Market Nurturing Run Amok

by Jane Jacobs - October, 1995

(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.


Books by Jane Jacobs

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

(Back to OPENAIR-MARKET NET)