A libertarian take on urban renewal. Filmmaker Jim Epstein read The Power Broker
From Planetizen:
Epstein found a number of folks who lived in a black community up on West 99th Street that was cleared by Moses’ Manhattantown project:
“In 2007, Epstein started digging through the archives and interviewing residents to learn more about the neighborhood that had vanished. From this work, he created a 7-minute documentary portrait of the old community…”
Cross-posted on Yurbanism.
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.
[Source: Jane's Walk USA]
Michael Levine, Jane's Walk Phoenix 2010 guide. Photo Credit: Light Rail Blogger on Flickr.
Jane’s Walks tours have been given by grade six students, urban planners, guerrilla gardeners, professors, social historians, avid cyclists, homeless rights activists and former city mayors. Tours are often done with more than one guide, and sometimes up to a dozen collaborators. The walks are all given and taken for free and are meant to be fun and participatory – everyone’s got stories and personal observations and they’re usually keen to share them. Leading a tour simply involves planning a route, thinking through the stories, places and people you want to get people thinking and talking about, then walking participants through it – you decide what’s important.
Jane’s Walk tour guides don’t have to be familiar with Jane Jacobs’ work to lead a tour. Many of Jacobs’ ideas are common knowledge now but were initially introduced in books such as The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane’s Walk tour guides have been very creative in encouraging people to get out and explore a range of neighborhoods and regions from the downtown core to the suburbs and exurbs. Don’t assume for a moment that an area isn’t ‘walkable’. Even if there are parts of your tour that cover areas that are expansive and spread out, these parts of a tour can often be the most interesting because it gets people talking about the strengths and weaknesses of various walking environments.
Here’s a few examples and descriptions of Jane’s Walks given in different cities.
Urban geography from the perspective and authority of the kids who live there. Join the grade 8 geography students from Parkdale Public School for an animated tour of Parkdale. One of Toronto’s most diverse neighborhoods, Parkdale has exploded with cultural activity, seen the encroachment of gentrification, and is also home to new Canadians from almost fifty different countries. Parkdale students will show you the ropes, their secret hangouts and shortcuts, and share their thoughts on the best and worst their neighborhood has to offer, and what could make it better. Pee breaks included. Presented by Mammalian Diving Reflex (www.mammalian.ca).
Salt Lake’s Historic Warehouse District has been a focal point of change since 1980, when a group of artists in need of affordable housing and work space set in motion the area’s transformation from an industrial district to a mixed-use residential mecca. The district’s exponential changes during the past 25 years illustrate fundamental Jacobsian concepts such as mixed-use, eyes on the street, the importance of short blocks and narrow streets, and how local businesses add to a community’s authenticity and vibrancy.
One of Toronto’s oldest chapels; an aboriginal gathering place; one of the finest examples of mural arts in the City; a sculpture garden set in spectacular natural beautify… Where else but in Scarborough – a rich, diverse and dynamic neighborhood. The tour is organized and led by a unique collaboration of grassroots organizations, local youth, historians, urban activists and community developers. It is coordinated through the East Scarborough Storefront, a partnership designed to bring services and support to the people of this diverse community.
Over the past year, efforts to restore the historic vitality of North Point Douglas have been heightened through the work of the residents’ committee and other community groups. This process has been inspired by the concept of “unslumming” that Jane Jacobs described in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Join us as we walk through nearly 200 years of history in North Point Douglas, viewing and discussing landmarks of the neighborhood’s transition from the preferred residential enclave of Winnipeg’s wealthy, to the teeming urban neighborhood of immigrants and industry, years of postwar decline, and the present era of unslumming.
Little India is more than a Bollywood backdrop. Officially named the Greenwood-Coxwell Corridor by the City, it is a neighborhood of contrasts, an “ethnic business enclave” catering to every South Asian cultural taste, but where Chinese is the most commonly spoken home language after English. It is a solidly working-class neighborhood with pockets of poverty, now facing the pressures of gentrification. Join our walk to take in the colors, smells and sounds of Little India, and learn about its diverse history, including a stop at the Gerrard-Ashdale Library in the heart of the bazaar, and ending with a complimentary South Asian snack. And why not stay around for dinner at one of the many restaurants along Gerrard?
City Centre is a neighborhood of hidden gems and special places, including the Alberta Hotel, the “Trees” and Art Central. This walk will visit 15 sites and discuss the design stages and plans for the heart of Calgary’s downtown. This walk includes a free trip up the Calgary Tower to gain a visual overview of the neighborhood.
View the city though the eyes of the unjustly invisible. Several homeless and formerly homeless persons who are still street-involved will point out places of significance: shelters, drop-in centers, and places to congregate and or sleep outside.
