A plan for the future city states

This is a book Review of “Dark Age Ahead,” by Jane Jacobs

Jacobs defines a “Dark Age” primarily as a great forgetting: Society loses the skills and culture known to one’s forbears in a widespread way.
She follows Henri Pirenne in naming the key point where Europe’s decline turns into a Dark Age as being when Mediterranean trade ended with the Muslim conquests–but the forgetting had been going on for years. Roman craftsmen in the 3rd century could not make items that their forebears could make in 0 AD, and by the fifth century, cities and culture were in noticeable decline under an autocratic state which allowed very little economic freedom. This state, with its remains of a much higher Roman and Greek culture, impressed the barbarians on its borders greatly, but it was a shell of what it had once been.

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