Dark Age Ahead: Author of The Death and Life of Great American CitiesVisionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times. |
Contents
ONE The Hazard | 3 |
TWO Families Rigged to Fail | 27 |
THREE Credentialing Versus Educating | 44 |
FOUR Science Abandoned | 64 |
SEVEN Unwinding Vicious Spirals | 139 |
EIGHT Dark Age Patterns | 161 |
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Common terms and phrases
agrarian Ainu American areas become boulevard Brampton buildings Canada Canadian century collapse corporations costs credentialing culture Dark Age Dark Age Ahead Diamond downtown drivers economic economists empires engineering Europe European evidence expensive families farm federal Fertile Crescent fiscal accountability funds Gordon Chong Greater Toronto Area happened Henri Pirenne homeless housing human import replacing income industry institutions Jane Jacobs jitney land living loss lost mayor modern municipal Nature of Economies neighborhood neoconservative North America North Lawndale numbers Ontario parks percent police poor postagrarian production professional programs province public transit question rent reported residents roads Roman Rome's routes scientific self-policing shelter social society Statistics Canada street streetcar subsidiarity subsidiarity and fiscal suburban sprawl suburbs tion Toronto Star trade traffic United University Western workers York