Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA
Policy
Open Access
Type
Polemic
Section
CRITICISM
We are honored to receive, and proudly publish, Tom Fisher’s acceptance speech for his 2025 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion award. [MS]
ABSTRACT - The political and social disruptions that often follow pandemics have accelerated many countries, including the United States, toward what Jane Jacobs described in her last book, entitled Dark Age Ahead (2004). This essay looks at Jacobs’ description of the characteristics of cultures that fall into a dark age and how we can see signs of them arising around the world today. Following that analysis, this essay explores what Jacobs calls the “five pillars” that stand against such cultural collapse and how the architecture and design community can help reinforce those pillars.
We are living in perilous times in the United States, with democracy under threat by the very people supposed to protect and defend it. And we have never needed the courage to speak truth to power more than now, using the protections that tenure or professional licensure provide to speak up against the abuse of authority. So, what can we do to respond to the authoritarianism that has arisen around the world, terrifying people, deporting immigrants, intimidating institutions, and threatening the very existence of nations?
PANDEMIC POLITICS
We perhaps should not have been surprised by this political extremism. In a book that I published in 2022 on the effect that pandemics have on human societies, I wrote about how a deadly and disruptive disease of bodies can sometimes metastasize, metaphorically, into a disease of the body politic.1 At the same time, pandemics have recurring and entirely predictable effects, such as rising inflation, because of the disruptions of supply and demand that they bring; workforce shortages, because of the number of casualties that they cause; growing inequalities, because of the unequal impacts that these disruptions have, and political polarization, because of the anger and division that the other factors inflame.
Pandemics have prompted significant change to higher education as well, often forcing it to become more affordable and accessible. The 1854 cholera pandemic, for example, helped build support for the 1862 Morrill Act, which established the American land-grant universities with the “mechanical arts” such as civil engineering that could improve the inadequate waste and water infrastructure that had caused the pandemic.2 And the 1918 influenza pandemic helped prompt the establishment of the American Association of Junior Colleges in 1920 and the growth of community colleges as a form of socially distanced higher education, without the congregate living conditions that made so many college-age youth sick during that pandemic.3
Pandemics also serve as accelerants, pushing marginal ideas and movements to become more dominant and exacerbating the inequities and dysfunctions that exist in societies. We saw this acceleration of digital adoption as well as digital inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in human history, we realized that if we had a computer or smart phone and an internet connection – something that too many families lacked – we could have almost any good or service delivered to either our door or our device. This has profound implications for the architectural and planning professions, which create the places that people have traditionally occupied to conduct their daily activities, going to offices to work, stores to shop, and schools to learn. Now, many people – but, of course, not all – have a choice about whether to do such things in person or remotely, which raises the bar on the quality of the built environment now that it has to compete with the digital environment for people’s time and attention.
The COVID-19 pandemic will likely have equally profound implications for higher education. As Zoom has become a regular part of how we teach and interact with colleagues, it has raised disruptive questions such as: Who are our faculty when we can zoom in almost anyone from around the world? Who are our students when we can have hundreds zoom into our lectures? And who needs to go to campus or the library when so much of what exists there can now be accessed from wherever we are? Such questions suggest that we need to speak truth to our own institutional power and to traditional practices that have made higher education unaffordable and inaccessible to too many people.
DARK AGE AHEAD
So, as we assess the implications of these hyper-political, post-pandemic times, we might turn to one of the greatest tellers of truth in the face of power: Jane Jacobs. Many are familiar with her first, ground-breaking book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which provided a compelling argument against the reductionist views of modern architecture and urbanism and the discriminatory practices of city planners and policy makers who were then in power.4 She has come under her share of criticism, such as the recent cover story in The Atlantic by Yoni Appelbaum accusing Jacobs of prompting gentrification and the lack of affordable housing.5 A fuller reading of her work, however, shows not only how much that criticism misses the mark, but also how much her work anticipated what we are now experiencing.
