Jacobs Crackers? (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Ishmael]

[DPCrisp]

Cities First--Rural Development Later (2)

Pasteur repeated the Florentine experiment, using bacteria instead of flies as his experimental animals and wine instead of meat as his medium. His findings were savagely attacked by the most eminent biologists of his time because the new knowledge demolished so much that they knew about biology. For although the dogma of spontaneous generation ostensibly explained only the origins of tiny organisms, belief in it had subtly distorted much other biological observation and theory. It had simply closed off as "already explained" some very interesting questions, such as how single-celled animals really do multiply; hence had stultified the investigation and understanding of cells generally. For another thing, many biologists had invested their lives in rationalizing newly observed truths to conform with the traditional error; those biologists with the most eminent reputations had frequently been the authors of the most elaborate and arcane rationalizations.

In just such ways, I think, our understanding of cities, and also of economic development generally, has been distorted by the dogma of agricultural primacy. I plan to argue that this dogma is as quaint as the theory of spontaneous generation, being a vestige of pre-Darwinian intellectual history that has hung on past its time.

The dogma of agricultural primacy says: agriculture first, cities later. Behind the dogma lies the notion that in pre-Neolithic times hunting men lived only in small and economically self-sufficient groups, finding their own food, making their own weapons, tools and other manufactured goods. Not until some of these primitive groups learned to cultivate grain and raise livestock, it is thought, did settled and stable villages emerge, and not until after the villages were built did complex divisions of labor, large economic projects and intricate social organization become possible. These advances, coupled with a surplus of agricultural food, are supposed to have made cities possible.

One school of thought, the older, holds that cities evolved slowly, but directly, out of villages that were at first simple agricultural units but gradually grew both larger and more complex. Another school holds that cities were organized by non-agricultural warriors who put peasants to work for them, in return protecting the peasants from other warriors. In either version, the food produced by agricultural work and workers is presumed to have been an indispensable foundation for cities.

This sequence -- first agricultural villages, then towns, then cities -- ostensibly explains only the first cities. But the assumption has affected ideas of what cities are and what may be their place in the economic scheme of things now, as well as historically. If it is true that cities could not have been developed before agricultural settlements appeared, then it follows that development of agriculture, and of rural resources in general, is basic and that cities, since they are supported upon rural development, are secondary. Thus villages certainly, and probably towns, would seem to be more important to human life than cities. It follows also that cities would differ from lesser settlements primarily by being bigger and more complicated, or by being the seats of power.

All these logical sequels to the dogma of original agricultural primacy underlie -- often as unspoken assumptions -- modern, practical attempts at planned economic development. They are not merely academic notions. In both Marxist and capitalist countries these ideas are used as working assumptions.

Cities have long been acknowledged as primary organs of cultural development; that is, of the vast and intricate collections of ideas and institutions called civilization, and I have no intention of laboring that point.

Rather, my purpose now is to show that cities are also primary economic organs. To explain how this can be, I shall first touch upon modern and historical relationships between city and rural work; then conjecture what those relationships must have been in prehistoric times; and finally suggest why the conventional and contrary theory took hold.

[Mick Harper]

I had assumed (in my vapourings elsewhere on the site) that urban-origins for all cultural advance was the orthodoxy. So either Ms Jacobs' book has, since 1968, become the New Orthodoxy or (more likely) there was no Old Orthodoxy because nobody had, before Ms Jacobs, bothered to examine the question systematically. Or I've got it all wrong.

In my own version of events, there is no special distinction to be drawn between urban and rural. Everybody seems to wander between the two states without making hard-and-fast distinctions. Indeed it is not hard to discern the fact that as soon as people are in the city they try very hard to recreate the countyside as best they can, while the countryside is steadily littered with suburbs and factories. Everywhere is like a City-state writ large: there's a bit in the middle and there's a hinterland but everybody thinks of themselves as a citizen of the whole.

This is not to deny that everybody supports one or other vociferously like two football teams. It is after all the clearest physical distinction -- apart from men vs women -- we have in life.

[DPCrisp]

Mick Harper wrote:

I had assumed (in my vapourings elsewhere on the site) that urban-origins for all cultural advance was the orthodoxy.

