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Lovely essay from 2006, Paul Goldberger on Jane Jacobs:
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Jacobs was never as eager as Mumford for acolytes, though she ended up with plenty of them, and she saw right through many of the things that were presented as consistent with her views. She didn’t even have much patience with the New Urbanists, whose philosophy of returning to pedestrian-oriented cities would seem to owe a lot to Jacobs. But she found the New Urbanists hopelessly suburban, and once said to me, with a rhyming cadence worthy of Muhammad Ali, “They only create what they say they hate.”
What Jane Jacobs really taught wasn’t that every place should look like Greenwich Village, but instead that we should look at places and figure out their essences, that we should try to understand what makes cities work organically and to think of them as natural systems that should be nurtured, not stymied. I think of her less as showing us a physical model for cities that we need to copy and more as providing a model for skepticism.
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It had to happen, of course...
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So it is with particular angst that many of these same planners [who learned from Jane Jacobs that they need to listen to the people] now are forced to reckon with the modern-day Jane Jacobs, at least in terms of tactics and a libertarian streak: the Tea Party.
Across the country, Tea Party activists have been storming planning meetings of all kinds, opposing various plans by local and regional government having anything to do with density, smart growth, sustainability or urbanism.
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What’s driving the rebellion is a view that government should have no role in planning or shaping the built environment that in any way interferes with private property rights.
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As one Florida Tea Party activist put it, "compact development aka smart growth, aka New Urbanism, aka Traditional Neighborhood Design, aka Transit Oriented Development, aka Livable Communities, aka Sustainable Development ... are all names meaning the same thing: they are anti-suburban, high-density dwelling design concepts that are part of the UN's Agenda 21 and will make single family home ownership for our posterity unattainable." Another summed it up this way: “We don’t want none of your smart growth communism."
Interesting: a crit of the web akin to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book?
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What the internet badly needed in its first two decades of existence, and what it needs still, is a book akin to Jane Jacob’s [sic] 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities which attacked the practices and attitudes of 1950s US urban planners and proved hugely influential. The structure of online space requires a similar critique.
The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.
The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square.
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Right on. Excellent critique.
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While Campanella says that we need a muscular government to accomplish such great things, he for the most part blames a citizenry that no longer shares values about the public realm that are necessary to support a bold course of government action. He attributes this to a sense of self-interest that he finds rooted in the various "cultural revolutions" that started with the civil rights movement.
It seems bizarre, at least to this reader, to blame America's failure to maintain and modernize its transportation systems, its schools, and every other aspect of the public realm (with the exception of sports stadiums!) on the social and cultural gains of minorities, women, gays, etc., when a much more obvious explanation is the fact that for 40 years America's economy and fiscal decisions have largely been in the hands of the intellectual, economic, political, and actual descendents of those who fought tooth and nail the New Deal that Campanella appropriately admires.
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Completely agree with Benjamin Hemric's critical comment (below), about Benjamin Schwarz's article (which in turn is a review of books by Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin and their collective take on Jane Jacobs.
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While I agree that there is much to criticize in Michael Sorkin's and Sharon Zukin's lamentations about gentrification, it's very disheartening to see that in his article, writer Benjamin Schwarz seems to accept the very same myths about Jane Jacobs that Sorkin and Zukin appear to subscribe to. I think that if one looks at what Jane Jacobs ACTUALLY WROTE (rather than accepting at face value what people "say" she wrote) one will quickly see the differences between Jacobs and Sorkin and Zukin -- and also see why Sorkin's and Zukin's critiques are so misguided.
It seems to me that the following, in order of appearance in the article, are the pernicious myths that Mr. Schwarz has, sadly, incorporated into his article:
1) Myth incorporating statement #1: "She [Jacobs] largely formed her conclusions in "Death and Life . ." . . by closely reading the neighborhood life around her house on Hudson Street . . . "
The name of Jacobs' first and most famous book is "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," NOT, "The Death and Life of Greater Greenwich Village." In it, Jacobs writes about many sections of New York City (e.g., East Harlem, W57th St., Rockefeller Center, Yorkville, etc.), AND about parts of a lot of other American cities too (e.g., the North End of Boston; Rittenhouse Square, Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the four Center City parks of Philadelphia; Back of the Yards, Chicago, etc.).
