Distractions, reflections

David Ing, at large … Sometimes, my mind wanders

Currently Viewing Posts Tagged Caitlin-Broms-Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, A Public Celebration, in Toronto

The “Jane Jacobs: A Public Celebration” event in Toronto was both warm and thought-provoking — a rarity in social events!
Last night, Trevor and I went across town to the Trinity St. Paul’s Church — in the Annex — for “Jane Jacobs: A Public Celebration“. It was a wonderful evening of music and thought, including some readings from her works.

Jane Jacobs passed away in April. This event was organized by John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto, who was described as “disciple” of Jane. The ground floor of Trinity St. Paul’s Church was filled to standing room, and the balcony was about half full. The attendees seemed to include both people from the neighbourhood who had known Jane, as well as some had travelled from a longer distance.

  • Mary Rowe, president and editor of Ideas That Matter, acted as the master of ceremonies for the evening. She said that Jane wouldn’t have liked this gathering if it was about her. She could, however, warm up to the gathering as a discussion of her ideas. Jane liked debate, and liked having people come to her house to discuss ideas.
  • Ken Greenberg, former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto, related Jane’s history, as she moved from New York to Toronto. Jane was offered honourary degrees multiple times, but chose to turn them down. Given a choice between celebrity and work, she chose work. Although many have pegged Jane as a pure urbanist, in recent years she spent a significant amount of time in the Toronto suburbs observing and trying to understand how they worked.
  • Ann-Marie MacDonald, a Toronto-based writer and actor, read from Cities and the Wealth of Nations. She read a passage on import substitution, describing the roles that cities played in the a funeral in the south (i.e. the casket, clothes, nails, etc. all came from cities from the north).
  • A quartet, led by Caitlin Brom-Jacobs (oboe) — Jane’s grand-daughter and a graduate of the Eastman School of Music — with Michelle Zapf-Belanger (violin), Carolyn Blackwell (viola) and Anne-Marie Zapf-Belanger (cello), played a Mozart Quartet for Oboe and Strings. The performance was quite moving, and the sound (from our seats in the balcony) was wonderful.
  • A video montage of Jane including segments of her on the streets in Toronto wearing an afghan, and in conversation at home. She described the way she thought as web thinking — perhaps an emphasis on part-part interaction from systems thinking.
  • Vince Pietropaolo, photographer and town planner, described a course from a college in upstate New York called Two Cities, which included a visit by students to New York City, and then to Toronto — ending up on Albany Street, where Jane lived. He read an article from The Village Voice on April 18, 1968 republished in Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs, where Jane disrupted a civic hearing, was arrested, and then released by police due to crowds calling for her freedom for two hours.
  • Anne Collins, Jane’s editor from Random House Canada, said that she could hear Jane’s voice in her head but couldn’t quite reproduce the sound. Looking at the cover of Dark Age Ahead, she said that she wished that should could have convinced Jane to put her name on two lines, so that it would read Jane … Jacobs. She said that she was tempted to read from the footnotes, because they provide depth to the body of the chapters. Anne started reading from near the end of the book, and then made the joke that since she was Jane’s editor, she would skip over some of Jane’s explanation to read the final paragraph of the book.
  • Max Allen, a producer from the CBC, introduced a recording of Jane’s 1979 Massey Lecture, that would become The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. Max pointed out that the discussion on transfer payments is back in today’s headlines. In Canada, three of the provinces are clearly in surplus, and six are clearly in deficit, but Quebec is so close to balancing its books that its separation from Canada could potentially have minimal economics effects (on at least that dimension).
  • The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band played three tunes. David Buchbinder said that Jane had come to the release party of their third CD, not as a celebrity, but just as someone who was easy to talk with. Dave Wall made a quip that klezmer music can be appropriate for any occasion, because no one understands what the words are about. The final song had a dozen dancers in a chain prancing up and down the aisles between the pews.
  • Margie Zeidler, recipient of the 2003 Jane Jacobs Prize, said that she would give the perspective of a 10-year, since she had known Jane for 30 years. Jane was first introduced as a famous writer, but since Jane didn’t write Nancy Drew novels, Margie wasn’t impressed. They had many conversations where Jane was quite interested in listening to Margie’s thoughts, and Jane occasionally chiding Margie when she wasn’t thinking straight.
  • John Sewell read from Systems of Survival, at the point at which Kate describes how she came about to categorize behaviours into commercial and guardian syndromes. This emphasized a difference that, unlike other animals, human beings can be commercial.
  • R. H. Thomson, a renowned actor, described how after being away for a few weeks in other places, he comes home twice: once to his wife, two sons and dog, and then to Bloor Street, where he knows the shopkeepers. He read from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where Jane describes an entire day on Hudson Street in New York, where she used to live.
  • Mike Ford, on guitar and then piano, performed two songs. In “Stars shone on Toronto”, he described a peaceful city in the darkness of a power failure. He then sang “Crossroads”– written for the Ideas That Matter conference in 1997 — which includes the lines …
    • The world’s at a crossroads — this town’s at a crossroads
      Jane Jacobs help us decide how it unfolds and what we should do …