She said

[DPCrisp]

Cities and Agricultural Productivity (1)

It can readily be seen in the world today that agriculture is not even tolerably productive unless it incorporates many goods and services produced in cities or transplanted from cities. The most thoroughly rural countries exhibit the most unproductive agriculture. The most thoroughly urbanized countries, on the other hand, are precisely those that produce food most abundantly. A few years ago the United States and the European Common Market engaged in what was called a chicken war. Each was trying to push its surfeit of chickens off onto the other. But this does not mean that the industrialized and urban economies of the United States and Western Europe were built upon surfeits of chickens. They simply produced surfeits of chickens.

Surges in agricultural productivity follow the growth of cities. Japanese cities began their modern industrial and commercial growth in the latter part of the nineteenth century and by World War II Japan had become a highly urbanized country. During this time, although Japanese farmers were industrious and thrifty -- the very models of those virtues -- and although they used their land most carefully, neither they nor the city populations were well fed. Rice was the staff of life; for many Japanese there was little else except wild food -- fish from the sea. Yet Japan did not raise enough rice for her own people and a full quarter of what they consumed had to be imported. It was the custom to ascribe this severe food deficit to Japan's small supply of arable soil.

But after the war and during the 1950s remarkable changes occurred in Japanese agriculture, changes that cannot be explained by catchwords like "reform"; indeed, the Japanese have made advances that have not been made in countries where reform of agriculture, land-holding and rural life have all been pursued more determinedly and heroically.

What happened in Japan was, although wonderfully effective, commonplace. The rural world began receiving in vast amounts, for the first time, fertilizers, machines, electric power, refrigeration equipment, the results of plant and animal research, and a host of other tangible goods and services developed in cities -- the same cities where the richest food markets already lay.

[DPCrisp]

Cities and Agricultural Productivity (2)

Japanese agriculture rapidly achieved a degree of productivity that had been thought unattainable. In 1960, although the population was twenty-five percent larger than it had been before the war, and total consumption of rice had soared, Japanese farms were supplying all of Japan's rice; none was any longer imported. Even more interesting, the per capita consumption of rice had dropped a little, but not because of shortages. Like the steady, long-term drop in starch consumption in the United States, this drop was caused by the availability of more abundant and varied food. The farmers, in addition to supplying more rice, were producing so much more milk and other dairy products, fowls, eggs, meat, fruits and vegetables that the Japanese were not only eating more than before, they were eating better. Nowadays when Japan imports food and pays for it with industrial products, she imports meats, not rice.

If modern Japanese cities had waited to grow until a surplus of rural products could support that growth, they would be waiting still. Japan, reinventing its agriculture, has accomplished abruptly and rapidly what the United States did somewhat more gradually and Western Europe more gradually still. It created rural productivity upon a foundation of city productivity. There is no inherent reason why this cannot be done by other nations even more rapidly.

Modern productive agriculture has been reinvented by grace of hundreds of innovations that were exported from the cities to the countryside, transplanted to the countryside or imitated in the countryside. We are accustomed to think of these innovations in large, rather abstract groupings: chemical fertilizers, mechanical sowers, cultivators, harvesters, tractors and. other substitutes for draft animals and hand labor; mechanical refrigeration; pipes, sprinklers, pumps and other modern irrigation equipment; laboratories for research into plant and animal diseases and their control; soil analyses and weather forecasting systems; new hybridized plants; marketing and transportation systems; canning, freezing and drying technologies; methods of spreading information. . . . The list is long.

[Mick Harper]

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

Yes I was rather impressed with these Siberian nomads' designs-for-living too. Until I mused that they had had thirty thousand years to get it right and that's about all they managed.

[DPCrisp]

[DPCrisp]

Mick wrote:

If you wish you can characterise all animals existence as "life-styles" and you can even say they are "invented" by evolution.

But there is a clear and present difference between what we can bear anatomically as evolution has made us and what we can bear with the aid of technologies various. An Eskimo without mukluks freezes to death.

