Dark Age Ahead

Zusatztext "She once again has proven herself to be one of the most trenchant observers and challenging critics of American culture and character." The Christian Science Monitor "There's no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs! nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us. . . . It's a tribute to Jacobs that her observations still resonate! succinct yet dead on. That's why Dark Age Ahead is a treat to read for the way it snaps our perceptions into focus." San Francisco Chronicle "A short! dense! terse and often lyrical book that sets the wistful against the hopeful. . . . Wonderful and essential." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel " Dark Age Ahead is witty and damning. . . . It's hard to disagree with Jane Jacobs. . . . Worth reading and thinking about." The Washington Post Book World "Jane Jacobs has been right about so much for so long that when she writes gloomily of a 'Dark Age Ahead!' we all better listen. Prescient." Austin-American Statesman "[Jacobs is] the matchless analyst of all things urban." The New Yorker "A short! terse and often lyrical book that sets the wistful against the hopeful. . . . This book is a warning! artfully and profoundly dressed as a reminder. . . . Thanks to Jacobs for pointing the way." St. Petersburg Times "Scholarly yet accessible . . . certain to spark debate . . . [a] unique addition to the genre of social forecasting." Library Journal "Compact and compellingA spellbinding account of the forgetting and misplacing of shared values! assets and skills that . . . may lead the contemporary Western world into widespread social! economic and physical disaster." Toronto Globe and Mail "Still right and still cranky after all these years." Cincinnati Enquirer "Jacobs has always championed neighborhoods. Now she has extended her ideas about community to include the culture at largeWe should stick around and listen up." Newsweek "Jacobs is the quintessential public intellectual! entirely self-taught! omnivorous in her references! pan-historical in her outlook. . . . Dark Age Ahead is something of a retrospective of Jacobs' theories and travels! anchored in specific examples from her years of observation and activism." The Sunday Oregonian (Portland) "Culture critic Jane Jacobs! famous for her work on the economies of cities! has taken the idea of a tipping point toward a dramatic end." Chicago Tribune "A sweeping survey of a civilizationourson the brink of catastrophe. . . . What makes Dark Age Ahead worth a read is the way in which its author brings her famously independent and inductive mind to bear in fresh ways on familiar topics." Berkeley Daily Planet "A blend of advocacy and anecdote about how to protect the vitality of American cities." The Financial Times "Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle! or final authority." The New York Sun Informationen zum Autor Jane Jacobs was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a work that has never gone out of print and that has transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities , Systems of Survival , and The Nature of Economies . She died in 2006. Klappentext In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we're at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs-renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities-pinpoints five pillars of our culture...

Auteur

Jane Jacobs was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that has transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, and The Nature of Economies. She died in 2006.

Texte du rabat

In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we're at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs-renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities-pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference-from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland's cultural rebirth-Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs' career, but one of the most important works of our time.

Échantillon de lecture
CHAPTER ONE

The Hazard

This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.

The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past. Whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the splendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago, in what is now southwestern France? Or the culture of the builders of ambitious stone and wood henges in Western Europe before the Celts arrived with their Iron Age technology and intricately knotted art?

Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it. A failing or conquered culture can spiral down into a long decline, as has happened in most empires after their relatively short heydays of astonishing success. But in extreme cases, failing or conquered cultures can be genuinely lost, never to emerge again as living ways of being. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

This is a question that has practical importance for us here in North America, and possibly in Western Europe as well. Dark Ages are instructive, precisely because they are extreme examples of cultural collapse and thus more clear-cut and vivid than gradual decay. The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.

Surely, the threat of losing all we have achieved, everything that makes us the vigorous society we are, cannot apply to us! How could it possibly happen to us? We have books, magnificent storehouses of knowledge about our culture; we have pictures, both still and moving, and oceans of other cultural information that every day wash through the Internet, the daily press, scholarly journals, the careful catalogs of museum exhibitions, the reports compiled by government bureaucracies on every subj…