Tag Archives: Urban planning

Jane Jacobs on her book “Dark Age Ahead”

on May 17, 2011 in books, Jane Jacobs, Video

Original broadcast May 2004.

 

Jane Jacobs, visionary, , and guru of , talks about her last , Dark Age Ahead

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Who is Jane Jacobs?

on March 15, 2011 in Jane Jacobs

[Source: Jane's Walk USA]

have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

—The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, -based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, , introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, , 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 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.

 

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Channeling Jane Jacobs

on October 13, 2010 in Video

This video from last summer show activists channeling the spirit (and iconic looks) of  Jane Jacobs to help advance their cause:

httpv://www..com/watch?v=bDtfGtcGPC4

honored Jane Jacobs by naming Hudson Street Jane Jacobs way. Jane fought to preserve and communities, Save Coney Island paid a visit to the ceremony to remind the what Jane Jacobs stood for.

You can read more about the street (and the controversy) here.

Via txt-Urbia

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Is it time to move beyond Jane Jacobs?

on October 11, 2010 in books, Jane Jacobs

Over the weekend, I came across an interesting article about a recent panel convened at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York  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 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 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.”

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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 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 critic.

American 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 , and about what we believe is correct and desirable about .

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 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 ’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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Stephen Goldsmith, Editor of What We See, in Gothamist

on August 5, 2010 in books, Jane Jacobs

On Tuesday,  I posted a review of the book What We See: Advancing the of Jane Jacobs.  As I mentioned in the review, one of the books editors was Stephen Goldsmith.  At the time of the book’s publication, Stephen wrote a post for Gothamist on the life  and legacy of Jane Jacobs.  Here is what he had to say:

Illustration by Robert Cowan

Here in New York, Jane Jacobs is best remembered for killing the Lower Manhattan Expressway project, and writing “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“. Why is her work still important today? Jacobs’ work is important today because her common sense approach to city building can empower others to be the experts of their places. She was ahead of her time in many ways, and particularly her understanding of the interconnected nature of our social, environmental and economic systems. Jacobs changed the way we think about cities and understood that cities are complex eco-systems that, when functioning well are resilient, cauldrons of innovation.

People who learn about her observations of the ballet of the street for instance never see our sideswalks the same again. The city becomes a stage, a place where our human interactions–both direct and indirect–animate our lives and our places. Another great example of Jacobs’ importance is the way policy makers and law enforcement personnel understand the importance of what she described as “eyes on the street.” After the failed bomb attempt in Times Square earlier this month a number of articles cited Jacobs’ wisdom, and how a couple of street vendors saved the day. Her importance is more important now than ever before because she empowers citizens to trust their instincts.

In “Death and Life”, she argued that lively mixed-used are the key to successful cities. If she was still alive today, what do you think she would think of the state of our city? One thing that those of us who had the privilege of time with Jacobs knew was to never second guess what she might think about anything. She was full of surprises, unexpected insight and never dogmatic. One thing I can share is that during her last visit to NYC in 2004 she remarked how vibrant she found the city to be. She came to deliver the first annual Lewis Mumford lecture at City College and filled the hall–standing room only.

Jane Jacobs’ urbanist philosophy seems to have largely been embraced by the current generation of city planners. Where do you think her ideas have had the greatest physical impact here in New York?One way to observe how her ideas are having the greatest impact, and there are many examples to be sure, are in projects such as Majora Carter’s efforts with Sustainable South Bronx , and Alexie Torres-Flemming’s work with Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. One might even make the case that the High Line project is an outgrowth of her sensibilities.

Consider the reclamation of these abandoned, neglected places and the new life they have, the way these places have learned to become something new. Jacobs ideas have catalyzed ways of thinking about preservation, about integrated uses that even manifest themselves in such things as local manufacturers capturing downstream waste for new materials, such as Ice Stone in Brooklyn. The integrated way she viewed cities, economies, ecologies and people encourages creative responses to complex problems.

Here is the link to the original post

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The citizen

on July 18, 2010 in Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs

The final installment of Jane Jacobs‘  Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:

The citizen

The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. So it should be in the future; planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his , after all; his job is not merely to sell plans made by others, it is to get into the thick of the job himself.