    with the audience singing along in the choruses.

  • The evening closed with a second video montage of Jane at her typewriter and pulling sheets from her stacks of notes. Jane said that she was most proud of her work in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, because that was her largest intellectual contribution.

I see that there’s supposed to be a similar event in New York on June 28, but can’t quite get all of the details.

In doing the searches for web links for this posting, I note that Ideas That Matter volume 3, number 3 includes commentary on Dark Age Ahead, as well as some other authors that I wouldn’t have expected in traditional pegging of Jane Jacob’s work as “urban planning”. These include Robert Lucas (1995 Nobel Laureate in economics) and Henry Mintzberg (from management). I think that I’ll take a break and read a bit more ….

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • RSS on Coevolving

  • RSS on Media Queue

    • What to Do When It’s Too Late | David L. Hawk | 2024
      David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
    • 2021/06/17 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 2
      Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
    • 2021/06/16 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1
      The philosophy of science underlying Classical Chinese Medicine, in this lecture by Keekok Lee, provides insights into ways in which systems change may be approached, in a process ontology in contrast to the thing ontology underlying Western BioMedicine. Read more ›
    • 2021/02/02 To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems | Zeynep Tufekci with Ezra Klein | New York Times
      In conversation, @zeynep with @ezraklein reveal authentic #SystemsThinking in (i) appreciating that “science” is constructed by human collectives, (ii) the west orients towards individual outcomes rather than population levels; and (iii) there’s an over-emphasis on problems of the moment, and…Read more ›
    • 2019/04/09 Art as a discipline of inquiry | Tim Ingold (web video)
      In the question-answer period after the lecture, #TimIngold proposes art as a discipline of inquiry, rather than ethnography. This refers to his thinking On Human Correspondence. — begin paste — [75m26s question] I am curious to know what art, or…Read more ›
    • 2019/10/16 | “Bubbles, Golden Ages, and Tech Revolutions” | Carlota Perez
      How might our society show value for the long term, over the short term? Could we think about taxation over time, asks @carlotaprzperez in an interview: 92% for 1 day; 80% within 1 month; 50%-60% tax for 1 year; zero tax for 10 years.Read more ›
  • RSS on Ing Brief

    • Notion of Change in the Yijing | JeeLoo Lin 2017
      The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
    • World Hypotheses (Stephen C. Pepper) as a pluralist philosophy [Rescher, 1994]
      In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
    • The Nature and Application of the Daodejing | Ames and Hall (2003)
      Ames and Hall (2003) provide some tips for those studyng the DaoDeJing.
    • Diachronic, diachrony
      Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2”, edited by F. E. Emery (1981)
      The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings”, edited by F. E. Emery (1969)
      In reviewing the original introduction for Systems Thinking: Selected Readings in the 1969 Penguin paperback, there’s a few threads that I only recognize, many years later. The tables of contents (disambiguating various editions) were previously listed as 1969, 1981 Emery, System Thinking: Selected Readings. — begin paste — Introduction In the selection of papers for this […]
  • Meta

  • Translate

  • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
    Theme modified from DevDmBootstrap4 by Danny Machal