Her last and less-well-known book, Dark Age Ahead speaks to the particular way in which power operates in these perilous times.6 In that book, she looks at the recurring patterns of cultures that have fallen into a dark age, from Europe after the fall of Ancient Rome to China in the 1400s. Those patterns include: cultural xenophobia that trades on a fear of others, a fortress mentality that seeks to close borders, a self-imposed isolation that puts up trade barriers, mass amnesia that seems hostile to fact-based knowledge, extreme inequality that often favor the super-rich, leadership cults that prioritize loyalty to a personality, and ideological thinking that offers prefabricated answers to every problem.
Jacobs wrote this book in 2004 and much of her commentary focused on worrisome trends that she saw happening in Canada at the time. But Jacobs described, with characteristic clarity, the very challenges that we now face. As she wrote near the end of the book, “societies … that were great cultural winners in the past are in special peril of failing…Formerly vigorous cultures typically fall prey to the arrogant self-deception for which the Greeks had a word: hubris.” 7 We can see such arrogant self-deception coming from the federal government in the US right now, and to avoid falling prey to it, we need to see Jacobs’ book about the dark ages as a cautionary tale and a call-to-action for those of us who have the self-awareness and the power to steer us away from this danger. “A society must be self-aware,” Jacobs wrote. “Any culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity become weak and hollow.” 8 To prevent that, Jacobs – always one to use an architectural metaphor – focused in the book on “five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm…(against) ominous signs of their decay.” 9
Figure 1.
1
Dark Age Ahead, the last book that Jane Jacobs wrote in 2004, offers insights into how to address the rising authoritarianism around the world and what communities – including the architecture and design community – can do to fight the cultural collapse of the dark age ahead.
FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
The first pillar involves supporting families and communities, a hyper-local response to the chaos of the nation-state. Jacobs was especially critical of our housing system, which, as she said, had made “families rigged to fail.” 10 To address that failure, she argued that we need to focus not just on the cost, quality, and availability of housing, but also on building stronger communities that offer families tangible resources such as schools, libraries, and parks; informal resources such as cultural opportunities and community events; and intangible resources such as knowing our neighbors and acknowledging passers-by. Jacobs saw this “public poverty” as the result of the “deliberately imposed policies…(of) neoconservatism” with its “moralistic belief that each public service or amenity should directly earn enough to support its cost.” 11
Design has a role to play here, to help communities build on their assets and see how they can leverage those assets in new and better ways. Jacobs explored in her book, The Nature of Economies (2001), the idea of local economies as ecosystems that we need to cultivate.12 In a pilot project underway in Crookston, Minnesota, we have begun to cultivate such an ecosystem with a “community loyalty rewards” program in which people will be compensated for volunteerism with credits that they can use in local businesses, expanding people’s purchasing power, increasing public and non-profit capacity, and absorbing the excess capacity of private-sector merchants.13
Jacobs’ focus on families also suggests how we might respond to the negative impacts of federal actions. Jacobs was no fan of large-scale federal programs, be they federally funded highways that cut through already underserved communities, federally subsidized urban renewal efforts that demolished a lot of affordable housing, federally supported public housing that concentrated poverty in parts of cities, and federally blessed redlining policies that stifled the generational accumulation of wealth in communities of color. At a time when the US government is once again imposing its agenda on localities, community solidarity offers a bulwark against such actions.
When Robert Moses wanted to use mostly federal money to route the Lower Manhattan Expressway through SoHo, Jacobs organized the local community, who refused to stop their protests until Moses relented. The time for such resistance has returned. So too has the time come to ween ourselves off of federal money. One of our powers lies in refusing to participate in federal government work or to pursue federal contracts, be they for architectural projects or academic research. The use of federal funds to punish us only works if we need those funds, and our refusal to be manipulated in this way may be among our greatest weapons.
A non-profit that we launched a few years ago out of my center, Settled, focuses on the needs of people experiencing homelessness and uses a federal law – the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act – to enable faith communities to build tiny home communities on the land they own, even if it violates local zoning laws.14 At the same time, Settled’s executive director, Gabrielle Clowdus, does not pursue nor would she accept federal funds, in part because of its affiliation with religious organizations, but also in part because she does not want the strings that come attached with such funds nor the fear that can come from losing them.
