Here's the link
Jane Jacobs was an inspirational figure for many of us interested in Town Planning as the person who managed to stop the destruction of her neighbourhood - Greenwich Village in New York, where she lived at the time - by monstrous city planners. Her classic book is the Life and Death of Great American Cities, but she went on to write several more - less generally acclaimed about economics in general. She has a very bottom up, grass roots idea of how things should be, which she relates to the way biological systems 'self-organise' - a basic insight of modern science, and required to explain the complexity of life with out some divine master planner. By analogy, people can come together to live in cities without the need for central government, which in her vision is something which has come later, spoiling everything.
Biological ideas are central to Barry Quirk's thinking, as illustrated by this talk on Procurement to the Design Council, where he says
There is also this on his web site about the Roots of cooperation and routes to collaboration in which we read thisWell, I started as a biologist many years ago and there were two principles of natural selection that Darwin dreamt up that still apply now. The first is, when there’s a drought around a lake, those plants that survive are the most resilient. They’re not competing with other plants, they’re competing against the environmental change.
The other natural selection is the competition between hyenas and lions for a zebra. That is competition between people. We must know the difference between competition and the ecology of our supply markets because they are very different. Some are operating in very dry, drought-ridden markets and in some, there really isn’t competition between people.
There's also a reference later to insights from repeated Prisoner's dilemma experiments as rebutting 'a school of classical economics that argues that collaboration is in some ways unnatural'.The cooperative gene
In biology, significant developments in evolutionary theory over the past 50 years have recast
the understanding of how animals successfully evolved. The existence of widespread cooperative behaviour between animals – across species or within species – was witnessed for many hundreds of years but never really understood. But the sheer extent and degree of cooperation between animals seemed to fly in the face of the supposed ‘tooth and claw’ survival instinct.
Therefore, cooperative behaviour in animals, enacted without the benefit of (human) conscious intention, is not now seen as somehow anomalous to a dominant pattern of selfish behaviour and instinct but rather as a central feature of species’ successful evolutionary strategy. Of course, this may have little bearing on human evolutionary development where cooperative behaviour arose first through conscious and intentional ‘group selection’ mechanisms;8 and then second, through the relatively more recent development of intergenerational cultural pressures of custom and tradition blended alongside the march of technological progress and the ever extending intellectual reach of reason. Nonetheless, it can be said that in a very real sense cooperation has its deepest roots in genes.
There's something here of wanting to set out a way of thinking with stands against mainstream economics, and hard-nosed modern biology as expounded in 'The Selfish Gene'. It's something which comes through in the support for Time banks and local currencies, as described in this post - Lewisham's New Labour ghosts
Time to get on with some paid for work ... this is only the introductionLewisham Time Bank Development Strategy 2009 - 2012 wrote:Dr Edgar Cahn, civil rights lawyer and activist, devised the time banking system (then called ‘time dollars’ or ‘service credits’), whilst at the London School of Economics in London in the 1980s. One hour equals one time credit may not have seemed rocket science, but his ideas were to prove revolutionary - even though economists at the time argued vigorously about whether this new community currency based on time could actually grow social capital and revive the ‘core’ economy of family, neighbourhood and community.
I'm sure anyone who's got this far will have realised I think this way of thinking is misguided, and can explain much of Lewisham's relative decline compared to comparable London boroughs. But it's probably more a book, or a PhD thesis needed to detail how.