Dark Age Ahead - by Jane Jacobs
It’s a little mind-bending to get even a glimpse of how Jane Jacobs’ brain worked. Reading Dark Age Ahead feels like watching Steph on a basketball court or Prince on stage — the kind of mastery that looks effortless because the thinking behind it is disciplined and generations deep.
Now I’m going to find out if the urbanist internet trolls have discovered this page. Ready?
It reminds me of Cyndi Lauper. Humor me.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was her She’s So Unusual — the classic everyone knows, the one that gave generations of urbanists their favorite karaoke lines for blogs and conference slides (I’m guilty). But like Cyndi, Jacobs didn’t peak early. (Even if karaoke bars aren’t exactly filled with “Change of Heart” or “Sally’s Pigeons.”) She went on to produce work that was deeper, stranger, braver. Dark Age Ahead is one of her masterpieces.
What makes it so striking is how prophetic and yet how disciplined it is. Jacobs isn’t forecasting collapse for shock value; she’s diagnosing the quiet erosion of five essential societal systems — family, community, higher education, science, and governance — and tracing how each one shapes the health of cities and civic life. It’s systems-thinking at its most precise.
She was right. And she was early.
She also knew, in a way that still feels uncomfortably current, that we wouldn’t heed her warnings. Her later essays on capitalism spell out why: the forces accelerating decay — inertia, momentum, bureaucratic detachment, market pressures misaligned with public well-being — are bigger than any one intervention. She shows you the rot and the reasons it persists.
I keep circling around whether to tie this back to the core vision and values of Big Creative. Not because I think her ideas need me, or because community-building is some magic counterforce that can fix everything she names. But because none of the systemic failures Jacobs identifies can be addressed if we can’t rebuild the basic connective tissue of urban life — trust, belonging, shared responsibility, shared space. Resilient community isn’t the whole answer, but without it, we don’t even get a shot.
Dark Age Ahead isn’t cheerful. It isn’t meant to be. But it’s clear, brilliant, and painfully relevant. Anyone who loves cities — truly loves them — should read it.