Jane Jacobs, Urban Realist, 1916-2006

Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) has died at the age of 89.  The New York Times obituary can be found here, Inga Saffron's obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer is here, her short note for Skyline Online is here.  Another roundup of thoughts about Jane Jacobs can be read here.

I'll try to write up my own thoughts soon, but the best recommendation is to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which will tell you far more than I will be able to.

Update: this is what I came up with in the last hour--I apologize for the quality, but I wanted to get it posted quickly.

Jane Jacobs celebrated the function of urban neighborhoods, rather than the triumph of urban planning, which was at odds with the optimism and faith in science and technology of a rapidly suburbanizing post-WWII America. I first encountered The Death and Life of Great American Cities while working as a research historian for a museum exhibition on the history of Boston’s West End. I was struck by the two very different and competing visions of the West End in the 1950s which began to emerge from my research. Boston’s business community, politicians, and urban planners saw the West End as a decrepit and obsolete area of the city, crowded, with old housing stock and narrow streets. The availability of federal money for slum clearance after 1949 seemed to solve two problems: how to rid Boston of a “cancer,” as one business leader called the West End, and also how to stem Boston's post- war population decline through the creation of new housing like Charles River Park. On the other hand, West End residents experienced their neighborhood as a satisfying way of life which demographic details couldn’t capture and were willing to tolerate less than modern conveniences in order to retain long established social networks.

This fundamental difference in perception informs the heart of Jane Jacobs’ work. She wasn’t the only one to see this disconnect: sociologist Herbert Gans wrote a book, The Urban Villagers (1962), about his experience living in the West End in the mid-1950s and Jacobs cites some of his early conclusions in her own work. But Jacobs was the first person to bring a broader perspective and to write in the language of the layperson—The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a polemic designed for people, not scholars.

The work of Jane Jacobs led me to explore the organic nature of urban neighborhoods created out of a diversity of people, uses, and building styles. In part, her observations about the function of neighborhoods help explain why large scale housing projects often fail—neighborhoods placed on cleared land can only hope to emulate a way of life that takes years to evolve. It was the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods and the blind faith in professional planning Jacobs fought against, lending an eloquent voice which rose above the sounds of wrecking balls.

While her conclusions have sometimes been carried to absurd lengths, her four conditions for a thriving urban neighborhood still hold true (pardon my paraphrasing): 

1. Neighborhoods must serve more than one primary function to “insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules”
2. “Most blocks must be short, that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.”
3. The district “must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition”.
4. “There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.”

 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pp. 150-151

Chris Cagle on why Jane Jacobs still matters and here as well.  John Keith has a short post with some good links.

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I originally posted this as a comment over on John Keith's site but think it is worthy of adding here.  Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a very strange criticism of Jane Jacobs in the New York Times (it is in the NYT pay archive now, so no bother linking) and the following is my response.  I think you can get the gist of his essay from it:

I think Nicolai Ouroussoff has constructed a strawman here. First, people have moved on since Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I don’t know anyone who has an “obsessive belief that Ms. Jacobs held the answer to every evil that faces the contemporary city” and since Ouroussoff doesn’t name anyone that does, or any school that teaches that she did, I doubt he does either. But that doesn’t make a very good contrarian argument then does it?

The lasting impact from a planning perspective has been the attempt to include a better understanding of how people inhabit spaces rather than taking an architectural deteminist approach which says that design can cause certain types of human behavior and to think more about the scale and scope of urban projects, which can be dehumanizing if done on a large scale.

Second, criticizing the new urbanists for their devotion to Jacob’s ideals is an easy target however it is important to note that new urbanist projects aren’t being dropped down into urban cores. Jacob’s book was about cities and urban life, not suburbs, not exurbs, not towns or villages, and certainly not about developments created on empty land. My blog post on Jacobs talked about the importance of the accretion of details over a number of years and decades in forming a rich urban environment.

Third, taking Jacobs to task for not having a solution to sprawl or automobile dependency is silly. Someone else has to answer for sprawl and car culture. Jacobs was all about the business of saving cities and by changing the dynamic of the debate over the future of urban America, succeeded in her quest. Isn’t that enough for one life?

 

 

Comments

[HiMY in The Annex in Toronto [www.JaneJacobs.TYO.ca]]

We here in The Annex neighbourhood in downtown Toronto where Jane lived have started a book of condolence which will be forwarded to her family.

Because you can't sign the book in person, you may leave any messages or memories at our Jane Jacobs online memorial weblog:

http://www.JaneJacobs.TYO.ca

Your messages will be collected and forwarded to her family.

Thanks,

~ HiMY! ~

[Phlip]

Fascinating topic - I'll definitely be looking for her book. RIP Ms. Jacobs.

[Jim Campano]

I am the publisher of The West Ender Newsletter a newsletter devoted to the former West End of Boston. Jane Jacobs as well as Herbert Gans have been recieving my newsletter for the past 20yrs.
We are the original Urban Villagers, as coined by Herb Gans.Jane Jacobs was special because she understood that people make neighborhoods not buildings. And deserted streets especially in the daytime are the death of neighborhoods.