On second meeting with Prof Dr Peter Taylor dated 5 October 2009, 10am , he said " Well, Azmi before we go further, I want you to read a book by Jane Jacobs - The Economy of Cities (1969). I want you to read only Chapter 2 - How New Work Begins. You can find this book in the library.Then we will meet again next week" Oh my god I hate to do book / chapter review.
Then I went to Pilkington Library, Loughborough University to look for that book. I look at this small book. I think have this book that I bought in Singapore February 2007. I read only chapter 1- Cities First - Rural Development later... then I ignored this book for 2 years. Now I have to read again. This book was published 2 years after I was born. Its takes 4 days for me to understand Janes Jacobs's idea. And it is not easy. I read twice chapter 2 then I understand her vision and wisdom on city by Janes Jacobs.
I discussed with one of PhD student at Department Geography, Loughborough University. She said "Jane Jacobs's books are Prof Dr Peter Taylor and Dr Kathy Pain main references. Even though Janes Jacobs's books are classic books, many authors on global city such as Peter Hall etc always refer her books. If you work with them you should read Jane Jacobs's books." Kindly read my review below.
The Economy of Cities is about the importance of cities as the source of innovative economic change, a point that she believes economists have not understood, going back at least to Adam Smith, whom she chides for having misdirected subsequent thinking by glibly adopting the view that successful urban commerce must be founded on a successful agricultural economy. There are five major processes at work in a growing city economy: (1) Anascent city finds a market in older cities for its initial export work and builds up a collection of numerous local businesses to supply producers’ goods and services to the initial export work;
(2) Some local suppliers of producers’ goods and services start exporting their own work. New local businesses begin to supply various goods and services for this new export work, and some of them eventually begin to export their own work. In the process, the city imports a growing volume and diversity of goods and services;
(3) Many of these imports are replaced by locally produced goods and services through “import replacement”, which is not the same process as the “import substitution” policies adopted by the leaders of various developing economies in the 1960s and 1970s. For one thing, import replacement must take place in logical stages, beginning with the parts or inputs most in demand, and must be self sustaining. For example, Japanese imports of bicycles from the West gave an incentive to local entrepreneurs and mechanics to open repair workshops, to begin manufacturing the most sought after bicycle parts, and eventually to assemble and later export bicycles entirely made of local components. For economic and practical reasons, successful import replacing can only be a city process. Import replacement creates a powerful multiplier effect and, as result, cities built their diverse economic foundations in “boom” phases. After an import-replacement boom, a local economy contains rooms for goods and services that were formerly neither imported nor locally produced, including unprecedented goods and services;
(4) The city’s greatly enlarged and diversified local economy becomes a potential source of numerous and diversified exports. The city’s exporting organizations arise by a) adding the export work to other people’s local work; b) adding the export work to different local work of their own; c) exporting their own local work. The city earns more imports by generating new exports, but many of the new exports merely compensate for declining lost work through obsolescence of older exports, transplants of some organizations into the rural world and replacement of exports by goods now produced in former customer cities; and,
(5) The city continues to generate new exports and earn imports, replaces imports with local production, and so on.
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