Tour guide: John Sewell, former mayor of Toronto from 1978 to 1980. In the late 1940s the city of Toronto embarked on a grand experiment, building the country’s first public housing project, Regent Park. That led to ideas of tearing down other parts of the older city for more projects, including the area north of Gerrard Street (now Cabbagetown) which narrowly averted demolition, and Don Mount (just east of the Don River) which was the battleground where the demolition approach to older neighborhoods was stopped. Today public housing is being rethought and redeveloped. Construction of a new Don Mount is far enough along that some families are moving into the new units, and construction of the first phase in Regent Park is underway. This tour will look at Cabbagetown (briefly), and Regent Park and Don Mount, to see what’s proposed and assess the opportunities and obstacles.
A 90-minute stroll through the history of the bars, beverage rooms and clubs frequented by gays and lesbians on the Yonge Street strip from King to Charles Streets. A lively gay demimonde has flourished in Toronto since the ’50s complete with drag shows, Queen Bee Beauty Contests, lesbian bank robbers, and same-sex slow dancing — doormen would flick the lights to tip off the clientele to the arrival of the morality squad, and the lesbians would quickly switch partners with their gay male friends. In 1964, Maclean’s magazine noted the increasing popularity of bars that catered to, or tacitly accepted, a queer clientele: “Homosexuals have no family, spend a lot of time in bars, drink steadily, tip generously and seldom smash the furniture.” As time passed, the bars moved up Yonge Street. Gays and lesbians transitioned from being simply tolerated in private spaces to claiming public space in their own clubs, like The Music Room and The Manatee, and demonstrations, like Gay Pride, International Women’s Day and the Dyke March.
Flickr Photo by antt_pix (Anthony Rodriguez).
All Jane’s Walks are given and taken for free.
The main Jane’s Walk event takes place annually on the first weekend of May, to coincide with Jane Jacobs’ birthday.
Jane’s Walks can be organized and offered any other time of the year by enthusiastic local people or organizations, although the first weekend in May is the event to which the Jane’s Walk organization devotes its energies and resources.
Local organizers of Jane’s Walk are provided with the administrative resources, infrastructure, network and inspiration to organize great community-led walking tours that energize local residents.
Jane’s Walks are best organized by a broad network of people and groups who share a common concern for making cities more livable but a spectrum of approaches and observations about the neighborhood, the city, the past and future are welcomed. As with all community organizing, the wider the network, the lighter the organizational load for everyone.
Jane’s Walks are a walking conversation. Tour guides lead the conversation with interesting insights and stories about their neighborhood, but also encourage people to share their own opinions and observations. Participants really enjoy the opportunity to meet neighbors face to face and hear each others’ ideas.
A key principle of Jane’s Walk is that it is self-organizing and self-selecting. Anyone can sign up to give a walk by getting in touch with the Jane’s Walk USA team via the web, phone or email.
Tour guides don’t have to be familiar with Jane Jacobs’ work to lead a tour, but we encourage people to find out more by reading her books or consulting our website for more links and primers on her ideas.
Local Jane’s Walk partners should be inclusive, diverse and accessible, welcoming anyone and everyone to participate in the walks and reaching out to people from every neighborhood of the city or town to encourage participation.
Local organizers should be open to whatever concepts people come up with for walking tours, the more personal and idiosyncratic the better, although they should not be used simply for personal or professional gain, promotional or otherwise.
All Jane’s Walk tours are given and taken for free. The walks are led by anyone who has an interest in a neighborhood where they live, work or hang out. They offer a personal take on the local culture, the social history and the planning issues faced by residents. They are not always about architecture. Jane’s Walks work best as walking conversations, with lots of personal observations and examples. Jane Jacobs believed strongly that local residents understood best how their neighborhood works and what is needed to strengthen and improve them.
As always, people face a complex array of challenges and hazards in our social and built environments. The decline in physical health is a problem that is exacerbated by our reliance on mechanical modes of transportation that burden our environment and infrastructure. When it comes to making improvements to the livability and vibrancy of neighborhoods, people are often isolated or unaware of others who may share their interests. Jane’s Walk helps bridge these gaps and encourages people to explore the sidewalks they use for the basic tasks of daily life – tasks like shopping, getting to school and work.
Jane’s Walk encourages an environment where people choose to walk, not merely as a recreational option, but as a viable and enjoyable way to improve health and increase social cohesion.
Jane’s Walk helps pedestrians by providing a simple walkability tool kit, available on our website, which gives the basic tools for recognizing, discussing and improving local walking conditions.
Jane’s Walk often takes Jane Jacobs’ ideas to communities unfamiliar with her ideas, in order to advance local engagement with contemporary urban planning practices.
. . . lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
From Jane’s Walk USA
JANE’S WALK is an effective means of knitting people together into strong and resourceful communities through the common bond of caring about the places they live and work. It is simple, fun and flexible – all sorts of communities, groups, age levels and interests connect with Jane’s Walk programming and our social mapping curriculum, in large part because of its simplicity and sustainability.
Jane’s Walks are more than just informative tours of different city neighborhoods. They also give residents a chance to encounter places and people who may be part of the same city, who care about the same sorts of ideas and places, but rarely cross their paths.
Exploring a neighborhood on foot-especially with someone who lives there-is the best way to get a sense of city life in all its rich particularity. And talking with strangers from different walks of life can help reveal our shared experience, connecting us to something larger than ourselves. Jane’s Walk invites city-dwellers to get out of their cars and get connected, to strike up a conversation, and keep it going after the walk over a coffee, on the sidewalk, or sharing a seat on the transit.
Walkers and guides say that Jane’s Walk is a great opportunity to build social bridges over the geographic, economic and cultural barriers that so often divide our modern cities and towns. By learning about each other’s lives through sharing our varied experiences and environments, we can help foster understanding, citizenship and a sense of belonging, and begin to knit people from diverse backgrounds into a strong and resourceful community.
Jane’s Walk has developed a program to help groups create walking tours using a social mapping curriculum adaptable to many ages and interests. In Toronto, this community walks program has built partnerships in neighborhoods that face shared challenges, including increasing racial and economic marginalization, and limited access to social services, schools, transit, housing and employment. A special focus on the city’s inner suburbs/neighborhoods, often considered unwalkable or even unsafe, highlighted the creativity of these diverse communities outside the downtown core in dealing with their existing walking environment. Guides and walkers explored strip malls now filled with community centers, visited independent shops and restaurants, and learned from youth and other residents about the best hangout spots for local food, green space, people-watching and meeting friends.
The youth got a huge amount out of leading the walk, they are changed by it. They have more confidence and say ‘hello’ now to everyone. They couldn’t believe they could stand up and speak in front of 100 people, and now they know they can. – Toronto
Over the weekend, I came across an interesting article about a recent panel convened at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City to discuss a new book by Brown University professor Samuel (“Sandy”) Zipp entitled Manhattan Projects: the Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Among many other things, the panel engaged in an interesting discussion on the respective legacies of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.
Here’s a passage from the article:
For the last few decades, it has been taken as a given by urban planners that “urban renewal,” the approach to planning in the 1950s and early 60s that resulted in bulldozed neighborhoods, modern public housing projects, and lots of urban highways, was a bad way to go about building a city. It’s axiomatic that a better way to go about it is to make the streets better for people and worse for cars, and encourage “mixed-use” development, among other things.
In New York specifically, Robert Moses, the post-war king of roads and “slum-clearance” made infamous by Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, has come to stand for urban renewal, and Jane Jacobs, who idealized and sought to preserve the West Village, and whose Death and Life of Great American Cities is still considered a prerequisite read for students in the field, represents the reaction.
That’s the history. But the cultural and intellectual legacy of urban renewal today is something a lot more complex.
The article ends with this quote:
“We used to say we plan at the scale of Robert Moses, but we judge ourselves by the standard of Jane Jacobs,” [New York City Planning Commissioner Amanda] Burden said in her introduction. “That’s not really true anymore. We judge ourselves now by Jan Gehl’s standard.”
Here is installment number two of Jane Jacobs‘ Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:
How hard can a street work?
The best place to look at first is the street. One had better look quickly too; not only are the projects making away with the noisy automobile traffic of the street, they are making away with the street itself. In its stead will be open spaces with long vistas and lots and lots of elbowroom.
But the street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and for themselves, through mid-block lobbies of building block-through stores and banks, even parking lots and alley, communication. Users of downtown know very well that downtown needs not fewer streets, but more, especially for pedestrians. They are constantly making new, extra paths for themselves, through mid-block lobbies of buildings, block-through stores and banks, even parking lots and alleys. Some of the builders of downtown know this too, and rent space along their hidden streets.
Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens
Rockefeller Center, frequently cited to prove that projects are good for downtown, differs in a very fundamental way from the projects being designed today. It respects the street. Rockefeller Center knits tightly into every street that intersects it. One of its most brilliant features is the full-fledged extra street with which it cuts across blocks that elsewhere are too long. Its open spaces are eddies of the streets, small and sharp and lively, not large, empty, and boring. Most important, it is so dense and concentrated that the uniformity it does possess is a relatively small episode in the area.
