Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961) is an important part of the spontaneous order catechism. Described by Jacobs herself as an “attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” the book undoubtedly helped undercut the post–World War II fashion of trying to revitalize urban neighborhoods and cities through large, top-down housing and redevelopment efforts. Rehousing people en masse gave a new, unfortunate connotation to the word “projects,” which is well explored through the comedy of Eddie Murphy’s unsung 1999 animated TV series The PJs.

Not content to accept Jacobs’s beatification on faith, I’ve finally been reading her book and finding it (so far) worthy of its place. It is of a piece with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998). Like Jacobs’s, Scott’s book illustrates how planners in all variety of fields—both governmental and corporate—reduce complex environments and social dynamics to some small number of dimensions that matter to them. In doing so, they trample much of what gives those dynamics richness, value, and resilience. City planners through the middle of the past century may have done as much to blight cities (and the lives lived in them) as to clear blight away.

In the introduction to her book, Jacobs illustrates the resentment of people forced (as a practical matter) to live in housing projects:

In New York’s East Harlem there is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. A social worker frequently at the project was astonished by how often the subject of the lawn came up, usually gratuitously as far as she could see, and how much the tenants despised it and urged that it be done away with. When she asked why, the usual answer was, “What good is it?” or “Who wants it?” Finally one day a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: “Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!’”

Somehow, this passage reminded me of debates about privacy policy, antitrust, and Big Tech, which I can see as parallels to urban planning. Though less visibly, federal privacy legislation and other such policies under debate today would cabin and revise society on an even grander scale than urban planners did. They wouldn’t move people from their dwellings, but by taking hold of the channels of interaction and commerce en plein, they may have greater total influence.

A few pages later, Jacobs uses my favorite word in deriding city planners’ premises:

The street is bad as an environment for humans; houses should be turned away from it and faced inward, toward sheltered greens. . . . Commerce should be segregated from residences and greens. A neighborhood’s demand for goods should be calculated “scientifically,” and this much and no more commercial space allocated. The presence of many other people is, at best, a necessary evil, and good city planning must aim for at least an illusion of isolation and suburbany privacy.

That’s right. My favorite word is “suburbany”!

Well, actually: privacy.

“Suburbany privacy” is so evidently the aim of federal privacy legislation that I think the class implications of mid-20th-century urban policy could be picked up and put down on today’s privacy policy debates and you wouldn’t see much difference.

In taking aim at commercial privacy (while tamping down corporate risk), the experts are saying, metaphorically: The great unwashed do not know how to live. Look at them out there, socializing on stoops while their children play on the sidewalks. They live near stores, and they’re inveigled by hawkers and salesmen. They endlessly encounter strangers. The noise! It’s dangerous. It’s too much. We must help them.

The results of privacy regulation have been, and would be, more subtle than turning everyone’s houses to face a despised anodyne green. But I think the inevitable result of this type of regulation will be to sap richness, value, and resilience from the great American internet.

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