conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Economy of Cities about York, Mrs, Economy with the genre: Business & Money, Economics.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "The Economy of Cities is an astonishing book. It blows cobwebs from the mind, and challenges assumptions one hadn't even realized one had made. It should prove of major importance."-- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times"This book is radiant with ideas about what makes cities rich or poor, how cities grow, and how city growth affects national economies."-- The New Yorker"What Mrs. the author has done... is to begin to formulate a badly needed urban myth for our now almost urbanized society...."-- Herbert J. Gans, New Republic"The book is... timely, and if it will irritate some of the experts it will also help bring some neglected issues and theories into public focus. This... has always been Mrs. the author' most notable taient and her most constructive contribution."-- Charles Abrams, The New York Times Book Review
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Economy of Cities
  But early in 1968, as soon as Dr. Matthew's second bus line had started, the city government went to court and obtained an injunction against both lines, which were forced to close. That was the end of that. People who are prevented from solving their own problems cannot solve problems for their cities either.
  One of the most expensive things an economy can buy is economic trial, error and development. What makes the process expensive are the great numbers of enterprises that must find initial capital—which must include those that will not succeed—and the great numbers that must then find relatively large sums of expansion capital as they do begin to succeed. "Expensive," of course, does not mean "wasteful." Development work pays; indeed an economy does not continue to pay its way without development work, unless by a gradually declining standard of living among many of its people. Nevertheless, economic development is expensive and when development work is skimped or obstructed, large amounts of capital thus become available for other uses instead.
  Consider, for a moment, how much investment in new and young enterprises might be bought with $300,000,000. For example:
  I mention the sum of $300,000,000 because it happens to be the amount of money that was spent in the 1950s upon public housing and related public construction in one district of New York, East Harlem, which has a population of about 200,000 persons. The economic problems of East Harlem are now worse, if anything, than before this expenditure was made. The rates of unemployment, underemployment, welfare—and even the deterioration of housing—have increased, not declined. All kinds of acute practical problems have become more acute.*3 No money to speak of goes into East Harlem for people there to use producing goods and services, developing new work, and becoming economically self-supporting. But this is obviously not owing to lack of capital, per se; witness the $300,000,000 made available to the housing projects.
  Consider the welfare costs of New York City which, as I write this, have reached a rate of $1,400,000,000 annually. Suppose ten percent of that were invested annually in new and young enterprises; consider how many such investments could be bought with $140,000,000 in one city in each year. Does ten percent of the welfare budget seem a lot? But welfare costs have doubled in only a few years, which means that much more than an annual ten percent increment has been available for a thoroughly unproductive type of expenditure. Lack of capital, per se, has obviously not been the reason for lack of a relatively modest investment in development of new work. Consider the billions of dollars available for highways, many of which are pure makework for powerful construction unions.*4 One is reminded of Mohenjo-daro and Harappā where the mass-produced pottery multiplied while nothing new was developed, until the people must have had more cups than they knew what to do with.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This scheme was defeated. Residents and property owners in the neighborhood, through their civic organization, the West Village Committee, then hired a firm of architects and planners and instructed them to work out a wholly different scheme. New buildings, gardens and public sidewalk plazas were to be added in already vacant sites, abandoned plots and makeshift parking lots, without destroying a single existing dwelling or requiring the removal of any business, other than the random and usually illegal parking. The architects met these requirements by working out designs for three different sizes of relatively small buildings (most, of ten apartments each) that could be fitted into existing vacant and abandoned sites individually and in combinations. The buildings themselves were capable of many differentiations, not only into apartments of differing sizes, but also of differing uses such as retail stores and workshops. This scheme, costing an estimated $8,700,000 instead of $35,000,000 (both at 1964 prices), provided a net increase of 475 dwelling units, instead of 300, and destroyed no businesses. This second plan was a far cry from the old craft manufacturing of dwellings; indeed, it was designed to use a number of building techniques and materials more advanced than those being currently employed by mass-production builders. But it is a long way from mass-producing a neighborhood.*2
  With growth of differentiated production in developing economies of the future, we may expect to find other changes in economic life. The average size of manufacturing enterprises will be smaller than at present. But the numbers of manufacturing enterprises will greatly increase and so will the total volume of manufactured goods. Most mass-production enterprises that have not been made obsolete by differentiated production—and many will remain—will have been transplanted to the countryside and into inert towns. There, with their low requirements of labor, their large requirements of space, and their relative self-sufficiency, these industries can operate more efficiently than in cities. Mass-production manufacturing will no longer be regarded as city work. Cities will manufacture even more goods than they do today, but these will be almost wholly differentiated production goods, made in relatively small, or very small, organizations.
