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.
[Source: Jane's Walk USA]
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists.
Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With a keen eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centred approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads. She lived in Greenwich Village for decades, then moved to Toronto in 1968 where she continued her work and writing on urbanism, economies and social issues until her death in April 2006.
A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work and play.
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.
In advance of this year’s Jane’s Walks, taking place on May 6-8, 2011 in cities across North America and around the world (including Phoenix!), Sharable: Cities posted the following perspective by Jay Walljasper, author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons
A Jane's Walk tour peeks into the backyards of Montreal. (Credit: Photo by This is Not Dan under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com
Spring is just around the corner, so here’s a bright idea to celebrate the season and discover hidden pleasures in your neighborhood– organize a Jane’s Walk.
Since 2007, thousands of people in more than 50 cities around the world enjoy time during the first weekend of May exploring nature, culture, history and architecture in their own backyard as way to mark Jane Jacobs birthday.
Jacobs, mother of today’s urban livability movement, revolutionized how we think about our communities in her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Her common sense approach to saving urban neighborhoods emphasized walkable streets and community connections over freeways and massive urban renewal schemes.
Her friends and colleagues in Toronto– her adopted hometown– organized the first Jane’s Walk the year after her death, and the tradition quickly spread across Canada and then to places as far as Omaha, Madrid and Mumbai.
Organizing a Jane’s Walk is simple, and provides the perfect excuse for getting outdoors in the fresh spring air to research what’s cool about your neighborhood. Each walk is initiated by volunteers who chart an interesting course that shows off the area’s special spots and unique character. Some Jane’s Walks have focused on gay and lesbian history, homeless people or urban planning controversies.
You don’t need a history or architecture degree to lead one, just the curiosity to dig around in local history, urban ecology, social issues and cultural assets. Team up with your friends to share your collective knowledge.
A few years back, before Jane’s Walks, I took a similar tour of my neighborhood in Minneapolis from local historian Tom Balcolm who pointed out a row of Victorian houses that once graced a country estate, the tiny storefront where famed record producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis (Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Usher, Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Mariah Carry and the Spice Girls) first set up shop, and the site where a Northwest Airlines plane crashed into three houses in 1950, killing 15. Finding out about these places made me look on neighborhood in a new light.
Here’s how to get started (Canada)
Here’s how to get started (United States)
If you would like to host, or help out with a walk in Arizona, please let me know.
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.”
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 Villager, a well respected weekly newspaper serving downtown Manhattan, ran an obituary this week for Erik Wensberg. Mr. Wensberg was a friend and ally of Jane Jacobs during her battles against Robert Moses in the 1960s.
From the obiturary:
Erik Dana Wensberg, a writer, editor and longtime Village resident who worked with the late Jane Jacobs in the successful efforts to prevent the destruction of the neighborhood 40 years ago, died June 5 at age 79. He died of pneumonia, said his sister, Eleanor Pelcyger.
…
With Jacobs, he was a founding member of the West Village Committee and joined her in the successful effort to block the urban renewal project that would have destroyed 14 blocks of the Village. He also joined the fight to block Robert Moses’ 1963 plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway from river to river on Broome St.
In an interview in April 2006, Wensberg told The Villager, “We didn’t win them all. We opposed the [N.Y.U.] Bobst Library, saying it was a waste of space and would cast a shadow on Washington Square Park. It does. And we opposed the World Trade Center.”
Jacobs enlisted Wensberg to read and edit the manuscript of her groundbreaking book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” before she submitted it to her editor at Random House, according to his sister.
“She was only one of many authors who sought his expert editorial advice,” Pelcyger said.
…
Read the whole article here.
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 planning 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 urbanist 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 observations 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 People appeared in the April 1958 edition.
Together these essays address the problems of urban decline and suburban sprawl, transportation, 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.
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!
Jane's Walk Phoenix: No problem Taz. I'm glad I found a great new coor...
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