Sanford Ikeda has written a magnificently researched yet readable book that is aimed at economists and urban planners alike, as well as any readers interested in learning about both fields. His perspective is that of an insightful instructor who has spent the last three decades trying to combine key insights from Austrian (or market process) economics with the dynamic vision of urban theorist Jane Jacobs. To the relatively few of us interested in highly theoretical readings of Jane Jacobs, a major work establishing her as an economic theorist seems to have been overdue for years. Ikeda’s is the only sizeable and, at this point, definitive study distilling Jane Jacobs’s economic and social thought while showing why it matters as much as it did when her work and worldview first reached broad audiences in 1961.

Jacobs, an economic theorist? Please bear with me. Writer, theorist, thinker, and activist Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) has had a singular and indelible impact on the intellectual landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from urban design to popular culture, in a number of academic disciplines and in a number of places, starting with her native United States, moving to Toronto, Canada, where she lived from the late 1960s until her death, and reaching around the world—the Netherlands, Japan, Italy, Scandinavia, South America—where her ideas keep finding fertile soil. In fact, some recent interest in her work comes from France and the Canadian francophone province of Quebec, making it obvious that the unique seeds of Jacobs’s socioeconomic vision still germinate and bear fruit wherever unorthodox ideas are read and discussed.

Jacobs, a brilliant, insatiably curious and quirky woman with a seemingly superhuman capacity for observation and intellectual world building, a deep thinker who completely avoided the credentialing mill of modern academia and the “expert industry,” yet whose intellectual contributions have spawned plentiful responses, including intellectual biographies (the best being Peter L. Laurence’s Becoming Jane Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), popular biographies, retrospective works of all sizes and in many disciplines, and a growing list of scholarly publications, deserves awe and admiration. In fact, Jacobs’s stature is such that Ikeda simply called her “a legend in the field of urbanism” (p. xv), and urban planner Alain Bertaud, to whose work I will return later, did not attempt to define or describe her at all except as “Jane Jacobs” (Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, The MIT Press, 2018, p. 22).

Building on her critique of mid-twentieth century urban growth, design, and processes of reuse and demise published under the counter-intuitive title The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage House, 1961), Jane Jacobs wrote about cities as systems of economic and social knowledge that shape human experience in ways essential to sustaining innovation, creativity, and growth. Jacobs published her seminal work sixty-three years ago. Despite her sustained popularity, Ikeda’s work is the first such treatment of Jacobs’s pioneering socioeconomic analysis. As Ikeda shows, the city was both the canvas and the catalyst for Jacobs’s insights, originally dismissed by urban theorists as the “home remedies of Mother Jacobs” (Lewis Mumford, Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies, The New Yorker, December 1 [Winter 1962]: 148). Following suit, economic analysts and commentators (most recently, Peter Bauer, City Lights, New York Review of Books, 32 [17], November 7, 1985) have labeled the economic aspects of her writings as amateurish.

So, what has changed? Gradually, Jacobs’s economics insights have generated more scholarly interest and have even been praised by eminent economists like Robert Lucas (On the Mechanics of Economic Development, Journal of Monetary Economics 22 [1] [1988]: 3–42). Others have found her work on innovation to be transformative (among the best examples are articles by Edward L. Glaeser, Hedi D. Kallal, Jose A. Scheinkman, and Andrei Shleifer, Growth in Cities, Journal of Political Economy 100 [6] [1992]: 1126–1152; and by Pierre Desrochers and Gert-Jan Hospers, Cities and the Economic Development of Nations: An Essay on Jane Jacobs’ Contribution to Economic Theory, Canadian Journal of Regional Science 30 [1] [2007]: 115–130). Until Ikeda’s book reviewed here, however, there has been no comprehensive attempt to analyze Jacobs’s contribution to economic theory.

While academic economists are notoriously unimpressed by frameworks that lack a quantitative model, Ikeda makes every effort to show that Jacobs’s theories provide a coherent framework with which to approach concrete critiques of policy proposals. Ikeda pointed to the most significant turning point for Jacobs’s impact on the discipline: the commendatory citation by Robert Lucas (cited above). Lucas wrote about economic development and Jacobs’s understanding of social capital. He generously discussed Jacobs’s insights, as did Edward Glaeser (with his most influential co-authored work cited above), and several others since. Case for Jacobs as an economic thinker closed? Not entirely, according to Ikeda.

While Lucas’s attention made Jacobs’s work gain some disciplinary traction, it did not make her into an economic theorist. Ikeda’s task is then to show whether Jacobs’s framework, first of all, existed, and whether it could be seen to address the “Central Question of Economics” (p. 33): “How, in the presence of scarcity, human and natural diversity, and imperfect knowledge, does social order emerge among myriad, self-interested strangers?” (p. 33). While Ikeda’s answers can be inferred to be a decisive “yes,” his argument makes for a good read (pp. 34–38). Moreover, Ikeda extends his reasoning to Peter J. Boettke’s conditions for a market-process or Austrian economist and adds additional criteria (pp. 40–41) to show that “Jacobs’s economics lies squarely in the tradition of modern market-process economics” (p. 50). Indeed, “what distinguishes Jacobs’s approach from other urbanists is precisely the socioeconomic nature of that framework” (p. 50).

Those who are looking for a discussion of economic freedom and social networks, entrepreneurship, and action spaces will not be disappointed by Ikeda’s in-depth treatment of these concepts. His exposition follows his well-thought-out plan of presenting the building blocks of Jacobs’s socioeconomic theory, then applying them at the micro and macro level. Those who are expecting to read about zoning, housing subsidies, urban sprawl—the more conventionally urban economic issues—will encounter those as well, discussed in updated contexts and with recent critiques. Yet, this book offers much more than a refreshed look at Jacobs’s urban insights.