[DPCrisp]

Cities and Agricultural Productivity (3)

To be sure, one can often find fertilizer factories, tractor plants, agricultural research stations, nurseries and electric power plants located in the rural world far from cities. But these activities were not created there. This is so not because farmers and other rural people are less creative than city dwellers. The difference lies in the contrasting natures of rural and city economies, for it is in cities that new goods and services are first created. Even innovations created specifically for farming depend directly upon earlier developments of city work. For example, McCormick's first horse-drawn reaper was a tremendous innovation for farm work; here was a machine that replaced hand implements and supple, complex hand movements. Although this idea and the device to carry it out were new to farm work, the same idea and devices similar in principle were already commonly used in industrial work. Nor could McCormick have manufactured the reaper if other industrial tools had not already been developed. The industrial revolution occurred first in cities and later in agriculture.

Electricity is now as necessary to modern farming and farm life as it is to city work and city life. Yet as late as 1935, fewer than five percent of American farms had electricity. First, electric power and a great variety of devices to use it were added to the economies of city after city, then rapidly to the economies of towns, but only belatedly to the economy of the countryside. It is all very well to say that the length of time this process took was the result of the reluctance of utility corporations to invest in rural electrification and also of their attempts to prevent anyone else from doing what they would not do themselves. But it is still true that these great innovations were added in cities and only after they had been developed and proved out there were they received into the agricultural world. This pattern is typical and it explains how agricultural productivity lags behind urban productivity; why, indeed, there is no way to increase rural productivity first and city productivity later.

[DPCrisp]

Cities and Agricultural Productivity (4)


There are numbers of instances which show how rural people by themselves are helpless to meet even their own food crises. Ireland affords a gruesome illustration. When the potato blight hit Ireland in the 1840s, the population had no resources to combat the famine, even though they were an agricultural people. Cecil Woodham-Smith in The Great Hunger describes the callous and fatuous policies of the English overlords of Ireland and their local puppets which failed to meet the crisis. But she also describes Ireland's inability to accept and use what relief was attempted. There were no ports to receive relief food in the areas where the need was greatest, and no interior means of transporting relief food once it could be landed. There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops, nor any way to make the tools. Potato culture in nineteenth-century Ireland was a much simpler type of agriculture than even prehistoric grain culture had been. What we think of as the most primitive agricultural arts and equipment, dating back some nine thousand years and more, had been lost in Ireland. And without the intervention of cities, there was no way for the rural people to retrieve old technologies, let alone employ new ones.

To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection -- and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless -- was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies.

[DPCrisp]

The City Sources of Rural Work (1)

It is one thing to notice that equipment to change and improve the productivity of already existing rural work arises in cities. But the full purport of this movement as a pattern of development is not apparent until we recognize that the same pattern also holds for the introduction of new work into the countryside. Let us drop agriculture for a moment; we shall get back to it. Let us consider a movement that we take as a matter of course, the transplanting of modern factory work from cities to the countryside.

When we see a factory out in the country, we do not automatically assume that the kind of work being done in the factory originated and developed in the country. The brassiere was invented by a New York seamstress, Mrs. Ida Rosenthal, who first manufactured brassieres in the 1920s in New York and then across the Hudson in Hoboken. As her company, Maidenform Brassieres, grew, she later transplanted much of the production work to rural areas where labor costs were lower. The Maidenform Brassiere factories in rural West Virginia employed local people who already knew how to sew and possibly even made their own underwear but this should not persuade us that therefore brassiere making developed from subsistence underwear making in West Virginia.

But we may not so readily realize that just such transplantations of city work were being made long ago. For example, it is conventional to call the country weaving of Europe a "cottage industry" and to imagine that it actually developed in the countryside. It developed there no more than brassiere manufacturing developed in the villages of West Virginia. In Europe, at the time the medieval cities began to form, the prevalent rural weaving, was a degenerate and stagnated activity and its products were wretched. In time it disappeared. Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, European weaving was revolutionized in the cities. Indeed, for all practical purposes, it was almost re-created there. The looms, carding combs, dyes, methods of finishing cloth, the divisions of labor, the marketing -- everything was changed. This is why the specialized crafts in the industry, and the guilds that institutionalized them -- the Weavers, Butlers, Fullers, Shearmen, Carders, Beaters, Dyers, Drapers, and so on -- were first formed as city organizations, not rural organizations. George Unwin, a British economic historian writing early in this century, notes in his Studies in Economic History that "For two generations before Shakespeare's time, the cloth manufacture had been rapidly spreading through the country districts, to the great alarm of the older urban centers of the industry. The town craftsmen complained bitterly of the competition. . . ." It was the city weaving, transplanted into rural Europe in late medieval and Renaissance times, that became a country industry, and in some instances a cottage industry because the spinners and weavers frequently worked in their homes.

