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.
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.
December 1-2, 2011
New York University
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, NYU and NYU Abu Dhabi are sponsoring a conference in New York City on the global impact of Jane Jacobs’s landmark book outside North America from its publication in 1961 to the present day.
Organized by Hilary Ballon and Harvey Molotch, we are especially interested in papers on the reception of Jacobs’s ideas in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and welcome the participation of practitioners and academicians—urban planners, architects, historians, geographers, etc.
Funding for travel and lodging in New York will be provided for speakers.
Please submit a one-page proposal and c.v. by July 1 to hilary.ballon@nyu.edu and harvey.molotch@nyu.edu.
This video from last summer show activists channeling the spirit (and iconic looks) of Jane Jacobs to help advance their cause:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDtfGtcGPC4
New York City honored Jane Jacobs by naming Hudson Street Jane Jacobs way. Jane fought to preserve neighborhoods and communities, Save Coney Island paid a visit to the ceremony to remind the city what Jane Jacobs stood for.
You can read more about the street (and the controversy) here.
Via txt-Urbia
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 books 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 planning 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.
A few days ago, I came across a cool site called Qu3stions. The site gives readers the opportunity to ‘listen in’ on short but illuminating conversations with interesting people.
While they normally ask questions of living people, they recently decided to take a different tack and profile Jane Jacobs. Instead of asking real-time questions, given that Jane Jacobs passed away in 2006, they instead took three questions—and Jacobs’ answers—from some of her best interviews over the years. This week, I am reposting each question and response.
The final question is from a March 2001 interview with James Howard Kunstler for Metropolis.
JHK: You lived through most of the 20th century and it must make for a dizzying view of contemporary history. For instance, you’ve seen pretty much the whole rise of the automobile from its days of stupendous promise before WWII to its utter savaging of the American landscape and townscape. Can you tell us how your own view of the automobile and its consequences evolved and if your view changed over the decades of your life.
JJ: Well, my family had an automobile before I was born even. My father was a doctor and he needed an automobile to get around. A generation earlier, it would have been a horse and buggy. This automobile was a tool of my father’s, just as much as the bag he carried. We never thought of it as an all-purpose conveyance.
For instance, if we wanted to go to downtown, which was two miles from where we lived in Scranton, we went down to the corner and got the streetcar. We were never chauffeured to things. When my father’s office hours started coincided with one of my brothers and me being in high school very close to where he worked, we used to ride down with him. And once in a while our family would take a trip. I remember when I was four years old going to Virginia in the car to visit his relatives. Oh and I saw how the White House lawn was cropped in those days – there were sheep on the lawn in those days.
I didn’t see the automobile as a pernicious thing. I saw what was happening to the roads as a pernicious thing – the widening of roads and the cutting down of trees and then later on of course knocking down buildings, existing buildings. It was the roads I saw as being the destroyers. Perhaps that is a foolish distinction to make. The automobiles weren’t running into the houses and knocking them down, the automobiles weren’t cutting down the trees and so forth. Again, I’m not an abstract thinker, as you can see. The immediate concrete thing was what the roads were doing.
The 2010 recipients are Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the founders of Friends of the High Line, and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, a founder of the Central Park Conservancy.
Along with the Medal, David and Hammond will receive $60,000 each and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers will receive $80,000. David and Hammond will each give $20,000 of their winnings to Friends of the High Line. Rogers will continue her lifetime of commitment to landscapes and parks by donating her full $80,000 award to the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
Click HERE for the full press release.
Part six of Jane Jacobs‘ Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:
Maps and reality
But the street, not the block, is the significant unit. When a merchant takes a lease he ponders what is across and up and down the street, rather than what is on the other side of the block. When blight or improvement spreads, it comes along the street. Entire complexes of city life take their names, not from blocks, but from streets—Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, State Street, Canal Street, Beacon Street.
Why do planners fix on the block and ignore the street? The answer lies in a short cut in their analytical techniques. After planners have mapped building conditions, uses, vacancies, and assessed valuations, block by block, they combine the data for each block, because this is the simplest way to summarize it, and characterize the block by appropriate legends.
No matter how individual the street, the data for each side of the street in each block is combined with data for the other three sides of its block. The street is statistically sunk without a trace. The planner has a graphic picture of downtown that tells him little of significance and much that is misleading.
Believing their block maps instead of their eyes, developers think of downtown streets as dividers of areas, not as the unifiers they are. Weighty decisions about redevelopment are made on the basis of what is a “good” or “poor” block, and this leads to worse incongruities than the most unenlightened laissez faire.
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York is a case in point. This cultural superblock is intended to be very grand and the focus of the whole music and dance world of New York.
But its streets will be able to give it no support whatever. Its eastern street is a major trucking artery where the cargo trailers, on their way to the industrial districts and tunnels, roar so loudly that sidewalk conversation must be shouted. To the north, the street will be shared with a huge, and grim, high school. To the south will be another superblock institution, a campus for Fordham.
And what of the new Metropolitan Opera, to be the crowning glory of the project? The old opera has long suffered from the fact that it has been out of context amid the garment-district streets, with their overpowering loft buildings and huge cafeterias.
There was a lesson here for the project planners. If the published plans are followed, however, the opera will again have neighbor trouble. Its back will be its effective entrance; for this is the only place where the building will be convenient to the street and here is where opera-goers will disembark from taxis and cars. Lining the other side of the street are the towers of one of New York’s bleakest public-housing projects. Out of the frying pan into the fire.
If redevelopers of downtown must depend so heavily on maps instead of simple observation, they should draw a map that looks like a network, and then analyze their data strand by strand of the net, not by the holes in the net. This would give a picture of downtown that would show Fifth Avenue or State Street or Skid Row quite clearly. In the rare cases where a downtown street actually is a divider, this can be shown too, but there is no way to find this out except by walking and looking.
Next up: The customer is right
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
“This is the church of Jane Jacobs tonight, amen and hallelujah!”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDitwrdH3Fw
Jane Jacobs Remembered: Readings from Jane Jacobs, at the Judson Church, NYC, September 24, 2009. Hosted by ‘Reverend’ Billy Talen of the Church of Life after Shopping and a 2008 Green Party New York City mayoral candidate.
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