Move over David Brooks, there’s a new kid in town, and he appears to be so good at conveniently missing the point as to make the bobo author look like an amateur. I am, of course, talking about Joel Kotkin, who manages to do something our favorite conservative could never quite pull off: repeat himself in a novel way every article. He does this, simply enough, by glancing at the front page—thereby discovering the newest piece of evidence that New York is dead and the future lies in Phoenix (after his artful interpretation, of course). It should therefore come as no surprise that the London attacks spell, according to Mr Kotkin’s percipient pen, the end to everything that doesn’t involve an attached garage.

It is fortunate for our world that Jane Jacobs found ideology so late in her life. It is quite plausible that, had she been so ideological at a younger age, she might have ruined her earlier, seminal works with the rigid assumptions, logical fallacies, and contrived evidence that that permeates Systems of Survival.

Edit 2020—I find it interesting that I didn’t think The Death and Life of Great American Cities was an ideological book. Certainly the ideology wasn’t as naked as it was in Systems of Survival but it was absolutely there. If there’s any lesson, it’s that Urban Planning of the 1960s needed the critique from Jacobs’ ideological position. It was dominated by a belief that centralized city planning and architecture could solve our problems. The problem with Systems of Survival wasn’t that Jane Jacobs changed, but that the world changed.