Tag Archives: american cities

No Need for Acolytes

on August 24, 2010 in Jane Jacobs

Downtown Express photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio

I came across this National League of Cities column through Planetizen.com. It’s great advice for  Jane Jacobs fans and detractors alike.

Emerging Issues: Wrestling With Jane Jacobs

by Bill Barnes

Jane Jacobs wrote one of the most influential urban affairs of the 20th century.

“Death and Life of Great American Cities” — published in 1961 and still in print today — has become a talisman, cited by many and sundry to advance their views and proposals. Jacobs, who died in 2006, is an icon of the field, and new books explore her ideas and narrate her activities.

Jacobs’ views have become “the common wisdom of our time,” says Paul Goldberger, a prominent architecture critic.

American cities have changed dramatically since 1961. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Death and Life,” it’s surely time now to celebrate her accomplishments and also to think freshly about her ideas, about what we assume is actually going on in cities, and about what we believe is correct and desirable about cities.

Jacobs’ views have become, often unacknowledged, part of the regular vocabulary of and urban development. Take, for example, the idea that a street with storefronts and residences and lots of pedestrians is safer than a deserted one because there are people around to watch over it. Or, the idea that mixing uses in dense, complex places is preferable to isolating dwellings from shops and parks from workplaces. Or, the notion that development should evolve from existing uses, rather than by governmentally planned, wholesale clearance and new construction. All of those and more can be found in “Death and Life.”

The very first paragraph of “Death and Life” promises “an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding.” At mid-century, that orthodoxy included urban renewal and highway construction, and it was carried out through such elements as big projects, separation of uses, and “blight” designations followed by clearance. Jacobs’ writing and her activism in New York City’s Greenwich Village contributed immensely to the unraveling — but not the disappearance — of that approach. The book bristles with pointed criticisms and sharp analyses that aim to burst the modernist orthodoxy.

It’s a wonderful book, strongly written, and well-worth reading today.

More people should read the book before they cite Jacobs as an ally for their projects. One recent writer confessed to relying on second- and third-hand sources and to referencing “Death and Life” in support of “whatever I was working on.” Upon actually reading the book, she concluded that the “New Urbanism” movement’s implied claim to Jacobs’ approval is unwarranted. Goldberger complained that Jacobs’ ideas are being used to support purposes “deeply inconsistent with her values.”

Since 1961, cities have changed and the conventional wisdom has changed. How, then, to think anew about ideas that are so widely and implicitly shared?

In “Death and Life,” Jacobs herself provided useful recommendations.

First, she warned her readers against unexamined, preconceived notions, including her own vigorously argued ideas. She encouraged readers to “constantly and skeptically test what I say against [their] own knowledge.”

Second, she urged people who are interested in city life to think inductively and “look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether threads of principle emerge among them.” The page after the table of contents in “Death and Life” announces this approach to the reader. It is labeled “Illustrations.” (The book has no illustrations. It also has no charts or graphs or tables of statistics.) The page declares: “For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”

Third, Jacobs cautioned against over-generalization. She said that we should know which thing we’re talking about. That is, she knew that “Death and Life” is “concentrated on great [that is, very big] cities, and on their inner areas.” Thus, she also knew what she wasn’t talking about: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban. Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities.”

We now need studies that follow Jacobs’ advice: closely observed, fearless studies of the way things do or don’t function on the ground in big cities and also in towns, suburbs and little cities, and regions. We don’t need acolytes of Jane Jacobs; we need people who will think as hard and as well as she did about “the kind of problem a city is.”

Bill Barnes (barnes@nlc.org) is the director for emerging issues at NLC.

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An Introduction to ‘Downtown is for People’

on July 5, 2010 in Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs, Uncategorized

As I have posted before, one of Jane Jacobs’ first forays into the public realm was in 1956, when Douglas Haskell, an editor at Architectural Forum magazine, became sick before a speech at the landmark Conference on Urban Design at Harvard University. In his place, he sent Jacobs, one of his associate editors.  She had only spoken in public once before in her life and had great stage fright. As such, she decided to stick with what she was familiar with and simply shared her pointed observation on the mechanisms of city and urban renewal.

