I recently learned that there is a new audio edition of Jane’s Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. So if you are more a listener than a reader, you now have no excuse not to absorb Jacobs’ wisdom.
Personally, I think it would be cool to listen to the book with strolling through my neighborhood. That way I could make my own observations while listening to Jane’s.
The Guardian’s Ned Beauman is re-reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Here are a few passages from his article:
Jacobs, who died in 2006, never published any fiction herself, but she certainly had a novelist’s sensitivity to human relations. She argues in Death and Life, for instance, that one of the paradoxical advantages of urban existence is privacy. In contrast to the suburbs, a dense neighbourhood has lots of convenient places to stop and chat, so you can be on friendly terms with dozens of people who live or work near your home without ever feeling the slightest obligation to invite any of them inside for tea:
“Under this system, it is possible in a city-street neighbourhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offence, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships.”
If these things had truly been lost to New York, we would never have got Seinfeld, but the point still stands. How many professional city planners have considered everyday life so carefully that they’ve remembered to take all the nanophysics of social awkwardness into account?
[...]
Plenty of the requirements Jacobs sets out for building a healthy and diverse urban community can be applied with real success to building a vivid and plausible fictional community. Death and Life, in other words, is a sort of accidental creative writing textbook – perhaps appropriately so, because Jacobs’s beloved West Village was itself full of writers. Early on, Jacobs says:
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance.”
But the art form of the city is not really dance. The art form of the city, described so well in that passage, is the novel.
Jane’s Walk, a Project of Tides Canada Initiatives (TCI), celebrates the ideas and legacy of urbanist Jane Jacobs by getting people out exploring their neighbourhoods and understanding how their communities and cities work.
Its signature event – free walking tours held on the first weekend of May each year – gives locals a platform to tell stories of their neighbourhoods, encourages conversations about who plans and builds them and the experience of those who live there, and in the process, inspires people to come together to make them more walkable and liveable.
On the first Jane’s Walk weekend in May 2007, 1,000 people took part in 27 walks in Toronto. Since then, the event has inspired walkers everywhere, and the Toronto-based initiative has seen explosive growth in activity during the annual weekend.
During the fifth anniversary Jane’s Walk weekend in May 2011, 20,000 people strolled in 500+ free, volunteer-led walks in 75 cities across 15 countries worldwide, including in Berlin, Dublin, Goa, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manhattan, Montreal, New Orleans, Tel Aviv, Whitehorse, La Paloma, Uruguay and Wuhan, China! [and Phoenix too!]
Jane’s Walk seeks a visionary and entrepreneurial individual to provide strategic and operational leadership as Director. This person will be interested in guiding the initiative through its next stage of evolution, and will be excited by the challenge of establishing its long-term financial sustainability.
This is an extraordinary time in the evolution of Jane’s Walk. As local participation and global interest are at all-time highs Jane’s Walk faces the core challenge of developing a long-term financially sustainable model for delivering the initiative. The Director has an exceptional opportunity to turn a strong and promising initiative into a truly sustainable, global phenomenon.
The Director works closely with, and is answerable to, an Advisory Committee of committed volunteer members and to Tides Canada Initiatives (TCI), which acts as financial and legal trustee.
The annual compensation range is $65,000 to $80,000 commensurate with experience. A term contract will be negotiated and will be renewable based on funding and upon agreement by both parties.
Individuals with the requisite experience are invited to apply with a covering letter and resume (in ONE PDF or Word document) in confidence to chair@janeswalk.net by October 24, 2011.
Only those candidates who are being considered for interviews will be contacted.
For more information about Jane’s Walk and Tides Canada Initiatives, please visit:
http://www.janeswalk.net/ ; http://tidescanada.org/projects/
As Jane’s Walk is a Project of Tides Canada Initiatives Society (TCI), the selected candidate will be a contractor to, or an employee of, TCI.
[via JanesWalk.net]
Jane Jacobs talks about her book “The Nature of Economies.” In it, she asserts that economies are governed by the same rules as nature itself. (Originally aired April 2000).
Via: the good bike
Early this morning, I was out on my bicycle and came across the Jane Jacobs bike on Albany Avenue. I want to thank you for the smile, and for reminding me of the good things: of Jane and seeing her in her poncho; and of that little corner park. Jane’s spirit is there, and the bike is great. Thank you.
Linda (Toronto)
A short television segment from 1969, shortly after Jacobs moved to Canada.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9833TPWSCY
From CBC TV’s “The Way It Is” program, circa 1969, urbanist and author Jane Jacobs compares late 1960s Toronto and Montreal on how they have been planned and built, while condemning major highways planned for GTO.
A great video produced by the Active Living Network (a project of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). It features an interview with the urban goddess herself. The clip explores the role of the built environment in physical activity and public health. It’s 9 minutes and 46 seconds VERY well spent).
I love her support for skateboarding as an important of youth physical activity. Lots of good aphorisms at the end as well.
I came across this post on the neighborhood nomad blog—”a study of our homes, our neighborhoods, & the power of physical places in a virtual world.”
The post makes a lot of interesting points, but the key question for Jane Jacobs students comes in the second paragraph:
What would Jane Jacobs make of these places we live today, of neighborhood transformations like those on Washington, D.C.’s H St. or the southeast waterfront? Are the evolutions of these places measuring up to her standards for well-functioning city neighborhoods?
And what would Jane Jacobs think of all the time we now spend in our virtual world instead of our physical one? What would Jane Jacobs — an observer so big on the concept of “eyes on the street” — make of how we interact (and often don’t interact) in the age of Twitter?
The post ends by asking: “Would Jane Jacobs tweet about the happy hour special down the block?”
My answer: Probably.
Be sure to read the whole thing.
Bob Dylan and jane Jacobs both lived in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Indeed, this is where Jane got many of her ideas of how a city should work, including here famous aphorism ”Eyes on the Street’.”
While this video focused on Dylan’s haunts in the Village, it isn’t hard to imagine Jane hanging out and many of them as well. For example, Both Jane and Bob were known to frequent the White Horse Tavern. Who knows, maybe they shared a drink or two.
Jane's Walk is a series of free neighborhood walking tours to get people in touch with their environments and each other. Jane's Walks help citizens celebrate their communities and to discover themselves... all over again. Jane's Walk Phoenix will return in May 2012. Stay tuned for details!
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