For a number of years prior to writing "Death and Life . . . ," Jacobs was a writer for a prestigious, glossy, national publication, "Architectural Forum," and she visited, researched (e.g., explored and interviewed government officials, etc.), and wrote about cities all over the country. Furthermore she herself credited experiences in Philadelphia and, especially East Harlem, with really opening her eyes to the
Roger Scruton at his curmudgeonly best, but I can't say but that I don't agree with quite a few of his insights...\n"Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return."\nHe includes an interesting parsing of Jane Jacobs's ideas in this article. Intriguing thoughts around the role of planning the notion of "side constraints."
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The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.
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The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours.
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Adam Greenfield, a design director at Nokia, wrote one of the defining texts on the design and use of ubiquitous computing or 'ubicomp' called "Everyware" and is about to release a follow-up on urban environments and technology called "The city is here for you to use". In a recent talk he framed a number of ways in which the access to data about your surroundings that Hill describes will change our attitude towards the city. He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a 'searchable, query-able' city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium.
He states:
The bottom-line is a city that responds to the behaviour of its users in something close to real-time, and in turn begins to shape that behaviour.
Again, we're not so far away from what Archigram were examining in the 60's. Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete.
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The city of the future increases its role as an actor in our lives, affecting our lives. This of course, is a recurrent theme in science-fiction and fantasy.
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Back in our world, the exaggerated mega-city is going through a bit of bad patch. The bling'd up ultraskyscraping and bespoke island-terraforming of Dubai is on hold until capitalism reboots, and changes in political fortune have nixed the futuristic, ubicomp'd-up Arup-designed ecotopia of Dongtan in China.
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I love David Byrne's music, but in this essay for the Wall Street Journal I think he somewhat over-reaches himself. Why? The essay is muddled. He includes too many contradictory pronouncements. For example, that big and dense is good, but that you need the "village" thing for safety & security; or that LA isn't dense (I believe it is, actually); or that lack of density creates narcissistic attention-getting ploys; or that "human scale" needs to be achieved through some process of "compromise" (left undefined), and so on. Furthermore, his closing sentence really confuses me: "My perfect city isn't fixed, it doesn't actually exist, and I like it that way." He likes that it doesn't exist? What does that mean?
Great review by Howard Husock of 2 new books about Jane Jacobs: Anthony Flint's Wrestling with Moses, and Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch's Genius of Common Sense.
Love this quote, which Husock provides, from Jacobs: “To approach a city or even a city neighborhood as if it were capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art is to make the mistake of substituting art for life.”
Why do I single this one out? Because it takes aim at the "aesthetes" who infest our midst (even in Victoria, BC, at the City council level and beyond).
A review of Anthony Flint's "How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City."
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Now there's a book that shows how these mythic characters shaped each other's work and reputations - a volume that leaves me wishing there was some way today to combine the best traits of both.
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Make no mistake, Jacobs is the hero of this yarn. But in the epilogue, Flint addresses our ever-changing urban dynamics, where Jacobs' quest for "thoughtful citizen involvement" has morphed into "all-powerful neighborhood residents, who seek conditions to stay exactly as they are and reward politicians who agree with them."
Which sounds a lot like San Francisco, Berkeley and every other city [Victoria!] where process is more important than results. All the protections we've put into place, such as environmental reports, become weapons that can be used to derail anything that anyone dislikes.
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Another article that underscores the need for (and uses of) "cross-use" (as defined by Jane Jacobs). The interesting difference/ twist here is that cross-use is created/ nourished through congestion-cutting strategies and transit infrastructure, as well as (get this!) broadband infrastructure (!).
So, interesting pointer: congestion as another barrier to cross-use. Something to think about.
And: think about taking broadband/ digital infrastructure into account when thinking about cross-use vs single-use. How to map the virtual onto the real/ actual? Hmmm....
Note: CEOs for Cities entry has further links.
