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| Jane Jacobs wnyc.org |
Now that the excitement has died down from hitting 10,000 (and growing) page views, it's time to get back to business. Today we're going to look at the legacy of the late urban critic Jane Jacobs. The late Ms. Jacobs (d.2006) argued forcefully for the preservation of older buildings, point out that they were critical assets for unique local business and healthy, viable neighborhoods. Mike Powe, senior research manager at the National Trust Preservation Green Lab, recently posted an article in the Preservation Leadership Forum titled, "Jane Jacobs and 21st-Century Preservation." What makes her work so timely is the challenges that contemporary preservationists working in cities face. Given the current trend to knock down older buildings and replace them with shiny new developments, it might be a good idea to take a look, once again, at her approach to urban planning and preservation.
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| The Death And Life Of American Cities amazon.com |
Why the sudden interest in Jane Jacobs? For one, the Municipal Art Society of New York (http://www.mas.org) and the Urban Land Institute (newyork.uli.org) co-hosted their annual Jane Jacobs Forum that attracted 500 attendees. On the Left Coast, there's a movie in the works (naturally), neatly titled A Matter of Death and Life, a clever reference to her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Recently, two contemporary urban critics, Richard Florida and Ed Glaeser have liberally quoted Ms. Jacobs in their work. For example, in 2012, Mr. Florida, known for his work on the "creative economy" of flourishing cities, repeatedly quoted in interviews another familiar Jacobs adage, "New ideas must use old buildings." This was in reference to his thoughts on the decisions by Google and other tech firms to move their offices into older buildings in major cities. On the other hand, Mr. Glaeser, made it a point to demonstrate where he believed that Ms. Jacobs' thinking was out of step with his book, The Triumph Of The City. From all appearances, Jane Jacobs seems to be everywhere.
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| Jane Jacobs at a local bar futureofny.org |
* Jane Jacobs was not trained as a preservationists or urban planner. She began her working life as a journalist, first as a recent high school graduate in Scranton, Pennsylvania, then as an associate editor for Architectural Forum. Her outsider position gave a fresh outlook on urban life and planning. This also made her a later target for criticism by urban planners and economists who cited her unscientific writing style and arguments lacked quantifiable data as evidence.
* Jane Jacobs 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, has been hailed as "the most influential American text about the inner workings and failings of cities." Personally speaking, my professors at USC have cited this book frequently. In plain language and argument, she constructed her thesis based upon the observation and intuition, upending the planning practice, calling for planning concepts and land use policies that didn't gain national attention until decades later. Some of these concepts include: land use zones specifically allowing a mix of residential and commercial use; the idea of designing for "eyes on the street" (a very well-known Jacobs aphorism) as a way to naturally make public places safer; the importance of unique, locally-owned businesses that support neighborhood vitality: and the of retaining a mix of old and new buildings to support diverse social and economic activity throughout the day. Before it became fashionable, Ms. Jacobs wrote about cities as if they were living creatures with functioning ecologies. This analogy has gained traction and has found regular application in discussions on sustainability and resilience.
* Jane Jacobs was a community activist who was afraid to break the rules. She railed against Robert Moses, the powerful New York City planner who wanted to build a major freeway through the very heart of Manhattan and raze the human-scale neighborhoods, replacing them with high-rise commercial and residential towers. Ms. Jacobs won the war and blocked freeway construction, getting arrested several times in the process. I like her.
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| Robert Moses en.wikipedia.org |
* Jane Jacobs took a pragmatic approach to considering cities and the role of older buildings in healthy neighborhoods. Ms. Jacobs argued for the preservation of the vernacular buildings, including some dodgy structures, "not museum-piece old buildings..." (Jacobs, 1961) She implied that old structures are partly useful because the often provide more affordable spaces than bright shiny new buildings.
* Ms. Jacobs focused on the performance of a place. Based on her firsthand observations from which she evaluated the success, Ms. Jacobs was interested primarily in how urban districts worked and what made them work more efficiently as livable, interesting, and democratic places. In one oft-quoted section in her book, she detailed the "intricate sidewalk ballet" that took place daily outside her home. Attention was given to the actors and actions of a place guided the late writer to some important observations and like attention to a Main Street or historic district could be equally useful.
* For Ms. Jacobs, diversity was essential and she considered it in its multiple forms. She argued that communities needed a mix of recreational, commercial, industrial, and residential spaces and cities required a mix to economic engines such as both startups and more established business models. Further, she unequivocally believed that neighborhoods needed a combination of old and new buildings not just one or the other.
Your truly believes that the argument Jane Jacobs made over fifty years ago, and summarized by Mike Powe, are still relevant today. One doesn't need quantifiable scientific data to understand how cities operate. Simple observation and empirical data is often the best source for understand the day-to-day function of a city. This is something that gets overlooked in our rush to over analyze every piece information that comes across our screens. Jane Jacobs was right about one thing, to understand a city, you have to place yourself in the environment.
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