Here at the city limits, we call ourselves rural. Young families on small acreages, seniors on larger and older parcels, work the fertile muck to grow organic-ish food or keep a favourite nag in oats. They’ve raised oyster mushrooms and holly and chicken, lamb, and rabbit meat. Those on appropriately zoned land get farm perks – 50% off school and hospital taxes, for starters – if they make $2,500 a year from their land.

As in any vital environment, there is conflict. Next to the couple raising Finn sheep is the developer who’s taxed on 200 acres of rock and fir that she can’t subdivide or log. Down the lane lives the old-timer – family arrived on a square-rigger – who wants to activate his gravel pit. Beyond him, the Indian band imagines a waterfront casino. Next property, DND (Department of National Defence).

Sounds like a Rubik’s cube for Jane Jacobs, who at 84 has written her sixth book, The Nature of Economies. In 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities established her as an iconoclastic thinker and doer in the fields of urban planning and economics. She altered the way cities are perceived and planned – notably New York and Toronto – and continues to posit theories that appeal to both sides of the political barbed wire: “Get rid of government subsidies” pleases one side; “Think of the city as a complex ecosystem” tickles the other. Jacobs, though, rejects ideologies.

In 1992, in Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, she used made-up characters and Socratic dialogue to voice her views on governance and its untidy fit with economics. What emerged was a two-camp model of human society: we are either guardians or traders. When guardians act like traders, watch out. Practices such as ill-conceived government subsidies to farming and fishing will result and wipe out the traders. In The Nature of Economies, Jacobs argues that the fall of the Atlantic cod industry was due to government policy, which in 1976 said fishing would no longer be regulated by “biological factors,” but rather “in the interest of the people who depend on the fishing industry.” Government subsidized bigger boats and broader nets, while nature – the fish populations – said slow down, let us recover. The intervention caused what she calls an “economic vicious circle.” In nature, vicious circles are fatal to the organism.

The Nature of Economies is also in dialogue form and so “suited to expounding inquiry and developing argument.” If that sounds dull, it isn’t: this is an exciting book. Five smart and verbose friends debate Jacobs’ premise that economies are ruled by the same principles as nature. Jacobs believes “human beings exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect.” We are not “interlopers” as some misanthropic ecologists believe nor innately superior, in charge because we can reason. The didactic discussion, Jacobs hopes, will also invite an open-minded reader to dispute or agree but at least consider.

Jacobs’ debate is simplified for non-experts, some of the rhetoric only mildly academic. When definitions are tough or blurred, the Socratic form allows another character to summarize and paraphrase before moving on. Examples are clear, fun, and destabilizing: How might naturally occurring “voluntary birth control” be similar in its efficiency to farming and herding? Why, when a cat is given a house full of mice, will it eat three and then snooze, and how is human behaviour similar?

For Jacobs, creativity is crucial to problem solving and policy making. Creativity is not necessarily an ability to anticipate glitches – nature is too unpredictable for that – but to respond without simplistic regulations such as subsidies; to allow, instead, the organic generation of possible solutions.

I tried – as her generative form invites – to fit my community’s tangled interests into Jacobs’ vision of civil and moral economics based on nature’s models. (Her characters wouldn’t let me talk or ask questions. I felt like an English major out on a date with an MBA.) Yes, all the interest groups here constitute an ecosystem, and we are a healthier system if we compromise. But the interference of government – subdivision bylaws and farm tax subsidies and agricultural land reserves – are now a part of this ecology. They allow seniors to farm alongside single fathers, doctors to cut hay next door to recent immigrants. Without the subsidies, don’t land values go up and create a monoculture of the rich? Would Jacobs argue that such governance actually limits our growth? I want her character Hiram to tell me I’m wrong, Hortense to kindly suggest a better way for my neighbours, Armbruster to back me and then capitulate to the others.

The Nature of Economies is a playful, vigorous book, one that insists we see our working lives in a new way, as a web of relationships shared with other life forms. But dear Jane: Come for tea, I need to talk.