Jane Jacobs, RIP

I dabbled in urban history for a number of years (1976-1986?) in my survey courses at the Collegium Excellens. Jane Jacobs exerted tremendous influence on the field of urban studies. In fact, give me Jane Jacobs over Lewis Mumford anytime. If this is (fair & balanced) urban wisdom, so be it.

[x Financial Times]
Jane Jacobs: Leading voice of the city
By Jeff Pruzan

Jane Jacobs, a giant among urban critics and enthusiasts who died on Tuesday aged 89, spent her entire career fighting for one deceptively simple principle: leave the cities alone and let them develop by themselves.

In many ways, Jacobs's tireless fight for the organic, spontaneous city - for wide sidewalks, old buildings, a mix of businesses, semi-supervised children at play, and trees - was ahead of its time.

But in retrospect, Jacobs's message initally surfaced as a final warning, nearly coinciding with the dawn of government-sponsored neighbourhood-razing and cement-pouring. Today, her first and most important book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), reads as a tragedy of sorts: Jacobs's countless suggestions about preserving street life were ultimately ignored. Numerous cities cited in her study - Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit - still wear the excesses of ill-advised renewal spending. The Back-of-the-Yards neighbourhood on Chicago's south side earned Jacobs's praise as poor but vital; today, it scarcely exists.

Jacobs's pleas may have been muffled by her circumstances. Born May 4 1916 in hardscrabble Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jane Butzner moved to New York City during the Depression and began a career in journalism, writing in a spectrum of publications, from The New York Herald Tribune to Vogue. During the second world war, Jacobs worked at the Office of War Information, where she met her future husband, Robert Jacobs.

Her career began to accelerate in the 1950s, when the mother of three held a writing and editing job at Architectural Forum. This job provided her only paper credential as she began compiling her observations about what made her Greenwich Village neighbourhood so lively, exciting and self-possessed - a project that eventually became Death and Life. She would publish seven books during her lifetime, most recently Dark Age Ahead (2004).

In clear, direct prose, Jacobs extolled the virtues of the local bar; the mom-and-pop shopkeeper who looks after the vacationing family's keys; short city blocks that create more street corners; and older, “mixed-use” buildings. Even the neighbourhood snoop plays an essential role in Jacobs's dream cities.

Jacobs also scolded an emerging urban trend: governments corralling the poor into brightly-lit, cheap high-rise housing; the old buildings in poor neighbourhoods should not be torn down, she said.

This was not what most developers and planners wanted to hear. Jacobs quickly suffered withering, smirking critiques from social experts. Lewis Mumford's 1962 dismissal of her observations appeared in the New Yorker beneath the condescending title “Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer”.

Meanwhile, state, federal and local governments carried on, building sky-high housing projects for the poor, threading expressways through once-vital neighbourhoods, and throwing money at “renewal” projects - from prematurely shabby pedestrian malls to empty, pointless convention centres - that only hastened decline. (Her memorable phrase for such spending was “cataclysmic money.")

The 1960s prodded Jacobs away from her writing desk and into the street, where she agitated on behalf of New York neighbourhoods. She famously helped prevent Robert Moses, New York's legendary developer king, from putting a new motorway through Manhattan's SoHo neighbourhood, then a decaying warehouse area but today one of Manhattan's most popular shopping, restaurant and gallery districts.

At the time, the Vietnam war was raging, and Jacobs found herself with another problem on her hands: a conflict she and her husband opposed, and teenage sons approaching draft age. In 1968 the family moved out of harm's way to Toronto. Jacobs would stay there permanently; by the time of her death, she was one of Toronto's most celebrated immigrants. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974.

Only recently has American city planning caught up with Jacobs's laissez-faire prescriptions for keeping cities thriving.

Today's US city centres enjoy renewed street-life and energy, thanks in part to fashionability among young professionals with money, and in part to the wisdom learned from past planning mistakes. Meanwhile, Jacobs's perfect American city proved to be just over the border in Canada.

Jeff Pruzan is an editor on the Financial Times's Americas desk.

Copyright © 2006 Financial Times

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