CityReads│What Jane Jacobs Got Right and Wrong about Cities?

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What Jane Jacobs Got Right and Wrong about Cities?

What Jane Jacobs got so right about cities—and what she got wrong.

Robert Kanigel,2016.Eyes on the Street:The Life of Jane Jacobs, Knopf.

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Now, in the year of Jane Jacobs’s centenary, with the biography out there, along with a new collection of her uncollected writings, “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs” (Random House), and an anthology of conversations between her and various friends, “Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House), it seems fair to pay her the compliment of taking her seriously—to ask what exactly she argued for, and what exactly we should think about those arguments now.

Jane Jacobs wrote seven books, but is remembered most by one of them, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, continuously in print ever since, and heralded as the book that has shaped how people see cities and what they expect of them. She saved neighborhoods; stopped expressways; was arrested twice; and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates, all of which she won. She is called “the most influenced urban thinker of all time”,”genius of common sense”,”godmother of urban America,”, an “Urban Thoreau”, and “The Rachel Carson of the economic world”.

Her admirers and interpreters tend to be divided into almost polar opposites: leftists who see her as the champion of community against big capital and real-estate development, and free marketeers who see her as the apostle of self-emerging solutions in cities.  In a lovely symmetry, her name invokes both political types: the Jacobin radicals, who led the French Revolution, and the Jacobite reactionaries, who fought to restore King James II and the Stuarts to the British throne.

She is what would now be called pro-growth—“stagnant” is the worst term in her vocabulary—and if one had to pick out the two words in English that offended her most they would be “planned economy.” At the same time, she was a cultural liberal, opposed to oligarchy, suspicious of technology, and hostile to both big business and the military.

When Lewis Mumford reviewed Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in these pages, in 1962, it was under the now repugnantly condescending title “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies.” But it conformed to the image of Jacobs that, with her help, had become prevalent: that of an ordinary Greenwich Village mom, in sensible bangs and oversized glasses, out to protect the neighborhood from the destructive intrusions of alien big shots. Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be a caricature.

Kanigel, who has found the right tone for his subject, light but serious, introduces us to the young Jane Butzner, as she was born, in 1916. His portrait of growing up in the Butzner family, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is hugely attractive.

Her parents were the kind of old-fashioned “nonconformists’’—not exactly bohemian, and certainly not radical. Confident in their social status, not least because they descended from a secure background (there were Daughters of the American Revolution in the family tree), they indulged their daughter’s eccentricities, clearly seeing them as part of her character, her “spunk.” A skeptic of authority from the beginning, she staged a grade-school rebellion against having to pledge to brush your teeth—she wasn’t against the brushing, just the coerced promise—that led to her being briefly expelled.

She believed that authority could be laughed away, a powerful notion for a provocateur to take through life. The young Jacobs also held long imaginary conversations with the Founding Fathers, dismissing Jefferson’s abstractions in order to talk to the more practical-minded Ben Franklin, who “was interested in nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details, such as why the alley we were walking through wasn’t paved, and who would pave it,” as she recounted to an interviewer.

Scranton was a thriving capital of the coal industry in those days, but it quickly fell on harder times, and the regular evocation, in her work, of thriving rather than stagnant cities surely echoes her sense of the fine little town’s rise and fall. Though an ambitious theorizer, she is at her best as an observer: she leaps plenty, but she looks first.

Jacobs found her vocation quickly but her subject very late. She spent several years working for a magazine called Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. Only in the mid-nineteen-fifties did she begin writing about urban issues and architecture, first for Architectural Forum and then for Fortune, which offered a surprisingly welcoming home to polemics against edifice-building.

She married an equally cheerful, nonconformist architect, Robert Jacobs, and they moved—just before the first of their three children was born—into a house at 555 Hudson Street, an address that, for certain students of American originals, has attained the status of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden.

A paragraph heading in a piece for Fortune summed up her new belief: “The smallness of big cities.” Big cities thrived, she wrote, because they were full of healthy micro-villages; small ones became overdependent on one or two businesses, turning into plantation towns with company stores (as Scranton had been too dependent on coal).

She became notorious for attacking Lincoln Center, then under construction. A cynosure of everything forward-looking and ambitious in urban design, it represented to her, almost alone, the apotheosis of the “super blocks” that destroyed the “hurly-burly” of city life.

