RIP Jane Jacobs, Urban Planning Activist

Jane Jacobs was a person who lived in New York City and found it good. She believed cities were for people, not cars. She was brave and tenacious and therefore considered a giant pain in the ass by the powerful and mighty. She was arrested in urban renewal protests, and moved to Toronto in 1969 because of her opposition to the Vietnam War. Farewell to a giant thinker of our age.

Her book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" (1961) attacked the 'urban renewal' concept that was obliterating neighborhoods in cities across America to build high-rise buildings and expressways. (Boston, for example, completely bulldozed its West End neighborhood to build ugly towers for rich people to live in. The neighborhood isn't really a functioning neighborhood any more.) From the NYTimes obituary:

"Death and Life" made four recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition, use and rentals. 4. Population must be dense.

These seemingly simple notions represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed their ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces.

NYTimes: Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89

Village Voice: Jane Jacobs, in Her Own Words
For the urban thinker, now dead at 89, the fight was not abstract

Preserving the Village
Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There is No Other Recipe
By Jane Jacobs

May 22, 1957

The best you can say for redevelopment is that, in certain cases, it is the lesser evil. As practiced in New York, it is very painful. It causes catastrophic dislocation and hardship to tens of thousands of citizens. There is growing evidence that it shoots up juvenile-delinquency figures and spreads or intensifies slums in the areas taking the dislocation impact. It destroys, more surely than floods or tornados, immense numbers of small businesses. It is expensive to the taxpayers, federal and local. It is not fulfilling the hope that it would boost the city's tax returns. Quite the contrary.

Furthermore, the results of all this expense and travail look dull and are dull. The great virtue of the city, the thing that helps make up for all its disadvantages, is that it is interesting. It isn't easy to make a chunk of New York boring, but redevelopment does it.

On the other hand here is the Village—an area of the city with the power to attract and hold a real cross-section of the population, including a lot of middle-income families. An area with demonstrated potential for extending and upgrading its fringes. An area that pays more in taxes than it gets back in services. An area that grows theaters all by itself . . .

Wouldn't you think the city fathers would want to understand what makes our area successful and learn from it? Or failing such creative curiosity that they would at least cherish it?

WaPo: Jane Jacobs, 89; Writer, Activist Spoke Out Against Urban Renewal

The urban-renewal movement of the mid-20th century spent hundreds of millions of dollars clearing communities that were deemed slums, building low-income housing projects and creating parks and highways. Anyone criticizing the model, with its political backing, was not looked on kindly.

In this atmosphere came Mrs. Jacobs, a middle-aged, self-taught architectural and urban-planning specialist with Architectural Forum magazine. She was an incautious woman, at times disheveled in appearance, who tended to anger very powerful people. Several times, she courted arrest to speak out against plans by Robert Moses, a New York City commissioner whose portfolio included oversight of the city's parks and roads.

In her name-making book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961), she recorded what she considered the human toll of urban renewal.

She spoke of the displacement of thousands of residents and the destruction of small, if untidy, communities whose diversity she said was crucial to a city's allure. She maintained that urban renewal worsened the problems it was intended to solve: high crime, architectural conformity and a general dullness infecting daily life.

She attacked the arrogance of city planners for making decisions without consulting those affected.

"The planner's greatest shortcoming, I think, is lack of intellectual curiosity about how cities work," she told the New York Times in 1969. "They are taught to see the intricacy of cities as mere disorder. Since most of them believe what they have been taught, they do not inquire about the processes that lie behind the intricacy. I doubt that knowledgeable city planning will come out of the present profession. It is more likely to arise as an offshoot of economics."

Wikipedia: Jane Jacobs