People are not interchangeable

A while ago I blogged a few blogs about Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. One of the key points she made in the book was that the organization of a vibrant city is very complex, with lots of functions depending on and resulting from one another. A city block that is thriving serves many different purposes for many different types of people, at different times of day and in different ways.

She frequently railed against city planners with their obsession for single-dimensional classification that would assume, among other things, that one store could be exchanged for another, that a person of a certain type could be exchanged for another, and that, in general, a city was no more than a set of twelve different types of LEGO and a few different types of LEGO people, and lots of cars.

Of course this is all wrong—it is much more complex than that.

And I think I had been in some state of believing that people were interchangeable, or at least more interchangeable than they actually are. There may also be some scale differences at play. Maybe at a very macro level, like if you’re the aliens coming for us, you can make some abstractions about people. But on the community level, that is unwise.

There are core individuals in the groups that I am a part of that would be changed irrevocably if they were lost. Not to say the groups would die out (though they might), but those people cannot be easily replaced. In friendships and in close working situations, one person cannot just be substituted for another. We are not pieces of machinery, to be plugged in where others fall out, no matter how much the HR department wants you to think so and wishes that were true. It’s not.