Given her inexperience in public speaking and her rather critical account of the current state of urban planning Jacobs expected a cold reaction from the crowd. To her surprise, the speech received rowdy applause. As a result, renowned William H. Whyte invited her to write a corresponding article in Fortune magazine, where he worked.

The essay, entitled Downtown is for People, put Jacobs on the radar of many urban theorists and developers. More importantly, it was her impetus to begin gathering her and her urban prescriptions. These were published in her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961.

While many observers of the urban condition are familiar withe the book, they are less familiar with the speech and article that started it all. The article concluded Fortune’s series on the ‘exploding metropolis.’ The series, which began with Whyte’s Are Cities Un-American? (September, 1957), included Francis Bello’s The City and the Car (October), Seymour Freedgood’s New Strength in City Hall (November), Daniel Seligman’s The Enduring Slums (December), and Whyte’s Urban Sprawl (January, 1958).  Jacob’s Downtown is for appeared in the April 1958 edition.

Together these essays address the problems of urban decline and suburban sprawl, , city politics, open space, and the character and fabric of cities. The collected essays have since been published in book form, with the subtitle, “A study of the assault on urbanism and how our cities can resist.” Selection passages from the book are available on Google Reader.

I hope by posting this essay, you will gain a deeper appreciation of how Jane Jacobs saw the city, and a better understanding of what I am trying to do with this blog and through organizing the annual Jane’s Walk in Phoenix. Please feel free to share your own questions and observations in the comments section.

Given the length of the essay, I have decided to post it in sections. I will post part one tomorrow. If you can’t wait and want to read the entire essay on one siting, you can do so here.

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See Cities As Jane Jacobs Did

on June 7, 2010 in books, Jane Jacobs

While I will be writing my own review of the book “What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs,” I thought that this review from Treehugger was worth highlighting:

Sometimes the biggest frustration for those of us craving green, healthy, and vibrant cities, is how slow progress can appear, and how seemingly huge the task. To be reminded of the what really makes cities thrive and be alive, pick up What We See – rather than a tribute to renowned thinker Jane Jacobs, this book keeps in motion a conversation Jacobs started back in 1961 with her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The 30 essays in What We See show the expanding extent of Jacobs’ legacy and also offer hope that while there will always be more to do, the dance of competing cultures and ideas in cities that Jacobs called “ballet of the streets” is alive and well, and possibly poised to be greener than ever.

Read the whole thing here.

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“Eyes on the Street” outwit Terrorists

on May 3, 2010 in Jane Jacobs

One of the most quoted, and arguably the most important, concept of Jane Jacobs work was ‘eyes on the street.’ In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane wrote:

There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers…

She was proven right, again, over this past weekend.  While thousands of urbanist took the across North America and around the world, a couple of veterans in New York City’s Time Square helped to foil a terrorist attack:

From: Three lessons from the Times Square bomb. By Fred Kaplan (Slate) Posted Monday, May 3, 2010, at 5:04 PM ET

2. Jane Jacobs is, once again, right. In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, self-taught urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs observed that and their users are “active in the drama of civilization versus barbarism” (by “barbarism,” she meant ) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—”the natural proprietors of the street”—provide “eyes upon the street.”

Jacobs, who died in 2006, would not have been surprised to learn that it was two street vendors who first notified police of the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway.

Lane Orton and Duane Jackson, both disabled Vietnam War veterans who were hailed as heroes after their roles in the foiling became clear, have been keeping their “eyes upon the street” for years and—like many of their fellow vendors—have frequently tipped off police to strange and illegal activities.

This may explain why busy areas like Times Square aren’t attacked by terrorists more often. The crowds make them tempting targets: lots of people mean lots of potential victims and subsequent media attention. But those same crowds—especially the regulars, who are always looking out on the street—make an attack harder to conceal and, therefore, to pull off. (Research project for a sociologist: Have terrorist attacks in Western taken place more often, or less often, in areas with lots of street vendors?)

