During the 1950s and ’60s, a federal program called “urban renewal” destroyed hundreds of African American neighborhoods, many of which were home to jazz, a music that flowed through the communities from home to street to club. The young kids learning to play would linger outside the clubs to hear the music, dreaming of the day they might participate. Major chunks of the jazz world—the Fillmore in San Francisco, the Hill District in Pittsburgh, and the South Side of Chicago, among them—were torn up by urban renewal, and the structure of home-street-club was destroyed. Jazz nearly disappeared in the United States, surviving by dint of becoming an academic subject in high schools and colleges, played in a few austere clubs in New York and other big cities. The fact that the music endured had much to do with Europe and Japan, which offered performance sites where musicians might hone their craft and earn a living. Japan is now the top consumer of jazz CDs and Tokyo a “must stop” on a jazz ensemble’s touring schedule.
Tobias von Shöenebeck, a tour guide in Berlin, applied this principle of ripple effects on August 3, 2003, while watching fellow citizens participate in a new fad called “flash mob,” which had apparently originated in New York two months earlier. At the Berlin event, the flash mob, called together by email and cell phone, gathered in front of the American embassy to pop bottles of champagne, toast Natasha, and disperse. Von Shöenebeck shook his head, and muttered, “This is just the sort of thing that happens when you forbid New York to smoke.”9 He was referring to the implementation in April 2003 of tough new laws outlawing smoking in New York City bars and restaurants. While few might have made the connection between New York’s smoking laws and the fads that catch on in Berlin, it is exactly the kind of idea to which I am referring.
This lesson of interconnectedness is as hard to learn as differential calculus or quantum mechanics. The principle is simple: we—that is to say, all people—live in an emotional ecosystem that attaches us to the environment, not just as our individual selves, but as beings caught in a single, universal net of consciousness anchored in small niches we call neighborhoods or hamlets or villages. Because of the interconnectedness of the net, if your place is destroyed today, I will feel it hereafter.
Though a simple principle, it is hard to learn because the effects of root shock immediately get caught up in everything else that’s going on in the world. As the message moves around the world, it is possible to think of many other explanations for an initial cause. Imagine how many factors, other than New York City’s smoking laws, helped create the Berlin flash mob. The idea that your hurt has an effect on my life requires us to believe in “action at a distance,” which makes the average scientist go rigid with skepticism.
The emergence of theories of complex systems, chaos theory among others, has helped us. We now understand the seemingly impossible proposition that the flapping wings of a butterfly in Beijing could affect the weather in New York.10 It is from that perspective that we must view the ecosystem of emotions. Root shock rips emotional connections in one part of the globe, and sets in motion small changes—jazz musicians in search of a venue, smokers acting out their annoyance—that spread out across the world, shifting the direction of all interpersonal connections. Imagine it as a version of six degrees of separation, the idea that each American is only six handshakes away from the president of the United States. We are each of us only thirteen handshakes away from anyone’s root shock—not much distance in a global world.
Where Are People Rooted?
Though I have already argued that people go into shock if uprooted, it is useful to consider: Where are people rooted? Before people moved to cities, this was a fairly straightforward question. They were rooted where they lived, and they lived where their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, had lived. Of course, this is more complicated than it seems, as armies swept back and forth across the continents, trade routes linked distant lands, tribes exhausted their lands and had to move to new pastures, and adventurers wandered the world. Yet for a long time in human history, people lived for generations in small places—a few miles in diameter—and that is where they were rooted.
Things got complicated when people started to move to cities. After all, cities are much more unstable—people will leave a neighborhood within months or years, rather than decades or centuries, and they live with a fairly high level of anonymity. A few will live in stable neighborhoods, like the urban villagers who inhabited Boston’s West End before it was destroyed by urban renewal.11 But most live in a city neighborhood much looser and less secure. So where are they rooted?
The renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs had a profound insight into this puzzle. She identified the way in which people made the mazeway in the urban setting, what she called the “sidewalk ballet.” In one of the passages fundamental to our current understanding of rootedness, she wrote:
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak . . . It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick-bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back to each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: All is well.12
The street, bordered by buildings, is the stage of the local world, Jacobs proposes to us, as she describes her entry onto the “scene.” She recounts the interactions she experiences daily, informing us through her interchange with Mr. Lofaro that she is part of this little spot and she knows its rules. “All is well,” she writes, letting us know how content she is to be a part of this small theater piece. This construction of theater and actors, all knowing their parts and performing them well, is what makes up the street ballet. It is another way of describing our ability to master and run the maze of life, the mazeway, the near environment within which we find food, shelter, safety, and companionship. We love the mazeway in which we are rooted, for it is not simply the buildings that make us safe and secure, but, more complexly, our knowledge of the “scene” that makes us so. We all have our little part to play, carefully synchronized with that of all the other players: we are rooted in that, our piece of the world-as-stage.
Try the following thought experiments.
First, imagine Jane Jacobs’s street altered in any way you like—change the size of the buildings and their use; reorganize the street—move the subway entrance, relocate the school—and then imagine people making use of it. If you look closely, a sidewalk ballet, albeit different from Jacobs’s version, will emerge before your eyes. In this thought experiment, you are observing the degree to which people can adapt to different settings, and not just adapt, but attach, connect. They are connecting not to the negatives or even the positives of the setting, but to their own mastery of the local players and their play.
Second, take any setting, and reduce it to shreds. The fundamental geographic points cuing the ballet are now gone. Center stage has disappeared. Jacobs’s entry is gone, and so are the stores and the stoop that made possible the three-year-old’s English lessons. For a long moment, the actors will be frozen in horror. As the horror recedes, confusion will set in. Where is food? Where is shelter? Should I still go to school? What
