In this fascinating piece, Richard Florida puts forward very concrete discourses of Jane Jacobs about cities and our neighbourhoods acridly mentioned in her old book Dark Age Ahead. The author claims that even if the book was published in 2005, the book ''today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump''. In the book, Jacobs specifically draws attention to the ''mass amnesia'' and Florida writes in one sentence: 

Jacobs finds the answer in the rise of ''mass amnesia.'' The notion of a widespread, ''permanent and profound'' society-wide loss of memory, which seemed so strange and out of place when she wrote the book, seems suddenly all too real in a world of Trump and Brexit—a world where every new outrage quickly leads to another, where facts have no meaning.

Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. ''Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigour,'' as ''self-imposed isolation'' leads to ''a fortress mentality,'' she writes.

Read the article in 5-min, and comprehend the five pillars of Dark Age Descent. Jane Jacob's latest book The Life of Jane Jacobs is among Top 10 Architecture Books of 2016.

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At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age......Continue Reading

Top image: Jane Jacobs outside her Toronto home in 1968. Image by Frank Lennon/Getty Images

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