Imitating serendipity

I just found a printout of Jesse Walker’s article about Jane Jacobs, Jacobean Tragedy: The gross misinterpretation of an intellectual icon. A paragraph on the page that was facing me caught my attention.

First, a little context:

One of [Jane Jacobs’s] most important insights, enunciated in The Economy of Cities, is the way new work grows out of old [my emphasis]: not by plan, as too many social engineers have assumed, and not by ever-finer division of labor, as Adam Smith asserted, but by serendipity [emphasis mine]. [Break long paragraph.]

First, work is divided into smaller tasks, à la Smith, and then someone discovers that one of those smaller processes has other uses. The old enterprise then reinvents itself, or else someone breaks away from it to start a new operation. In this way, a sand mining company (3M) began to develop new forms of adhesive tape; [and two more examples of this].

… Contrast that process with these words from business writer Paul Hawken’s 1993 book The Ecology of Commerce …: “[Talk about an industrial park where many companies of different types] work cooperatively together …. This synergy is remarkable because it happened “spontaneously,” without governmental regulation or law as the prime motivating factor, and because some of the relationships between outputs and inputs were serendipitous or unplanned at the outset.”

Here’s the kicker: “Imagine what a team of designers could come up with if the were to start from scratch, locating and specifying industries and factories that had potentially synergistic and symbiotic relationships.”

Here’s the paragraph:

Jacobs expects chance and entrepreneurship to produce progress. Hawken seems surprised when they do. Jacobs distrusts planners. Hawken, in this passage, does not. Of course, it makes sense to expect industries to imitate success, the serendipity of the past giving way to the deliberate design of the present. [My emphasis.]