As one result of its extreme density, Rockefeller Center had to put the overflow of its street activity underground, and as is so often the case with successful projects, planners have drawn the wrong moral: to keep the ground level more open, they are sending the people into underground streets although the theoretical purpose of the open space is to endow people with more air and sky, not less. It would be hard to think of a more expeditious way to dampen downtown than to shove its liveliest activities and brightest lights underground, yet this is what Philadelphia’s Penn Center and Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center do. Any department-store management that followed such a policy with its vital groundfloor space, instead of using it as a village of streets, would go out of business.
Next up: The animated alley
Here is the first installment of Jane Jacobs‘ ”Downtown is for People’ essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:
This year is going to be a critical one for the future of the city. All over the country civic leaders and planners are preparing a series of redevelopment projects that will set the character of the center of our cities for generations to come. Great tracts, many blocks wide, are being razed; only a few cities have their new downtown projects already under construction ; but almost every big city is getting ready to build, and the plans will soon be set.
What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well kept, dignified cemetery.
And each project will look very much like the next one: the Golden Gateway office and apartment center planned for San Francisco; the Civic Center for New Orleans; the Lower Hill auditorium and apartment project for Pittsburgh; the Convention Center for Cleveland ; the Quality Hill offices and apartments for Kansas City; the downtown scheme for Little Rock; the Capitol Hill project for Nashville. From city to city the architects’ sketches conjure up the same dreary scene; here is no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own.
These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety. There is one notable exception, the Gruen plan for Fort Worth; ironically, the main point of it has been missed by the many cities that plan to imitate it. Almost without exception the projects have one standard solution for every need: commerce, medicine, culture, government-whatever the activity, they take a part of the city’s life, abstract it from the hustle and bustle of downtown, and set it, like a self-sufficient island, in majestic isolation.
There are, certainly, ample reasons for redoing downtown – falling retail sales, tax bases in jeopaardy, stagnant real-estate values, impossible traffic and parking conditions, failing mass transit, encirclement by slums. But with no intent to minimize these serious matters, it is more to the point to consider what makes a city center magnetic, what can inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there. For magnetism is the crux of the problem. All downtown’s values are its byproducts. To create in it an atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance is not a frivolous aim.
We are becoming too solemn about downtown. The architects, planners—and businessmen—are seized with dreams of order, and they have become fascinated with scale models and bird’s-eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant: buildings come first, for the goal is to remake the city to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be. But whose logic? The logic of the projects is the logic of egocentric children, playing with pretty blocks and shouting “See what I made!” – a viewpoint much cultivated in our schools of architecture and design. And citizens who should know better are so fascinated by the sheer process of rebuilding that the end results are secondary to them.
With such an approach, the end results will be about as helpful to the city as the dated relics of the City Beautiful movement, which in the early years of this century was going to rejuvenate the city by making it parklike, spacious, and monumental. For the underlying intricacy, and the life that makes downtown worth fixing at all, can never be fostered synthetically. No one can find what will-work for our cities by looking at the boulevards of Paris, as. the City Beautiful people did; and they can’t find it by looking at suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities.
Mellon Square in 1955 (image courtesy of the Heinz History Center)
You’ve got to get out and walk. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong. You will see, for example; that a worthy and well-kept institutional center does not necessarily upgrade its surroundings. (Look at the blight-engulfed urban universities, or the petered-out environs of such ambitious landmarks as the civic auditorium in St. Louis and the downtown mall in Cleveland. (Look at Pittsburghers by the thousands climbing forty-two steps to enter the very urban Mellon Square, but balking at crossing the street into the ersatz suburb of Gateway Center.)
You will see that it is not the nature of downtown to decentralize. Notice how astonishingly small a place it is; how abruptly it gives way, outside the small, high-powered core to underused area. Its tendency is not to fly apart but to become denser, more compact. Nor is this tendency some the cores has been on the increase, and given the long-tern leftover from the past; the number of people working within growth in white-collar work it will continue so. The tendency to become denser is a fundamental quality of downtown and it persists for good and sensible reasons.
If you get out and walk, you see all sorts of other clues. Why is the hub of downtown such a mixture of things? Why do office workers on New York’s handsome Park Avenue turn off to Lexington or Madison Avenue at the first corner they reach? Why is a good steak house usually in an old building? Why are short blocks apt to be busier than long ones?
It is the premise of this article that the best way to plan for downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them. There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. This does not mean accepting the present; downtown does` need an overhaul, it is dirty, it is congested. But there are things that are right about it too, and by simple old fashioned observation we can see what they are. We can see what people like.
Next up: How hard can a street work?
Jane Jacobs’ home at 69 Albany Road, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood. She lived here for 37 years, from 1968 until her death in 2006. Via ~woot~.
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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