In New York State today, apple coolers stand at numerous crossroads; apples are brought together from many farms and stored in carbon dioxide atmospheres until it is time for marketing them. These facilities are called "country storage." But this country storage is not a derivative of the old farm fruit cellars. Nor are the machines that control the temperatures of the coolers derivatives of the old rural icehouses. Just so, the large furniture-making industry in Virginia and North Carolina, employing farmers part-time, is not a derivative of the local farm carpentry, but city industry transplanted. It is easy to fall into the assumption that older rural forms of work evolved or developed into newer rural forms of work. This is a result of thinking abstractly about categories of work such as sewing, weaving, storing or cabinetmaking. It is like assuming that one course of a dinner somehow evolves or develops into the next course, and failing to notice that each new course is being brought in from the kitchen.

[DPCrisp]

The City Sources of Rural Work (2)

Because we are so used to thinking of farming as a rural activity, we are especially apt to overlook the fact that new kinds of farming come out of cities. The growing of hybrid corn was a revolutionary change in American agriculture; it amounted to a new kind of corn culture. The method was not developed on corn farms by farmers, but by scientists in plant laboratories in New Haven. It was explained, promoted and publicized by plant scientists and the editors of agricultural papers, and they had a hard time persuading farmers to try the unprepossessing-looking hybrid seeds. When the wheat farms of New York State changed to fruit farming, the change was promoted primarily from Rochester, by the proprietors of a nursery that first supplied the city people with fruit trees, grape vines and berry bushes for their yards and gardens, and then showed farmers of the Genesee Valley, who could no longer compete with wheat from the West, that orchards and vineyards were economic alternatives. The great fruit and vegetable growing industries of California did not "evolve" from that state's older wheat fields and animal pastures. Rather, the new California farming was organized in San Francisco, for the purpose of supplying fruits to preserving plants there and, later, vegetables to canneries.

But let us go back farther, to medieval Europe, where the cities seem to have re-created the "country industry" of agriculture, much as they later created a "country industry" of weaving.

After the fall of Rome, European agriculture had stagnated and then degenerated. Even the model monastery farms, in which Roman agricultural technologies and crops were preserved longest, stagnated and then degenerated. Charlemagne attempted to revitalize them but could not, and they continued to deteriorate during the tenth and most of the eleventh centuries, the period during which the medieval cities had begun to grow. At the start of the eleventh century, when bustling little Paris already had a population of thousands engaged in trade and craft manufacturing, this was the state of rural French agriculture as described by Duby and Mandrou in A History of French Civilization:

". . . the peasants of the year 1000 are half starved. The effects of chronic undernourishment are conspicuous in the skeletons exhumed from Merovingian cemeteries; the chafing of the teeth that indicates a grass-eating people, rickets, and an overwhelming preponderance of people who died young. . . . There is never enough food for subsistence, and periodically the lack of food grows worse. For a year or two there will be a great famine; the chroniclers describe the graphic and horrible episodes of this catastrophe, complacently and rather excessively conjuring up people who eat dirt and sell human skin. If stomachs are empty, and children are stricken by disease before adolescence, in spite of the enormous extent of cultivatable and undeveloped land, it is because the equipment enabling men to extract their nourishment from the soil is very primitive and inadequate. There is little or no metal; iron is reserved for weapons. In the most comprehensive and advanced monastic farms, maintaining some hundred head of beef in their stables, one may find a scythe or two, a shovel and an ax. Most of the tools are wooden -- light swingplows, hoes with their points hardened by fire, unusable except in very loose ground and plowing that imperfectly."