EDUCATION VERSUS CREDENTIALING
Jacobs’ second pillar involves higher education. She argued that “credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.” 15 Jacobs tied that to her own experience growing up during the Great Depression, and the fear of unemployment that, she claimed, led to credentialing “as a growth industry in the 1960’s…(that eventually) dominated Education.” 16 But now, as we face an increasingly dark future, she argued that education has never been more important. “A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding.” 17
Jacobs’ own career reinforced that point. As a liberally educated person, she learned journalism on the job and wrote about architecture and planning, economics and ethics, without academic credentials in any of those areas, and yet she made ground-breaking contributions to them all. And given the post-pandemic pressure on higher education to become more accessible and affordable, Jacobs’ career offers an instructive example of what a re-focus on education might mean. It is an example especially relevant to architectural education, which faces challenges from those who see a degree from an accredited architecture program as either a discriminatory barrier for disadvantaged students or as a regulatory barrier against free-market competition. Jacobs would have likely argued that we are focused on the wrong thing – the credential – rather than on the education needed to become an architect, which could be delivered in a variety of ways and in a number of forms.
A growing national conversation has arisen around this idea. A recently published book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter—and What Really Does (2025), by Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, proposes a mass-customization, on-demand approach to higher education that would connect students to those who they aspire to become and would then co-create with them the mix of courses and experiences that would enable them to get there.18 This would empower students to design their own education in ways that makes sense and that works for them. And it would disempower those in the US government wanting to punish universities, by making higher education more like the internet, existing everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
METROPOLITAN ECONOMIES
Jacobs’ third pillar against the darkness ahead involves economics. In her book, The Economy of Cities (1969), she argued that city-based regions are the true sources of innovation and the appropriate scale at which we should compete in a global economy, through a process that she called “import replacement.” 19 And in her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), she extended that argument to show how the focus on national economies have created “faulty feedback loops” for cities, distorting the ability of local economies to respond and innovate.20 Jacobs’ idea of city-based economies, with research universities central to their competitiveness, challenged both capitalist and communist orthodoxy as well as the assumptions of most economists “that nations are the salient entities for understanding the structure of economic life.” 21
At the same time, her focus on local and regional economies seems well suited to the scale of architecture and education, which occurs in particular places, according to the requirements of communities or regulations of the cities in which we work. Her economic ideas also reveal something about architecture that we rarely consider: that every building is, to some extent, a form of import replacement, creating something new locally, based on what others have done elsewhere, that might work even better. Jacobs posits two principles in her book of direct relevance to architecture and education. The first is “subsidiarity (which) is the principle that government works best … when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.” 22
The second is “fiscal accountability (which) is…that institutions … work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.” 23
Subsidiarity not only reinforces Jacobs’ argument that the proper scale of an economy is that of cities; it also shows the importance of disciplines such as ours, which works for particular clients and communities, closest to the people we serve and the needs we address. As such, architecture can serve as a counter, subsidiary force to neoconservatism to the extent to which our work enriches rather than impoverishes the public realm. In terms of fiscal accountability, Jacobs wrote that “Virtually all idealogues…are fearful and insecure…(and) every society contains such people. But they can exert considerable power only when they control public purse strings…not subject to…fiscal accountability.” 24 We have seen this play out in the US, where an unelected and unaccountable private entity has seized control of the public purse strings. What might we do in the face of such corruption? Transparency: using our visualization skills to show people what is going on and to turn the tables on these idealogues, making them, once again, fearful and insecure.
Another non-profit we launched out of our center, Envision Community, showed what transparency can achieve.25 Envision, led by an oral-facial surgeon, Dr. Bill Walsh, seeks to create respite housing for indigent patients discharged from hospitals, with no place to go except back on the streets, where they can become reinjured and in need of hospitalization again. We realized that to get Medicaid to pay for respite housing, we needed to visualize the flow of money and true cost to the health system of not having such housing, which ultimately convinced Medicaid to change its policies in order to provide the necessary funding. As Jacobs said, transparency leads to fiscal accountability.
