I dug out this quote from Jane Jacobs yesterday for a comment I made on Dave Pollard’s “How to save the world” site. I was then going to use it in a much longer post I was going to write, but thought, “sod she says it better than me”. So here it is:
“In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal orientated, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along. For one thing, unforeseeable problems arise. The people who developed agriculture couldn’t foresee soil depletion. The people who developed the automobile couldn’t foresee acid rain. Earlier I defined economic development as a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible. We might amplify this by calling development an improvisational drift into unprecedented kinds of work that that carry unprecedented problems, then drifting into improvised solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems …”
(Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, Pelican Books, 1986, pp221-222)