Thu

Apr 27
2006

Nat Torkington

Nat Torkington

Jane Jacobs, and Missed Opportunities

No sooner had I learned about Jane Jacobs by finding this fantastic summary of her thinking via del.icio.us than I heard she had died. Saul Griffith pointed out this lovely article about her life and work. Her thoughts about the relationship between cities and rural areas and the different types of cities really rang true with me now that I'm living in a rural area near a major city. Through her obituary I learned that she also had interesting ideas about the networked nature of economics, so (having already ordered her books on cities) I've now got another book to order.

I'd just written to Stewart Brand recommending Jane for a Long Now talk, but of course now it's too late. I'm acutely conscious that there are many interesting people from science, economics, arts, and technology who die every year. For example, I recently saw an obit for one of the first coders, a woman whose job it was to program ENIAC. I'd love to put people like that on stage at OSCON and other conferences, to give us all the benefit of their experience and historical perspective. Do you know any such pioneers and historical figures, people who are over 60 and whom we should have speak before they're lost to us forever? I look forward to seeing your suggestions in the comments ...


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Comments: 6

  Fredrik Rubensson [04.27.06 06:16 AM]

Some years (4?) ago I went with a coworker to visit B? Langefors - a swedish pioneer in Systems thinking. He was then in his 80s I think and really had a lot to say. One thing that I got from that meeting was a better definition of "system". IT people typically think that a systen is defined by a certain amount of code. But from a business and organizational perspective IT is just part of the overall system. A good insight indeed.

Another thing I thought about recently is the way legacy systems handles requirements. Often it is in a rather strict way with lots of details concerning even database rows and similar. The artifacts are often called functional specifications. With the introduction of OO and the Unified Process much of the insight gained through several years has been lost. Maybe some of it was good although we are moving to a new programming paradigm. (Or are we - many so called OO systems (J2EE) I have worked with has been part OO and part functional.) We should have listen to the experience of those before us before entering the new age. These old "functional" software development processes may sometimes be a bit heavy on documentation but the turn around time from requirements change to deployed system is often surprisingly short - even agile?

  hfb [04.27.06 08:14 AM]

John Stilgoe - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~stilgoe/

He's no octogenarian, but he doesn't do email and likely would deliver a more interesting talk than you've had in quite a long time. He does make good on the promise of a response to postal mail as we corresponded for a while back when I tried to get him to come to a boston.pm meeting but couldn't match schedules. Read 'Outside Lies Magic' or 'Landscape and Images'.

  Sean Savage [04.27.06 01:06 PM]

Death and Life was one of the books that permanently changed the way I think and see. It's so important for people who build high tech to consider her teachings. Beyond Jane -- it's more important than ever to bring urban studies and architecture into the conversation as our tech is used more and more beyond the office and the desktop.. as it pervades and changes and merges with our urban spaces and places and affects the flows between these nodes. Place and physical context is so central to the way humans operate but even in the Where 2.0 era the technologists aren't talking to the people who study and work in these realms. This knowledge is almost completely absent from the tech conferences but it seems inevitable we'll delve into this much more.. circa ETech 2010? Two older figures from this world who might worth approaching sooner: Christopher Alexander and Manual Castells.

(PS- Not to single out O'Reilly here.. You're doing a much better job here than the other tech conferences. And responsibility for this lack of conversation lies w/ the urban planners/architects etc. too, not just w/ the technologists. But let's bring these worlds together sooner!)

  Sean Savage [04.27.06 01:09 PM]

This one has not much obvious connection to Jacobs and urban studies (though they really are connected!) but nonetheless.. Howard Bloom might add some useful perspective to your conferences, and he's 60+. He wrote "Global Brain" (another perspective-altering book) and the upcoming "Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine -- A Radical Reperception of Western Civilization"

  Kevin Farnham [04.28.06 08:45 PM]

Another remembrance of Jane Jacobs is available at Steven Berlin Johnson's blog (stevenberlinjohnson.com/2006/04/jane_jacobs_rem.html).

Johnson talks about the influence her work, particularly Death and Life of Great American Cities, had on the development of the ideas that eventually turned into his book Emergence.

  Scott Lewis [04.30.06 02:37 PM]

I doubt that he would like to be thought of as "venerable", but to me the single character who has received too little recognition in modern computing remains Alan Kay. I think he is still somewhat unappreciated because his ideas about object-oriented programming are still not thoroughly understood; as he has commented "when I think about object-orientation, Java and C++ are not what I think about". O-O for Kay was not about code re-use, MDA, object-contracts or any of that; it is about finding a bridge between simple, common human thinking and the abstract realm of a computer program.

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