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Why Phoenix Needs Old Buildings

on April 26, 2010 in Jane's Walk, Your Views

The theme for this Year’s Jane’s Walk Phoenix is “New Ideas for Old Buildings. Phoenix is a city that really ‘came of age’ after World War II and did not experience significant growth until air-conditioning and the automobile were prevalent among the middle class. As such, the city does not have a large amount of ‘old’ buildings (at least by eastern standards), and we have done a poor job preserving what once existed. Nevertheless, Phoenix does boast some great historic neighborhoods, such as Willo, Encanto-Palmcroft and FQ Story (and 31 others) and has done a decent job preserving (or at least retaining) some of our older civic buildings and churches.

Photograph courtesy of Levine Machine

One area that we haven’t given much love to, however, is our . In many other cities, warehouse districts have been epicenters of, not only their arts and culture scene, but also their entrepreneurial/small business movement. In Phoenix, however, much of the warehouse districts was bulldozed to make room for a sports arena and stadium, as well as acres upon acres of surface parking for the few hours a week these structures are occupied. Many of the warehouses that remain are stuccoed over or boarded up. Few are functioning as business open to the public, and even fewer are home to creative class type industries.

This is to Phoenix’s great peril. No matter how many new suburban oriented developments such as CityScape get championed by the City and their developer friends, they will not lead to any sustained renaissance in downtown. For that to happen, we need to a mix of not only uses (and nor simply more restaurants), but also ages and building types. This will require making far better use of what is left of our historic building stock.

As Jane Jacobs noted in the Death and Life of Great American Cities:

“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them…. for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

Phoenix Seed & Feed Capitol Warehouse 1905, Photograph courtesy of Levine Machine

This brings me back to the theme of this year’s Jane’s Walk Phoenix. While last year, I showcased some of the more exciting developments that have occurred in and around Roosevelt Row and Civic Space Park, this year I want to highlight to potential of the warehouse district. In particular, I want to showcase some of the amazing architecture contained in these buildings and get people thinking about potential new uses for these buildings. Michael Levine and Angela Paladino of Levine Machine Development are responsible for not only saving several buildings in the warehouse district from the wrecking ball, but also restoring a few of to the former glory and beyond.

During the Walk, we will be getting behind the scenes tours of several of their buildings as well as engaging in discussion about the history of the buildings and the neighborhood. More importantly however, we will be soliciting ideas for potential new uses for these buildings, as well as ways to make the warehouse district an epicenter for new ideas of any, and every, kind.

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From the Archives: Books for the Amateur Urbanist

on April 17, 2010 in books, Quick Take

Originally posted on April 29, 2009:

Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities tops the list (fitting as it was itself written by an amateur urbanist)

From Where:

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961). At about 450 pages, “concise” is probably not the most apt description of this book. But, as this is the single best written, most accessible, most compelling book I’ve ever read about cities, I’m willing to forsake the concision criterion even in my first recommendation. If you want to know what can make cities pleasant, safe and interesting places to live, read this book. If you want to read one of the best non-fiction prose stylists of our time, read this book. It’s a classic, and deservedly so. As one Where reader put it: “It’s a great book for explaining why we care about all of this.”

2. The Option of Urbanism by Christopher Leinberger (2007). While not as fun to read as  or The Geography of Nowhere (see below), this slender volume briskly highlights difference between drivable suburban development and walkable , and does a good job of explaining the benefits of walkable city neighborhoods. It’s good primer on the basics of density, zoning and the hidden subsidies fueling drivable sub-.

3. The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler (1993). This book is an exploration—and excoriation—of the rise of suburbia and sprawl. It also explains how the more traditional patterns and places of city life and country life are superior to the “geography of nowhere.” Accessible and ferocious.

