Creative NonFiction Final (Installment 1)
The Death & Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs – A Review and Mild Retrospective
Jane Jacobs died last April, but her ideas and writings will almost certainly survive well into the next hundred years at which point we will be living in oxygen injected super-domes and killing our clones with laser guns. This book, written in 1961, is a grand indictment of centralized urban planning, freeways, suburban sprawl, and Utopian “planned communities”.
Mrs. Jacobs had absolutely no qualifications to write such a book, nor her later books on macroeconomics, Western civilization, or anthropology. She never completed a college degree or taught a class. The book is a fascinating collection of anecdote, intuitive reasoning, and personal observation that speak much louder than all the dry sociological urban planning studies ever done.
Glancing at the table of contents, it seems that not much about a city is too small to escape her notice. Part One is called “The Peculiar Nature of Cities” and has 3 sub chapters on the uses of sidewalks, one on parks, and one on neighborhoods. I'll admit to being leery when I looked at this, wondering if I was going to get some sort of architectural draft in crabbed handwriting showing the perfect angles for corners and exactly how wide awnings should be in the Perfect City. Nothing fortunately could be further from the truth, as the very idea of a Perfect City is one that she despises (specifically Le Corbusier's Radiant City). In Jane's ideal city, city blocks are small, diverse, and mixed-use. The heavy hand of the zoning board has been manacled to a subway turnstile and the expressway exists only as a link between cities, not as a loop linking gated suburbs to mega malls and ruined downtown areas. The book is obviously heavily influenced by New York City, where Mrs. Jacobs moved during the Great Depression. There are, however, countless stories of other large American cities, and their successes and failures in urban planning and public housing (Los Angeles offers a wealth of examples of how not to do it).
The book is short on theory and long on practical application. She does not lay out how to intentionally design a better place to live, but she does clearly lay out the basic tools and conditions necessary to facilitate working, healthy cities. Houses should be close to businesses, parks should be designed around their actual users rather than a grandiose vision of “open places”. Having a couple of bars on your block is a good thing rather than a deplorable menace, and small independent businesses are much more desirable than chain stores or strip malls. A lot of this stuff seems fairly obvious to me, but a look around most major American cities will show that it isn't obvious enough to the people who zoned and developed them.
She made a lot of enemies with this book, particularly Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford. Moses she fought with over the leveling of New York neighborhoods to make way for the Cross-Bronx Expressway; Mumford she clashed with because he called her “Mother Jacobs” and her book a “home remedy for urban cancer”. In an era where academics were increasingly sheltered from working class people, where specialization and credentialed enlightenment were the ideals for writers, Jane Jacobs was a grand optimistic generalist who was often accused of not knowing what the hell she was talking about. It's amusing that in a time when we were fighting Communism in the name of Freedom and Individuality, the urban renewal movement was busily imposing a centralized aesthetic on millions of Americans by demolishing their communities to make room for interstates. Sprawl consumed thousands of acres of land, resulting in longer freeways, more traffic, and ridiculous commutes to and from work for people who had been forced to live in suburbs miles away from where they conducted their business. Pedestrians were to be distrusted as homeless vagrants, condemned to live in run down parks and vacant downtown districts. The personal automobile was changing the way people lived, worked, and commuted. There were many grand designs made by people who knew a lot about science, art, and architecture but not so much about people and how they lived. While it's true for instance, that Le Corbusier's Radiant City looks incredible, it does so as an object of art and not as a viable city. In his cities, the poor lived in separate high-rises from the rich, segregated by parks and green space large enough to keep dirty pedestrians out. Everyone lives in skyscrapers linked by bridges for cars, and presumably everyone is happy with this arrangement. Of course, if they aren't, there's not much they can do about it. It was our own 'Great Leap Forward' into a shiny new future in glass and steel where you would never have to talk to anyone who didn't look and dress like you.
Jane Jacobs defies easy categorization as a “small is beautiful” left leaning anti-war hippie, or a “free market solves all problems” conservative economist, because she makes arguments for both sides. Never afraid to speak her mind, she was investigated by the Loyalty Security Board in 1952, and was arrested multiple times for “inciting a riot” as she protested various “urban renewal” projects. She fought the Vietnam War and the draft, ultimately moving her family to Toronto to avoid her sons being drafted. She was a generalist, and a non-ideologue, which makes her writing so valuable and so rare, and keeps her relevant today.
