Market Nurturing Run Amok
(Even though Jane Jacobs was busy, she very graciously provided
a short essay for Openair-Market Net.)
Here's a small, true story. A few years ago the Vietnamese
in an immigrant area of Dallas asked permission to hold a weekly
market in a large vacant lot there owned by the city. If the market
succeeded and grew, it could add to the hours or days it operated.
City Hall was sympathetic to the scheme; its planners made studies
of what the market should be like, how regulated, how prettified,
and so on; meantime they applied for a government grant to cover
such costs.
The city proceeded as fast as it could but all this paperwork
and thought naturally took time, and when the grant and plans
were in place more than a year had elapsed. By then the Vietnamese
merchants had all given up and moved away, out of Dallas. The
entire exercise was pointless. Merchants or craftsmen with a living
to make can't put their plans and lives on hold the way a vacant
lot can be put on hold.
This fiasco was especially silly because people from southeast
Asia are among the world's greatest experts on how to organize,
set up and run stall markets. All the city needed to do was recognize
and respect this reality and grant permission to use the lot with
two provisos: that it be open to all merchants (of legal goods)
in the community and that the market take responsibility for satisfactorily
cleaning up after itself. Even allowing for meetings and a hearing
this shouldn't have taken more than a month at the outside.
Moral: Watch out for the inclination of civil servants to
make big deals out of what naturally comes economically and speedily.
all published in New York by Random House.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities - 1961
The Economy of Cities - 1969
Cities and the Wealth of Nations - 1984
System of Survival: a dialogue on the Moral Foundations of
Commerce and Politics - 1992
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