ETHICAL GOVERNANCE
Jacobs’ fourth pillar involves ethical governance, and her analysis of how governments can go awry explains a lot about the dystopian directives of authoritarian rulers. In Jacobs’ 1992 book, Systems of Survival. A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, she wrote about two “moral syndromes” – the commercial and the guardian.26 The commercial syndrome, she said, focuses on honesty, competence, inventiveness, industriousness, thriftiness, and optimism, among other characteristics, while the guardian syndrome prioritizes obedience, loyalty, vengeance, ostentatiousness, exclusivity, and fatalism, among others. Jacobs goes on to describe what she calls “monstrous hybrids” such as the Mafia, which “practices commerce in accord with guardian precepts…for self-aggrandizement…unfettered by law or even decent humanity.” 27 We now see what can happen when nations suffer under a Mafia-like leader, in which the commercial and guardian syndromes become hopelessly entangled and ostentatious self-aggrandizement becomes the norm.
Jacobs distinguished such monstrous hybrids from what she called the moral “anomalies” of professions, which, when “in government, works under the guardian syndrome, but in private practice under the commercial syndrome.” 28 Good professionals, she adds, “understand the distinction,” while those who don’t and who take bribes or cozy up to autocrats “make people distrust and hate” us.29 And so our greatest weapon against monstrous hybrids may be our adherence to the rule of law and to basic human decency, even when threatened or punished by autocrats. In the three books that I have written about architectural ethics, one lesson from them seems clear: the privilege and protection that tenure and licensure give us as educators and practitioners comes with responsibilities.30 We have an obligation to call out unvirtuous and amoral behavior that violates contractual agreements and tramples on the social contract. And we have an obligation to do what is right, regardless of the negative consequences to ourselves, and to address the negative consequences of our actions on others, regardless of our good intentions.
PROFESSIONAL SELF-POLICING
Her fifth and final pillar deals directly with the professions, and she uses the architectural profession as an example. In the book, she makes a key distinction between self-regulation, which involves activities aimed at the profession’s self-interests such as attending conferences or joining professional organizations, and self-policing, which entails combating fraud or other misbehavior of its members such as the proscriptions in our codes of ethics.31 While the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Code of Ethics largely focuses on architectural practice, Jacobs has somethings larger in mind: our obligations to the societies and cultures within which we work. Self-policing is particularly important in a field like architecture, whose practitioners have a history of serving dictatorial regimes. Presidential executive orders in the US, for example, have called for making classical architecture the favored style of public buildings and will no doubt tempt some in our midst to enable such directives, as Albert Speer did for Adolph Hitler and Anca Petrescu did for Nicolai Ceausescu.32 But the threat we face now extends far beyond style. Issues central to our discipline - inequality, sustainability, affordability, and accessibility – run counter to the concentration of power in the US presidency.
Healthy economies also depend, Jacobs argued, on how well they nurture diversity, while unhealthy ones engage in what she called “the self-destruction of diversity.” 33 Were she alive today, Jacobs might see that self-destructive behavior as the result of what she saw happening in American streets, where we prioritized the movement of vehicles over the interactions of people and lost the ability to trust each other. As she said, “The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts…the absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street.” 34 It is also a disaster to a country’s politics, where so many people have so retreated from city sidewalks to their own automotive and social-media bubbles that distrust of others has become the norm. Near the end of her first book, Jacobs reminded us that “Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat (these) difficulties.” 35
And that innate ability is what we need to lean into today. The way to nurture diversity and enhance the economy, Jacobs would say, is to take back our streets, to make them about the interactions of people rather than the movement of vehicles and to rebuild the trust among others, face-to-face, on public sidewalks, that we have lost. Jacobs also argued that professionals have an obligation to police ourselves. While Jacobs recognized that such self-policing “is touchier and more problematic than self-regulation,” she also reminded us that “there is no quicker way for a profession to lose public respect than to cover up, institutionally, for members who have done arrant wrong.” 36 We must call out those in our ranks who enable those who abuse of their power and we must never let others forget what they have done.