Have only skimmed this so far, but worth going over in detail. Mehaffy focuses on Christopher Alexander's 1987 work, A New Theory of Urban Design, which was inspired by Jane Jacobs's 1961 work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities. Some of Alexander's ideas have been incorporated by the New Urbanists, and Mehaffy's article traces their "setbacks and shortcomings, and significant opportunities still remaining."
Nice synthesis by Richard Florida (written for his Globe & Mail column) of Jane Jacobs's approach to thinking about economies. Let's hope it makes more people read her 2000 book, The Nature of Economies.
- sounds similar to what I've said in a few articles (see the FOCUS Magazine article on Centennial Square, published March 2007 ("Private affairs in public spaces"), and on my wiki, too (re. importance of anonymity). I'm intrigued by the ref. to "seams" as per Jacobs. Must get the ripper and investigate... <div class="jk">!</div>
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Jacobs’s admirers, Dr. Klemek said, are equally vociferous: He noted a recent article in Time Out New York magazine that asked “What Would Jane Jacobs Do?” as if the urban theorist were a Christ-like figure.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, emphasized Jacobs’s appeal to people from different political positions. “It’s very striking about Jane Jacobs that such a wide range of views can be found in her writings that people along the entire political spectrum admire,” she said. “She relies on stories and anecdotes for much of what she says, and then it’s incumbent on the reader to try to figure out what the story says and what the story means.”
What emerges from her straightforward prose, she argued, is a deep respect for the principles of density and complexity in urban design. But those ideals can be misinterpreted, she suggested, if one receives priority over the other.
“In practice, she disapproved equally of self-isolating large development, like public housing for low-income people, and luxurious towers for high-income people,” she said, adding later, “She admired a certain kind of active integration, of people of different races, incomes, educational levels. She admired the presence of work in neighborhoods. She had a romantic attachment to manufacturing work and certain small enterprises — retail, commercial — on the street. She liked everything mixed up together.”
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Ms. Vitullo-Martin offered perhaps the most provocative argument of the evening: “If Jacobs were looking at New York today, she would regard the most serious self-isolating projects as the projects that are being developed by large powerful nonprofit institutions.” Universities like N.Y.U. and Columbia and hospitals like Sloan-Kettering and NewYork-Presbyterian are building huge developments that do not necessarily fit in well with the streetscape, she said.
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It seems to me that much of what I have read about her, and much of what I have heard said about her, ignores these crucial aspects of her thinking, perhaps out of a fear that they might add up to something truly dreadful -- conservativism.
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She wants to demonstrate that economic life, far from being superimposed on the natural world, is a part of nature.
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She developed the idea of smaller sovereignties in her recent book Dark Age Ahead. In it she explains how early medieval cities helped pull Europe out of the Dark Age because of subsidiarity, the principle that government works best when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses, and fiscal accountability, the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing money. Both of these principles have almost disappeared from the modern world. The separation of Quebec would be an excellent way to restore them, argued Jane Jacobs.
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Jane Jacobs is not terribly impressed by the blurring of national sovereignties and currencies in Europe. “I think it’s a mistake for all these Western European countries to blot out so many currencies in favor of who knows which one will win out, maybe Frankfurt. It will not favor all those countries. Europe had something really wonderful going for it with the different currencies. Look at all the development in Europe over so many centuries. They did get into those wars and pretty well ruined it. But they also had an awful lot of relationships which didn’t involve fighting each other, but involved learning from each other, and building on each others’ successes.”
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The shelves of her study were not filled with books about economics or cities, but with writings on chaos theory and the sciences, subjects which stimulated her own thinking.
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“I think I’m living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect; things are connected by webs.
“This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven’t understood before. I think it’s very exciting.”
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what most people will remember about Jane Jacobs is the way she thought about issues. Largely self-educated, she was an acute observer of the complexity of life. She loved to walk the streets, storing information and insights in her prodigious brain, facts and incidents that she would then analyze, seeking patterns to explain why some neighbourhoods flourished and others declined.
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loathed the modern tendency to credentialism,
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She had a lot of good things to say about the city of Vancouver, praising the high-density residential downtown and the fact the area was designed so people could get around on foot.
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