  Manufacturing work will, I think, no longer be the chief activity around which other economic activities are organized, as it is today and as the work of merchants once was. Instead, services will become the predominant organizational work, the instigators of other economic activities, including manufacturing. For an obvious example, consider what has been happening in the case of office machines. The older sorts—typewriters, dictating machines, adding machines and so on—are bought simply as machines. If a service is also bought along with them, it is a minor appendage: maintenance checking and repair, brief instructions to users of the machines, a trade-in service when a new machine is bought to replace an old one. But some of the new kinds of office machines are not bought in this way. Rather, what is bought is first and foremost a service: the service of analyzing and programming the work of an office, such as billing, payroll preparation, and sales and inventory analyzing. The machines are bought as an appendage to accommodate the system prescribed by the analytical service. Sometimes the machines are not even bought. Instead, an office may buy services from a computer or data-processing center, and it will be the service organization that buys or leases the necessary machines. In either case, service work is the organizing activity for the other work, including the manufacturing of the machines.
  It is not likely that manufacturers of vehicles will organize the transportation of the future, as they do now, to a considerable extent. The organizing forces, rather, will be transportation services, including even the services of renting differentiated automobiles for different purposes to individual users. The manufacturing will be done specifically to meet needs of these various services. When I was conjecturing, in Chapter Three, how waste recycling systems might be organized in developing economies of the future, I suggested that services would be the key work in such industries, and that the service organizations would be customers for many kinds of waste-collecting equipment. This conjecture was based upon the logic of the work, but it corresponds to what I suspect is the coming trend in economic organization generally. Service organizations in developing economies of the future are likely to draw upon products made by many different manufacturers, and are likely to be larger than manufacturing organizations. Even so, they will begin as small businesses and expand as they add innovations.
  No doubt, to English-speaking people of the future, especially if they happen to live in developing and highly advanced economies, it will seem quaint that "service" carries a connotation of servants' work, and even quainter that these economically important and awesomely large organizations should, in many cases, have sprung from such menial work as cleaning, minor maintenance or chauffeuring. The case will seem, no doubt, as quaint as it seems to us that manufacturing arose upon servants' work, or that merchants originated from vagabonds and beggars who were even lowlier than the manorial servants of their time.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As suggested in Chapter Eight, the predominant methods of manufacturing change as an economy develops. So do the kinds of activities around which—and also by which—other economic activities are organized. Let us correlate these changes, and also relate them to the situation in currently highly developed economies:
  Our ordinary vocabulary does not take account of the differences between the nature of cities and the nature of other settlements; e.g., "town" and "city" are often used interchangeably, as if cities were larger towns. We do not need new words to express the differences, but rather a little more precision in the use of old words. I suggest the following:
  Metropolitan area—Economically, it means the same as "city." Politically, it means a city that has physically expanded beyond its formal boundaries, in the process engulfing former towns and, in some instances, coalescing with other, formerly separate, cities.
  Town—A settlement that does not generate its growth from its own local economy and has never done so. The occasional export a town may have generated for itself has produced no consistent self-generating growth thereafter.
  National economy—While its accepted meaning, the sum of a nation's production of goods and services, is useful, the connotation of an amorphous sum is not. Owing to Leontief's analyses, it is now becoming widely appreciated that a nation's production is composed of "output" items for ultimate consumers and of "input" items going into that production. However, we need to add the further understanding that changes within a national economy arise from changes within city economies. A national economy is the sum of a nation's city economies and the past and current secondary effects of city economies upon the economies of towns, villages, countrysides and wildernesses.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A national economy is the sum of a nation's city economies and the past and current secondary effects of city economies upon the economies of towns, villages, countrysides and wildernesses. So do the kinds of activities around which—and also by which—other economic activities are organized. Let us correlate these changes, and also relate them to the situation in currently highly developed economies:
  Our ordinary vocabulary does not take account of the differences between the nature of cities and the nature of other settlements; e.g., "town" and "city" are often used interchangeably, as if cities were larger towns. We do not need new words to express the differences, but rather a little more precision in the use of old words. I suggest the following:
  Metropolitan area—Economically, it means the same as "city." Politically, it means a city that has physically expanded beyond its formal boundaries, in the process engulfing former towns and, in some instances, coalescing with other, formerly separate, cities.
  Town—A settlement that does not generate its growth from its own local economy and has never done so. The occasional export a town may have generated for itself has produced no consistent self-generating growth thereafter.
  National economy—While its accepted meaning, the sum of a nation's production of goods and services, is useful, the connotation of an amorphous sum is not. Owing to Leontief's analyses, it is now becoming widely appreciated that a nation's production is composed of "output" items for ultimate consumers and of "input" items going into that production. However, we need to add the further understanding that changes within a national economy arise from changes within city economies.As suggested in Chapter Eight, the predominant methods of manufacturing change as an economy develops.