The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 November 2010
by Jane Jacobs
This book is a well-known and landmark work on the design, development, and ultimate livability of large American cities. Many of its assertions can be found in modern urban and even suburban planning, but it does not often come together in the way Jacobs would imagine. In the mid to late 1950s, Jane Jacobs was a leader in the opposition to planning czar Robert Moses's plans to build a freeway across Manhattan, through Greenwich Village and Washington Square. Moses had a vision of free automobile travel throughout New York, and he was certainly responsible for many of the public parks and features that still exist today. But he was ruthless in his plans, bulldozing swaths of entire neighborhoods without any acknowledgement of the residents or the diversity of the urban fabric. In his black and white world, your neighborhood was either luxurious and easily accessed by cars, or a slum serviced by broken down trains and buses. There was no in-between. There was no room for the gritty diversity that makes a city vibrant.
Jacobs went head-to-head with Moses and, as we know, won the battle against the cross-Manhattan expressway. It was probably the beginning of the end for Moses, who lasted another decade in his numerous planning posts around New York. Greenwich Village was a little seedy at the time, a cheap neighborhood for struggling artists, musicians and blue collar workers. It has since, of course, become one of the hippest, most desirable, and expensive neighborhoods in New York. It is also lively, diverse and vibrant. Definitely a better result than the wasteland that typically surrounds an urban freeway. Another part of the fallout of this battle is Jacobs's seminal book, which was first published in 1961.
This book is a brilliant, passionate and polemical plea for an urban planning that recognizes the complex, often messy diversity that makes cities great. Jacobs writes with conviction and, given its massive density, a surprisingly engaging conversational style. Her prime examples are New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but there are no illustrations in the book. Jacobs asks that the reader look around at his or her own city, and to seek out examples of her arguments there. It is a surprisingly satisfying approach, and makes Jacobs's arguments immediate and relevant even nearly half a century later. (Indeed, that there remain so many negative examples is proof enough that this book remains relevant.) Jacobs argues against the massive urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s, saying that they suck the life out of cities. Today, she might argue against some of the tenets of New Urbanism. While modern thinking does take into account the kinds of things Jacobs argues for, any mass development, any monolithic and monopolistic new "downtown" will ultimately not have the kind of life and diversity Jacobs is calling for. She wants us to have buildings of varying age, housing and businesses that support a diversity of incomes, to have people on the streets at all hours (San Francisco's Mission district is an excellent example of this), and to keep the fabric of the city finely grained, with small city blocks broken only very occasionally by parks and open space. None of this is easy to "plan" for. No broad detailed city plan can easily account for the complex interactions that make a city lively and diverse (physically, racially, socially, economically). Jacobs does provide specific suggestions that could contribute to a plan that allows for diverse growth in urban neighborhoods. She accounts, too, for the need to support those people who need housing in cities that have become increasingly unaffordable. But her suggestions do not constitute a complete specific plan. While she gives some specifics, she is basically calling for a general change in philosophy. Perhaps urban planning students have received more of her kind of wisdom in the intervening decades, but at the time, she wasn't terribly optimistic about the kinds of city planners being trained in the schools of her era.
Our urban fabric has certainly improved in recent decades. The finely grained detail that Jacobs calls for is more respected as a goal. Public housing and city parks have become more receptive to the urban landscape around them. But there is much yet that fails. Our suburbs continue to sprawl and demand the use of the automobile. Freeways continue to snake around and through our cities. Monolithic "new downtown" developments still end up occupied by the same homogeneous set of corporate tenants, the only ones able to afford the high rents of new development. Jane Jacobs, who passed away in 2006, still has much to teach us about the cities in which we live, and to teach modern city planners about what it is that makes a great American city thrive.
See Also: [The Power Broker by Robert Caro]