Import Replacing

Definition

City import replacing is Jane Jacobs's economic process — developed in The Economy of Cities (1969) and deployed diagnostically in Dark Age Ahead (2004) — "a process in which companies typically begin providing bits and pieces of producers' goods and services that were formerly imported. This process is led neither by export sales nor by sales to consumers. It is led only by perceived opportunity" (Jacobs 2004, p. 88). Its epistemological significance in the 2004 book is that it is invisible to orthodox economics: "Since such jobs don't fit into economists' preconceptions of how economies behave, they don't recognize these jobs as respectable evidence of economic expansion, and thus fail to recognize the process" (p. 88) — the case study being the 2002 Greater Toronto Area boom (460,000 net new jobs in half a year against 5,000 in the ten-times-larger U.S. economy) that Canada's chief economists could only attribute to a hollow "consumer-led" multiplier.

Jacobs's evidence for the 2002 episode is deliberately observational — the "unaverage clues" method of organized-complexity carried into economics: rising anecdotal reports of local purchasing by manufacturers; the gently rising Canadian dollar ("exactly what happens during significant city import replacing"); Statistics Canada's growth rankings (Vaughan fastest, Brampton second); the Vaughan factory parks' clusters of component-makers "cheek by jowl" supplying construction components; Brampton's factory-floor headquarters migration ("executives are now locating their headquarters as close as possible to the factory floor… With the executives come other jobs: in administration, research, engineering, design, and marketing, very good jobs, using high levels of skill… about ten thousand of Brampton's net new jobs are corporate headquarters jobs" — Dennis Cutajar, quoted p. 92); even the "Made in Canada" label turned up under a Brampton factory-building office chair (p. 94). The concept's diagnostic discipline is spatial: "to understand what is going on behind national statistics on jobs, one must know where the jobs are being added or lost. It never happens amorphously, in the country as a whole. Everything that happens in the world happens at some place" (p. 88). Its historical weight: "Between the mid-1950s and the early 1990s, Toronto did well on the whole, with several significant episodes of city import replacing during those forty years, which enhanced both its property tax base and its reservoirs of diverse exportable goods and services" (p. 117) — and its vanishing episodes (Vancouver's early-1990s boom, "lost to memory, like the episode… in the early 1990s," p. 98) are themselves cases of mass-amnesia.

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: The Economy of Cities (1969) as the theory's home; the 2004 diagnostic application; the opportunity-led mechanism (1969, 2004).
• Dennis Cutajar (not yet paged — see log) — Brampton's business development director, the episode's inside informant: the factory-floor headquarters migration and the furniture category's growth (2004, pp. 92–95).
• Jared Diamond (not yet paged — see log) — the counter-frame: biogeographic causes of city size and density as the enabling conditions import replacing presupposes.

Related Concepts

• scientific-state-of-mind — the methodological frame: the unrecognized boom as a case of paradigm-blindness ("economists' preconceptions"), evidence ignored because incongruent.
• organized-complexity — the epistemology: unaverage clues (a chair label, a rising currency, factory clusters) as the admissible evidence for a process economists' averages cannot see.
• postagrarian-society — the epochal frame: ingenuity-based production ("from commodity-based production to ingenuity-based production," p. 42) as what import-replacing episodes actually expand.
• subsidiarity — the governance frame: cities, not national aggregates, are the units where the process happens; municipal starvation (see fiscal-accountability) starves it.
• mass-amnesia — the risk run by unrecognized episodes: the Vancouver 1990s boom "slid by without being identified or studied" (p. 98).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the definition and opportunity-led mechanism (p. 88); the GTA 2002 episode and the economists' refusal (pp. 87–99); the Vaughan and Brampton fieldwork (pp. 89–101); the factory-floor headquarters trend and the office-tower vacancy implication (pp. 92–93); the Nortel converted-factory office and the Made-in-Canada chair (p. 94); the Vancouver episode lost to memory (p. 98); the guesses at American decline of the process (product standardization and production deficit, p. 198); cross-references to The Economy of Cities Ch. 5 and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (p. 198).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; the theory's home texts (The Economy of Cities 1969; Cities and the Wealth of Nations 1984) await their own ingests. See also Postmetropolis (Soja 2000), which discusses Jacobs's import-substitution as the synekism prototype.

Open Questions

• Soja's Postmetropolis reads Jacobs's import-substitution as the prototype of synekism (city-first economic development). Does the 2004 diagnostic application — episodes rare, unrecognized, and city-specific — strengthen or complicate that reading?
• The concept is an episodic theory (episodes begin, run, and wind down). What starts an episode, and what ends it? Jacobs's own guesses (standardized products, production deficits, capital imports) are flagged as "reasoned but undisciplined guesses… no substitute for the rigors of genuine scientific inquiry" (p. 99) — an open research program in her own terms.
• The Brampton headquarters migration implies a decentralization of corporate functions that downtown-office economics (the wiki's skyscraper-interior, interior-urbanism registers) has not absorbed. Is "the tenants that made possible the imposing skyscraper landscapes of the world's downtowns have begun finding other landscapes to populate" (p. 93) an urbanism claim hiding inside an economics book?