He does not have to be a planner or an architect, or arrogate their functions, to ask the right questions:

  • How can new buildings or projects capitalize on the city’s unique qualities? Does the city have a waterfront that could be exploited? An unusual topography?
  • How can the city tie in its old buildings with its new ones, so that each complements the other and re-inforces the quality of continuity the city should have?
  • Can the new projects be tied into downtown ? The best available sites may be outside downtown—but how far outside of downtown
  • Does the choice of site anticipate normal growth, or is the site so fat away that it will gain no support from downtown, and give it none?
  • Does new building exploit the strong qualities of the street-or virtually obliterate the street?
  • Will the new project mix all kinds of activities together, or does it mistakenly segregate them?

In short, will the city he any fun? The citizen can he the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk. He should walk not only the streets of his own city, but those of every city he visits.

When he has the chance, he should insist on an hour’s walk in the loveliest park, the finest public square in town, and where there is a handy bench he should sit and watch the people for a while. He will understand his own city the better—and, perhaps, steal a few ideas.

Let the citizens decide what end results they want, and they can adapt the rebuilding machinery to suit them. If new laws are needed, they can agitate to get them. The citizens of , for example, are doing this now; indeed, citizens in every big city planning hefty redevelopment have had to push for social legislation.

What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely before has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that he likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

END

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading  this essay over the past several days.  If you want to read it in its entirety, click HERE.

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Downtown is for People

on July 6, 2010 in Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs

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 . 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 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?

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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 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, , city politics, , 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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Why Jane Jacobs Rock – Blooming Rock’s Take on Jane’s Walk Phoenix

on April 29, 2010 in Jane's Walk, Walk Details

One of the best aspects of organizing an event like Jane’s Walk Phoenix is an opportunity to connect with other people doing their own cool things.  Yesterday I re-posted an article by my friend Nick Bastien of RailLife.com.  Today, I have the privilege of sharing a recent post by my good friend, architect, Taz Loomans’ Blooming Rock blog.

Why I think Jane Jacobs Rocked and Why You Should Participate in Jane’s Walk Phoenix

The 2nd Annual Jane’s Walk Phoenix
Saturday, May 1, 2010
9:00 am
Starting at AmenZone, 106 E. Buchanan St.

What is it?

From Magazine's profile of last year's Jane's Walk

This is an annual walk put on by urbanist Yuri Artibise in honor of Jane Jacobs who was a community activist, amateur urbanist and advocate of walkable . There are several Jane’s Walks that occur throughout different in the US, but Yuri brought it to Phoenix, a place that is in dire need of the ideals espoused by Jane Jacobs. Find out more about this remarkable woman and her accomplishments here.

Why I think Jane Jacobs Rocked!:

Jane Jacobs - photo from Time Out New York

She wasn’t trained as an urbanist. She was just a housewife with kids who cared about what happened in her city. She’s proof that one person can make a tremendous difference. And I love that she was a woman. Yes, that makes a difference. She’s an inspiration to all of us who might think we don’t have a voice. She was just a housewife with little formal training, in a man’s world, going against 150 years of established urban planning practices. The fact that she was able to have such a huge impact against all odds is a great inspiration. So I not only admire Jane for the urban theories she developed but I admire her more so for the person that she was.

3 Reasons Jane’s Walk Phoenix is an Important Event for the Development of Phoenix:

The Warehouse District - Photo from Downtown Phoenix Journal

  1. It gives face time to the little-known, disconnected warehouse district of downtown. I personally get to go to AmenZone every Sunday for Kundalini Yoga. Every time I go, I’m surprised at how very quite this area is. Granted, our downtown is too quiet as a whole on the weekends, but this particular area seems isolated and separate even though it’s physically not that far away from other downtown activity.
  2. The more awareness there is of this area, the more ideas and interest there will be in developing it. Other cities have done a great job in developing their warehouse districts into vibrant, hopping places with restaurants, galleries, studios, and lofts. The question is, can we do it here?
  3. It’ll bring people together as a community to talk about the future of this area. The way things go in Phoenix is more in our hands than we know. Instead of leaving the way our city looks, feels and works in the hands of out-of-state developers with deep pockets, can we take ownership of the city and encourage smart development based on local, sustainable and creative businesses and adaptive reuse? Participating in this walk is one way to take ownership and pride in our city and to have a say in what goes on here like Jane Jacobs did.

Are you on board? Am I going to see you there on Saturday? Also don’t miss Jane’s Talk at the historic San Carlos Hotel on Tuesday, May 4 from 7-9pm.

Are you inspired by what Jane Jacobs did? How can we tailor her ideals to our challenges in Phoenix? Let’s discuss, leave me a comment!

Thanks again Taz!  You Rock!!  (Blooming Rock, that is :-) )

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