4. Cities Back from the Edge by Roberta Gratz, with Norman Mintz (1998). According to a Where reader, this book is “in the spirit of Jacobs” and discusses “how existing cities can be improved with citizen participation in contrast to destructive master plans.” The book is filled with lots of specific ideas about how to improve downtown areas, all of them lavishly illustrated with real life examples from successful efforts in dozens of cities.

5. How Cities Work by Alex Marshall (2000). Squarely aimed at the lay person, this book seeks to discover what forces shape places and cities—and finds that one of the most powerful forces is political choices, particularly those having to do with transportation policy. A Where reader gave this recommendation: “It’s not comprehensive, of course, but it’s a good snack, possibly the kind that could interest a person in a larger meal.”

For more suggestions, look here

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Jane’s Talk—May 4, 2010

on April 15, 2010 in Jane Jacobs, Local Happenings, Other

View of The Hotel San Carlos

Image via

On May 4, 2010, in honor of Jane Jacob’s official birthday, Jane’s Walk Phoenix will be hosting a companion event, called Jane’s Talk, from 7-9 pm.  The evening wing feature two events: a film screening and a book reading. These will be followed by an open discussion of Jane’s ideas and how they might be applied in Phoenix. The event will be head at the historic Hotel San Carlos, 202 N Central Ave, in downtown Phoenix.  This location is consistent with Jane’s adage: “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

Click here to RSVP.
or leave a comment below

Film Screening

The evening will start with a screening of the documentary “ Wisdom” (2003).  Here’s a synopsis and trailer:

“Through her groundbreaking books, Jane Jacobs has influenced the planning and understanding of cities and economies with what she calls a web way of thinking. In this program, Jacobs shares her insights into urban planning by tracing the progression of ideas in her books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities; The Economy of Cities; Cities and the Wealth of Nations; Systems of Survival; and her more recent, The Nature of Economies. An extended interview with Jacobs is blended with scenes from various North American cities and footage of her 1997 seminar, “Ideas That Matter.”"

Book Launch

The event will also feature a launch of the new book, What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs. It will feature a reading by one of the book’s contributors, Dr. Nan Ellin.

Dr. Ellin is Planning Program Director and Associate Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. She holds an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. Before coming to  she taught at the University of Cincinnati, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of Southern California, and New York University.  She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris, France where she researched vatious facets of new urbanism.

Dr. Ellin is a celebrated author and .  Her books include  Integral Urbanism (2006) and Postmodern Urbanism (1996; revised 1999). She is the editor of Architecture of Fear (1997). Most recently, she  collaborated with Edward Booth-Clibborn on Phoenix: 21st Century City.  Dr. Ellin is also a well known public intellectual who writes, lectures and consults on urban revitalization, sustainable urbanism, and regional planning for the future.

Dr. Ellin will be reading from her chapter, entitled “The Tao of Urbanism: Integrating Observation with Action.”

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Books: The Battle For Gotham

on April 2, 2010 in books, Jane Jacobs

I haven’t read this book yet, but it’s near the top of my ‘to read’ list.

Excerpt from The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs by urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz.

To look at recent New York City through the lens of the conflicting urban views of Moses and Jacobs is to gain a new understanding of the city today. This lens provides a small measure by which to evaluate the kind of big and modest projects outlined in this book. I did not have that lens either growing up or as a reporter for The New York Post from the mid-1960s until late in the 1970s covering city development issues. Eventually, I understood that in my writing I was immersing myself in the web of challenges personified in the conflict between the urban perspectives of Moses and Jacobs.

Two things helped develop that lens for me: Reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York when it was published in 1974 and reading, meeting and developing a lasting friendship with Jane Jacobs in 1978. My own urban vision had been shaped earlier during my 15 years as a reporter, meeting and learning from people all over the city and watching positive and negative city policies unfold. But that urban vision was deepened and added to by that Moses/Jacobs lens and was expressed in my first book, The Living City : How America’s Cities Are Being Revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1989. “Urban Husbandry” was the term I coined in that book t odescribe a regeneration approach that reinvigorates and builds ona ssets already in place, adding to instead of replacing long-evolving strengths.

