Cities Matter : A Montrealer’s Ode to Jane Jacobs, Economist, livre ebook

Why do cities exist? Can’t we find better ways of organizing life on earth? With the climate crisis and other environmental issues, are cities part of the problem? Or can they help solve the problems of our time?
Cities Matter answers those questions and more.
Jane Jacobs is known mainly as a thinker of all things urban. That she was. But Ramsay insists that she was also a very important—and much underestimated—economist. Jacobs innovated particularly on how cities drive the development of nations and international trade.
Ramsay has delved into Jacobs’ work and extracted the features of her economic thought. Presenting them in a palatable and concise format, he has also brought to bear classical economic geography along with Alfred Marshall’s economies of agglomeration.
Jane Jacobs was also very pragmatic. Borrowing from her approach, Ramsay proposes real-life exercises for people wishing to compare suburban and urban living conditions, real estate investments, or for businesses doing transport-cost analysis.
Some predict that the Covid crisis combined with high tech means urban life is doomed, that the bucolic periphery will triumph over big messy cities.
That’s not going to happen, says Ramsay.
“Humanity still has many problems to fix,” writes Ramsay, “and we need healthy cities to get through it all.”
Charles-Albert Ramsay is a Montreal economist and teacher with an MA in Economics from the Université de Sherbrooke. As a journalist, he has reported on new business projects in cities throughout Canada and internationally. Specializing in innovation and urban economics, he has taught economics at Dawson College and Kiuna Institution in Quebec.
“Humanity still has many problems to fix,” writes Ramsay, “and we need healthy cities to get through it all.”
Foreword 9
Introduction 11
Section 1 The Economist’s City 17
Chapter 1 Economies of Agglomeration 19
Chapter 2 Hub Cities and Transport Costs 29
Chapter 3 Urban Land Values 35
Section 2 Jacobs’ Urban Economics 45
Chapter 4 Jacobs’ Theory of Import
Replacement 49
Chapter 5 City Instabilities 63
Chapter 6 Cities and Nation-States 67
Section 3 Jacobs’ Spectrum of Economic
Regions 75
Chapter 7 The Forward City 77
Chapter 8 The City Region 81
Chapter 9 The Hub/Entrepot City 83
Chapter 10 The Supply Region 87
Chapter 11 The Transplant Region 91
Chapter 12 The Backward City 95
Section 4 Cities as a Dynamic Economy 99
Chapter 13 Innovation in Jacobs’
Agglomerations 101
Chapter 14 Diversity Trumps Specialization 107
Chapter 15 The Future of Montreal
and 2nd-rank Cities 115
Conclusion 139
Notes 145
Notes on Sources – References and Further
Reading 149