Such self-policing sometimes comes at a price. When I was the editorial director of Progressive Architecture (P/A) magazine, we published a number of cover stories that self-policed the profession, ranging from practitioners who did not pay interns to practices that created hostile work environments for women to the management of the AIA which, at the time, had not disclosed its deficits to its members.37 That last story led a few months later to a hostile takeover and shuttering of P/A, despite its being a very profitable publication, in part to shut us up. So, while speaking the truth to power can have negative results personally, it can also be empowering, professionally, as a result. While jobs come and go, all we really have as professionals is our integrity and the respect of others for doing what is right, regardless of the consequences.
THE EXAMPLE WE SET
Jane Jacobs offered one last lesson of particular relevance to our times. She wrote near the end of Dark Age Ahead, “the true power of a successful culture resides in its example.” 38 And she offered an example, in her own life, of how – if all else fails and we cannot stop the disease of our body politic – we do have the option that Jane took: relocating. She moved from New York City to Toronto in protest of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and to protect her two sons from being called up for that illegal war, and she never looked back.
So let us see everything that we do now in terms of the example that we are setting, not just for our students and for the communities we serve, but also for those who come after us and look back at what we do now. Will they wonder why we did not use the power that we have to prevent our culture from falling into a dark age? Or will they wonder at the courage we had to avoid such a fate by standing up to the monstrous hybrids in our midst? The choice is ours and it is a choice that we need to make – now – if we want to have an opportunity to make that choice, ever again, in the future.
Notes
1
Thomas Fisher, Space, Structures and Design in a Post-Pandemic World (Routledge, 2022).
2
Nathan M. Sorber, Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education (Cornell University Press, 2018).
3
Glenn Ricketts, “Community Colleges: A Brief History,” National Association of Scholars – https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/community_colleges_a_brief_history, accessed March 30, 2025.
4
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1961).
5
Yoni Applebaum, “Stuck in Place. How Progressives Froze the American Dream,” The Atlantic (March 2025).
6
Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004).
7
Ibid., 175.
8
Ibid., 176.
9
Ibid., 24.
10
Ibid., 27.
11
Ibid., 113–14.
12
Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies (Knopf Doubleday, 2001).
13
Thomas Fisher and Joel Hodroff, “From Money-Centered to People- and Planet-Centered Ledger Economics: Leveraging the Hidden Wealth of Underutilized Productive Capacity,” in Investment Strategies in Emerging New Trends in Finance, eds. Reza Gharoie Ahangar and Asma Salman (IntechOpen, 2021) – https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/75019, accessed March 30, 2025.
14
https://www.settled.org/, accessed March 30, 2025.
15
Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 44.
16
Ibid., 47.
17
Ibid., 63.
18
Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter – and What Really Does (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).
19
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Vintage, 1969).
20
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (Vintage, 1984).
21
Ibid., 31.
22
Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 103.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 115.
25
https://www.envisioncommunitymn.org/, accessed March 30, 2025.
26
Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival. A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce
and Politics (Random House, 1991).
27
Ibid., 95-97.
28
Ibid., 112.
29
Ibid., 115.
30
Thomas Fisher, Architectural Design and Ethics. Tools for Survival (Routledge, 2008);
Ethics for Architects. 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); The Architecture of Ethics (Routledge, 2018).
31
Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 126.
32
Donald Trump, “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”
(White House, December 18, 2020).
33
Jacobs, Death and Life, 241.
34
Ibid., 56.
35
Ibid., 447.
36
Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 129.
37
Michael Crosbie, “AIA: Worth the Price of Admission?” Progressive Architecture (April 1994).
38
Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 176.
Thomas Fisher is the former Editorial Director of Progressive Architecture magazine, the former Dean of the College of Design, and a Professor and the Director of the University of Minnesota’s Design Center. He has written twelve books, over eighty book chapters, and over 640 articles in various publications over the last forty years. He was awarded the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 2025. E-mail: tfisher@umn.edu
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Print Publication Date
June, 2025
Electronic Publication Date
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