From the mid 1960s to the late 1970s, I reported for The New York Post on the impact of the great social and economic dislocations in the city. There were the urban renewal projects in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and most dramatically, the opening of Co-Op City which vacuumed out so many residents from the Grand Concourse and accelerated the decay of the South Bronx. I covered school decentralization battles in Ocean Hill/Brownsville, urban renewal on the Lower East Side and learned the fascinating evolution of Washington Heights while working on an in depth series about Henry Kissinger , whose family settled there after fleeing Germany in 1938, after he was appointed Secretary of State. There were public housing conflicts, landlord scandals in Times Square and on the Upper West Side, and middle-income apartment shortages. New urban renewal projects and battles to save landmarks all got my attention. But I had no knowledge of the role of Robert Moses in shaping urban renewal policies,locally and nationally, until Caro’s extraordinarily well-researched and thorough opus.

I had heard a little about Jane Jacobs’ activism in , particularly fighting the West Village Urban Renewal and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, but I had not read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When I finally did read it, just before I was heading to to meet her, I discovered a way of understanding the city that I could relate to, a way that I had instinctively come to believe during years of reporting on community-based stories, an understanding that Jane believed all keen observers are capable of developingon their own. Over the years, she challenged me, broadened my thinking and encouraged me to look, observe and understand way beyond what I had already learned.

This book now looks back on the city as I first experienced it growing up and then wrote about it as a New York Post reporter. By using the Moses-Jacobs lens to examine some of the issues I wrote about in the late 1960s and l970s, I come to a different conclusion than many experts on how the city reached the ultra-successful and constantly adapting condition of today – even if suddenly tempered by a colossal national economic meltdown.

The perspective of time is very useful.

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An Activist Awakes

on March 31, 2010 in Jane Jacobs, Quick Take

In 1956, Douglas Haskell, an editor at  magazine, became sick before a speech he was supposed to deliver at the Conference on Urban Design at Harvard University. In his place, he sent his employee Jane Jacobs, a writer with stage fright who had only spoken in public once before in her life. Jacobs used the opportunity to slam developers for ignoring how actually used cities.

“We are greatly misled by talk about bringing the suburb into the city,” she said. “The city has its own peculiar virtues and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the non-city.” Jacobs expected a cold reaction from the crowd, but to her surprise her speech received rowdy applause and put Jacobs on the radar of many urban theorists and developers.

From Wrestling with Moses by Anthony Flint.

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Watching: Jane Jacobs—Parting Words

on March 22, 2010 in Jane Jacobs, Video

Jane Jacobs: Parting Words (2007) from Kevin Balmer on Vimeo.This longer (20 min) video captures Jane Jacobs in one of her last public appearances in Portland Oregon. On tour to promote her book, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs discusses the imperative for culturally diverse and innovative , among many other issues.  I was lucky enough to meet Jane Jacobs on another stop of this tour, in Ottawa, Canada.  Despite being somewhat frail physically, she was full of passion and metal sharpness. But what I remember most about her is her matter of fact way of speaking and the easy way she related to her audience.

“Parting Words” (2007) explores passages from her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). It looks at Jacobs through the eyes of leading Oregon planners and highlights her clear-eyed perspectives on the problems and opportunities facing American cities. The film demonstrates Jane Jacobs’ long and abiding influence on urban design and planning.

Jane Jacobs: Parting Words (2007) from Kevin Balmer on Vimeo.

The film was written and narrated by Chet Orloff, Director, Pamplin Institute & Collection; PSU Adj. Prof. Urban Studies and Planning; President, Oregon Works/Museum of the City; Director Emeritus, Oregon Historical Society.  It was produced and directed by Kevin Balmer, PSU Master of Urban and Regional Planning Graduate (2006); Diggable Films.  The is by Solovox.

Found via Jane’s Walk USA.

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