Urbane Renewalist
Jane Jacobs showed us how cities really work.
BY DWIGHT YOUNG
Author John O'Hara once wrote, after the death of
his friend George Gershwin, "I don't have to believe
that if I don't want to." That's pretty much how I
felt when I learned of Jane Jacobs' death in April.
In photos, she looks both motherly and zealous—like
someone who could spend the morning cheerily baking
cookies, then dash out to join a picket line or lead
a demonstration against something. She ran afoul of
the law once, at a public hearing on a proposed highway
that would have slashed across Lower Manhattan: Apparently
there was some sort of scuffle, a stenographic machine
was damaged, and Jacobs was arrested for inciting
a disturbance. The phrase is an apt description of
what she achieved with her landmark 1961 book, The
Death and Life of Great American Cities.
It's a book pregnant with Message, but its didacticism
is in a gentle vein. To support her premise that the
government-funded "revitalization" program known (with
unintended irony) as Urban Renewal is utterly wrong-headed,
Jacobs calmly shares her observations on how cities
work. In one chapter, for example, she asserts that
old buildings are good to have around because they
generally offer cheap rents and therefore provide
affordable incubator space for new businesses. The
opening sentence of this section is one that preservationists
have been clutching to their collective bosoms for
45 years now: "Cities need old buildings so badly
it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and
districts to grow without them." You go, Jane!
Reading Jacobs' commonsense pronouncements, you're
led to some simple but inescapable conclusions: A
city is a complex, finely tuned ecosystem with disparate
parts—buildings, streets, traffic, sidewalks,
gathering places, people—that are both intertwined
and interdependent. Start messing with things—by
replacing comfy old buildings with oversized new ones,
for instance, or reducing opportunities for chance
face-to-face encounters among neighbors and strangers,
or obliterating a human-scaled street grid in favor
of "superblocks," or legislating mixed uses
out of existence—and you risk destroying the
delicate balance that has been achieved over time.
And if that happens, you wind up with a place that
is dull at best, downright unlivable at worst.
The information and insight she offers are not exactly
startling, but nobody else had ever presented them
so compellingly. Before Jane Jacobs, most people seemed
willing to believe that planners and bureaucrats knew
what was best for us in matters of urban design. Jacobs
kicked that mindset to the curb, encouraging "ordinary"
folks to trust their own instincts about what makes
a place viable and appealing—and pointing out
that the emperor named Urban Renewal not only had
no clothes but was full of baloney as well. Her perspective
was refreshing in 1961 and still seems so today, which
explains why the book is still in print, still widely
read and quoted.
In 1968 Jacobs left New York for Toronto, where
she settled down without letting up. Proving that
she hadn't lost what used to be called the courage
of one's convictions, she published the last of her
several books, Dark Age Ahead (which drew pointed
parallels between modern-day Western civilization
and the collapsing Roman Empire), just two years ago,
when she was 87.
When I first picked up the book that made Jane Jacobs
famous—I think I was in graduate school—I pondered
the significance of the title. Why "Death and Life"?
Why not the other way round? Here's what I've come
to believe: Even at a time when several forces—not
only Urban Renewal but also interstate highway construction
and generalized shortsightedness in high places—seemed
bent on obliterating traditional urban centers and
putting up something else, she was fundamentally optimistic
about the future of cities (if not whole civilizations).
She never claimed to have all the answers, but she
insisted that we ask the right questions. She urged
us to see communities with clear eyes so that we could
appreciate what really makes them tick. Perhaps most
important, she encouraged us to believe that cities
can be lively, beautiful, supportive places to live
and work and play in—and we don't have to
destroy them in order to save them.
We should all hope to leave behind so great a legacy.
Read more from our July/August 2006 issue online, look for Preservation on
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