Will I love The Economy of Cities?

While her Death and Life illustrates how cities work, this book helps explain how the economy of a city really works.

Jacobs uses very simple language to make urban economies understandable: her contrast between Manchester and Birmingham shows how one city fails and the other flourishes; her illustration of how the manufacturing of bras emerged from the earlier corset illustrates her observations about new work added to old; she illustrates how Rochester, N.Y. went from a diverse economy of many technological advancements to one all-consuming Kodak dependent making the city totally dependant on one company.

All her illustrations reflect how… show more.

This book discusses how the first cities formed, and how they operated. We assume they had to be centers of trade and production, but Jacobs really drills down into how that worked. In contrast to other scholars who argue cities emerged as agriculture grew, Jacobs suggests cities were the driving force behind agricultural development. Don’t be put off by the term “economy” if you’re not a numbers person, this isn’t a discussion of tables and percentages, but about the earliest cities would have created culture.