familiar and contagious.

Because Internet goes a little deeper than just face-value text frequency studies like "which letters are most likely to be repeated/elongated." There's also examination of how communities form, how people share and interpret intense emotions, how people express and develop their senses of identity, how different people encounter and use the internet in their lives. There's no pearl-clutching about the kids these days not knowing how to write well - and in fact, she combats this myth with thorough examination of casual versus formal writing styles over the years.

There's a few areas she touches on but doesn't really go into that I would have liked to hear more about. For example, she dates the end of "Advice Animals" memes to around 2014, but doesn't explain what contributed towards their demise. I've thought about this before - I suspect reddit removing the subreddit from its "default subs" led to its sharp drop in popularity, but I have a feeling that this meme format was already on the downward slope. This could have been an interesting avenue to discuss in more depth how the decisions of social networking companies shape language development. She mentions very briefly the alt-right's use of the pepe frog, but not how their ironic use of rapidly changing memes and slang and extreme irony allow them to pretend they were less hateful than they were, and communicate somewhat unseen with each other in the rest of the internet.

The author read the audiobook, and I liked her reading of it.