Jane Jacobs Said I Told You So

http://www.citylabb.com/design /2016/05/happy-100th-birthday-jane-jacobs/481035/?utm_source=atlfb

"May The Fourth Be With You"
walkasoff.com

Hello Everyone:

This past Thursday was a special day, at least, on the internet.  It was May the Fourth and if you are a Star Wars fan like yours truly, you celebrated your inner Jedi  However, Star Wars was not the only reason to celebrate like Wookie.  May the Fourth was the 100th birthday of the godmother of modern planning-Jane Jacobs.  Her iconic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; http://www.amazon.com) remains required reading for planners and preservationists.  The book was published the height of the urban renewal movement.  Death and Life was a complete contradiction to mainstream urban planners's misplaced faith in the glories of the "modern" city.  Roberta Brandes Gratz marked the occasion for recent CityLab article, "The Jane Jacobs Century," to look back at just how and why Ms. Jacobs's insights still resonate today.

Jane Jacobs quotes
azquotes.com

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jane Jacobs's observations on her beloved Greenwich Village, which she successfully fought its razing and redevelopment.  The Village was her laboratory.  Ms. Brande Gratz writes, "I stress 'observations' because Jacobs was not ideological, not prescriptive."  Specifically, she did not argue in favor low-rise neighborhoods as the cure-all for every place.  Nor did she unilaterally oppose tall buildings-unless they overshadowed or weakened a "viable urban fabric."  Jane Jacobs also did not oppose infrastructure and city park projects.  Ms. Brandes Gratz adds, She did not oppose roads 'as long the city is not reshaped to accommodate them....'"  Ms. Jacobs  also did not have a problem with urban infill redevelopment as "...as long as it was beneficial and appropriately scaled."

Gaslight Cafe
Greenwich Village, New York City, New York
gvshp.org

Jane Jacobs was not always a vocal advocate for smaller is better.  In her early career, she was an architectural critic for Architecture Forum.  During her tenure at the magazine, she was seduced by the promise of the post-war urban utopia that promised a better and newer city built on the rubble of the old one.  The she witnessed the after effects and recanted.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the six books that followed it were Ms. Jacobs's observations on what worked and what did not.  One thing she did acknowledge was "a parallel to the ecology of cities in complex ecology of nature."  She observed that parks designed as landscapes, instead for actual use, were empty.  Further, she also paid attention to shopping streets with a variety of businesses drew the customers retail requires to do well.

In the preface to Death and Life, Ms. Jacobs writes,

The scenes that illustrate this are all about us.  For illustrations, please look closely at real cities

Scene from the Beatnik Riot, April 1961
Greenwich Village, New York City, New York
gvshp.org

Contemporary American cities have become magnets for the young, old, in-between, and the tourist.  This point is accurate in cities that did pave over their economic and cultural centers; "traditional sidewalk-rich neighborhoods" during the apogee of Urban Renewal.  If Jane Jacobs were alive today, no doubt she would be savoring a cocktail at the White Horse Tavern, thinking to herself, "see I was right.  I told you so."  Experience tells us that the pre-war American city, noted by its economic and cultural diversity, walkable, transit dependent nature can endure and flourish if it is permit to grow with contemporary additions that do not obscure its essential strengths.

Consider the resurgence in popularity of historic neighborhoods-no just the ones designated historic districts.  Empirical data suggests that these places most often have the highest property values.  Start-up companies choose lofts and commercial neighborhoods for their businesses's headquarters, gradually reviving production-centered urban economies.  Millennial residents have embraced bicycle and mass-transit as an option to the automobile.

White Horse Tavern
Greenwich Village, New York City, New York
gvshp.org

Contrast this with single use "centers"-shopping malls, in particular, which do not survive past their 30-year mortgage with a major renovation.  Yours truly is thinking the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, which is slated to undergo major renovations for about the second time.  The mall has been in existence since the early eighties.  That aside, Roberta Brandes Graza writes, "Car-based cities struggle to create 'walkable' town centers.  Many first rung suburbs are being vacated by residents who either mover farther out or return to downtown living."  Who is moving into the suburbs?  Low income residents, frequently immigrants and small businesses unable to afford rent on their space.

However, the mistake would be to assume that all cities have regained their strength or recovered from decline.  Just the opposite, American cities have been contracting since the post-war love affair with the suburb.  The silver lining is, where smart policies have been implemented, where growing decline is recognized and appropriately mitigated, urban regeneration slowly takes hold and expands.  Again, Jane Jacobs is sipping her cocktail, thinking "I told you so."

1950 S. East East Harlem
East Harlem, New York, New New York
pinterest.com

Jane Jacobs's epiphany came in the mid-1950s, during a visit to East Harlem.  She saw "New, high-rise public housing surrounded by pretty but functionless lawns had erased the formerly dense mix of retail, institutional and residential uses."  Ms. Jacobs learned about what was paved over from the settlement house workers and the tenants.  One resident shared with her:

Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place.  They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else.  We don't have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even...But the big men come and look at that grass, 'Isn't it wonderful!  Now the poor have everything.

In her own way. Jane Jacobs celebrated the multiplicity of uses now seen in reviving cities; however she separated it from the congestions that accompanies excessive single-use development.

Washington Square Fountain
Greenwich Village, New York, New York
greenwichvillagehistory.wordpress.com

Roberta Brandes Grata writes, "Perhaps most relevant to the controversies engulfing today's reviving cities is her warning about 'cataclysmic money' the king that brings excessively tall towers for the super wealthy, foreign and domestic, along with tax and zoning policies that favor tourist over tax-paying residents."  Jane Jacobs admonished in The Death and Life of Great American Cities,

...steady but gradual change...retains staying power after its novelty has gone...requires a myriad of gradual, constant, close-grained changes...

That close-grain element is precisely what is missing in the mad rush encouragement of more and more tourists.

The negative impact of accelerated change is barely acknowledged-especially in the mega-popular destinations of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco.  Ms. Brandes Gratz points out, "These cities ignore the wisdom of Jacobs at their peril.  Not today or tomorrow, maybe not for years to come, their downfall is inevitable and it will be painful, unless they wake up to the urban dynamics that Jacobs chronicled and analyzed half century ago.

One thing is certain, if you heed the words of Jane Jacobs for the local, the tourist will follow; fi do it for the tourist, you lose the local and,  eventually the tourist because it is the existing fabric that gives a place character.  Read Jane Jacobs.