Ikeda divides the book into three sections: Economics and Social Theory; Diversity, Social Networks, and Development; and Planning and Revitalization. While each part engages with Jacobs’s analytical framework introduced in the first part—and yes, there is a coherent framework (p. 18)—they address economic issues moving from the micro to the macro stage. From the nature and economic inefficiency of living cities to Jacobs’s famous generators of land-use diversity, Ikeda moves to the economic explanation of how market processes make diversity and cohesion work in a city. This focus on the market processes, already prefigured in section 2.7, is then used to explain Jacobs’s ideas in the context of networks, action spaces, and Jacobs Density. Entrepreneurship, social capital, and action spaces are the key ideas of the middle section of the book. Ikeda then turns to Jacobs’s own favorite book, The Economy of Cities (Vintage Books, 1968) and a discussion of innovation, import replacement, and new work.

While most readers might want to turn to chapter 8, “Fixing Cities” (pp. 257–308), for a discussion of zoning, rent control, subsidized housing, building codes, and urban sprawl, I found the Coda an important part of the book. Like Peter J. Taylor’s analysis of Jacobs’s theory of syndromes (from Systems of Survival, Vintage, 1992) in his Extraordinary Cities: Millennia of Moral Syndromes, World-Systems and City/State Relations (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), Ikeda’s “Coda” (pp. 359–367) provides the distilled elements of Jacobs’s social theory, public policy, and economic theory.

Ikeda’s book is both a significant reference work—I know I will be returning to it in my own research tracing the impact of Jacobs as a knowledge producer—and an absorbing read that builds the argument that Jacobs is a “legitimate economic theorist [. . .] specifically a market-process economist” (p. 30) piece by piece, appealing to the perspectives and questions of both economists and urbanists even after the initial exposition of her theory. Importantly, Ikeda noted that even the urban thinkers or Jacobs fans who believe they are familiar with Jacobs’s work “are unaware of the primacy she places on her contributions to economic theory, with its appreciation for unplanned order, nor recognize the deeper social principles that undergird her economics” (p. 3). Consequently, Ikeda’s task is not to summarize what has been said by Jacobs or about Jacobs’s work in the contexts that might be familiar to readers, but to “construct a coherent analytical framework integrated with market-process theory” (p. 29). Specifically, Ikeda aims to establish and reinforce the interconnected and complementary nature of what he calls the Jacobs urban process and the market process so that readers can see that, necessarily, “the market process and the urban process are essentially the same social phenomenon: A city is a market and a market is a city” (p. 23).

While the title of Ikeda’s book comes from Jacobs herself and is known to those who are acquainted with The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the opening salvo of the intellectual conversation that Ikeda’s book is extending, the phrase has always been his calling card. When I took an abbreviated online version of his Jacobs economics course around 2017—this is the course that inspired the earliest drafts of this book—much discussion took place around that phrase with which Jacobs starts Chapter 19 of Death and Life. Part of the discussion is the recognition that art implies selectivity, oversight, and top-down control; life, on the other hand, does not explain or abstract but invites messiness and “endless intricacy.”

When one understands viscerally, as Jacobs did and as Ikeda explicitly does, that “a city is a market and a market is a city,” a static interpretation of what goes on in a city, or what a city is for, becomes impossible to accept. Hence the need for a new, socioeconomic understanding of cities, which Ikeda has made explicitly visible by tracing out the implicitly made, inductively constructed Jacobsian arguments. His vision coalesces into “what makes a city a spontaneous order and an engine of innovation” (p. 21, emphasis in the original), as seen through the lens of Jacobs’s socioeconomic theory.

Ikeda maintains an approachable and almost conversational tone. Where a less deliberate and less patient author might have attempted a linear framework, Ikeda organizes the book almost fractally, starting with the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of Jacobs’s thought, and returning to these big picture ideas in every section. For example, in his derivation of the fact that Jacobs, not Glenn Loury, originated the term “social capital” (p. 131), Ikeda follows a trail of references that takes him back to Jacobs’s early life, then back into Death and Life of Great American Cities. There is much evidence that Ikeda walks in Jacobs’s footsteps, both literally and intellectually, and engages others who have done the same, adopting (with attribution) that which makes Jacobs’s ideas stand out more clearly. Ikeda’s position as professor (now emeritus) at Purchase College, SUNY, a fellow of the Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economics Processes at NYU, as well as board member of economics institutes and publications, provides him with a solid departure point for this work, but it is his passion—and patience—for teaching the often abstract concepts of market process economics that led to this book.

As might already be clear, there is no work to which one might compare Ikeda’s book. For further reading about economics as seen by Jacobs, I would follow in Ikeda’s footsteps and refer readers to Jacobs’s books already mentioned in this review. They build on the microeconomic insights of the first one and delight with pithy, original insights at every turn. For biographical materials, I would recommend Laurence’s 2016 intellectual biography, also cited. For insights into how an urban planner sees the interplay between markets and cities, I would read Alain Bertaud’s Order without Design, also referenced earlier. Bertaud, a fellow traveler of Ikeda, understands that while the visions of economists and urban planners are often at odds, the two must learn to be informed by their complementary disciplines. Bertaud’s cities are markets: labor markets, markets for spatial structures, markets for entertainment and leisure, markets for art and entrepreneurship. These are insights that Ikeda also promotes, but from the economic point of view. In a meeting of these two authors, fully aware and appreciative of one another, we see the rise of a nuanced, pioneering sub-discipline that is set to revolutionize urban economics.