Reading Cities and the Wealth of Nations II
In the third and fourth chapters of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs distinguishes between two kinds of non-urban regions. The first, which she calls the "city region," is the inevitable byproduct of economically vibrant cities. The second, "supply regions," do not replace imports and tend to export one or more staple commodities. Neither type of region can be economically self-sufficient.
To recapitulate Jacobs's second premise, vibrant city economies excel at import replacement and export creation. They replace imports with locally produced goods, and through innovation they develop new types of goods which they then export to other regions. Transactions between cities and their city regions, however, do not constitute imports or exports. Indeed, one of the ways in which cities replace imports is by drawing on city-region production.
City regions are areas of activity that is intimately dependent upon their center cities. They lie beyond the cities' suburbs. (Jacobs also refers to such regions as hinterlands.) Not all cities sprout city regions. Jacobs's list of cities that don't is interesting. It includes many capitals and administrative centers. "Rome," she writes, "has an amazingly small and feeble city region, considering the city's own size." This makes sense, however, because symbolic cities, such as capitals (and certainly Rome) don't require active economies at all. The inhabits work in the city's symbolic industry, which either grows slowly over time or doesn't grow at all. Churches and legislatures don't produce more and more of something; they just go on reproducing and exporting the same sorts of things in the same quantities. Their populations are stable. Not that a capital need be stable. London, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam are just four examples of capitals that double as active economic centers, and they all have vast city regions.
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