It was against this background of established notoriety that Jacobs published, very much under the guidance of the editor Jason Epstein, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” The book is still astonishing to read, a masterpiece not of prose—the writing is workmanlike, lucid—but of American maverick philosophizing, in an empirical style that descends from her beloved Franklin.

A celebration of the unplanned, improvised city of streets and corners, Jacobs’s is a landscape that most urban-planning rhetoric of the time condemned as obsolete and slummy, something to be replaced by large-scale apartment blocks with balconies and inner-courtyard parks. She insisted that such Corbusian super blocks tended to isolate their inhabitants, depriving them of the eyes-on-the-street crowding essential to city safety and city joys.

She made the still startling point that, on richer blocks, a whole class of eyes had to be hired to play the role that, on Hudson Street, locals played for nothing: “A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a form of hired neighborhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes.”

The book is really a study in the miracle of self-organization. Without plans, beautiful shapes and systems emerge from necessity. The book rises to an unforgettable climax in a passage on the Whitmanesque “sidewalk ballet,” one of the most inspired, and consciousness-changing, passages in American prose:

Two core principles emerge from the book’s delightful and free-flowing observational surface. First, cities are their streets. Streets are not a city’s veins but its neurology, its accumulated intelligence. Second, urban diversity and density reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations—clubs, broadly put—they demand; and, the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them. The two principles make it plain that any move away from the street—to an encastled arts center or to plaza-and-park housing—is destructive to a city’s health.

If Jacobs’s micro-observations are still thrilling, at least one of her big ideas now seems just wrong. She believed in that virtuous, reoxygenating circle whereby density—and short blocks and small green spaces—guaranteed diversity. This no longer seems so.

In the past fifteen years, the density of my Upper East Side block has remained constant, and the play of old and new buildings, parks and streets is unchanged. (No one can build without several years of planning hearings.) But we have lost two toy stores, a magazine store, a cigar store, and a stationery-and-card store, and gained two banks, a real-estate office, a giant Duane Reade drugstore, and three French baby-clothes stores.

This pattern is felt everywhere in the city. The old neighborhood is helpless in the face of new pressures, ones that Jacobs was not entirely willing to name or confront. What kept her street intact was not a mysterious equilibrium of types, or magic folk dancing, but market forces. The butcher and the locksmith on Hudson Street were there because they could make a profit on meat and keys. The moment that Mr. Halpert and Mr. Goldstein can’t turn that profit—or that Starbucks and Duane Reade can pay the landlord more—the tempo changes. The Jacobs street, a perfect reflection of the miracle of self-organizing systems that free markets create, becomes a perfect reflection of the brutal and unappeasable destruction that free markets enforce.

The West Village may be unrecognizable today, but it is not because the underlying forces working upon it have changed. It is because they have remained exactly the same. The seeming contradiction between the Jacobite Jane and the Jacobin Jane arises from the reality that markets in street frontage, as in everything else, are made and unmade in a moment.

Jacobs acknowledged this at various moments, and suggested as a solution intricate forms of micro-zoning to protect diversity from self-destruction. Can diversity be protected by such means? Many have tried, but the truth is that “neighborhood protection” is often another name for exclusion.

The new crisis is the ironic triumph of Jacobs’s essential insight. People want to live in cities, and when cities are safe people do. Those with more money get more city than those with less. Jacobs did try to offer a plan for coping with the problem of too much success, though one voiced with an uncharacteristic and mournful vagueness: “Affordable housing could have been added as infill in parking lots and empty lots if government had been on its toes, and if communities had been self-confident and vigorous in making demands, but they almost never were.”

She also advocated public-private partnerships that she called “guaranteed-rent” buildings, involving carefully graduated rent subsidies. Micro-zoning, infill building, guaranteed-rent programs: whatever one thinks about the chances of such schemes, one thing is certain—they require an immense amount of centralized planning to work. Self-emerging systems are not self-governing systems. It takes intervention to sustain them.

The real reason that neither Jacobin nor Jacobite principle can solve this city problem is the conflicting demands of liberty and of equality—the freedom to live where you want and the freedom to stay where you are—can’t be neatly theorized away. Blaming neoliberalism, as leftists do, or statist bureaucrats, as reactionaries do, is to seek, despite historical, political, and organizational differences, a one-size-fits-all villain, not an actual analysis.

That’s where planning matters and politics counts. Jacobs seldom gives a good account of the place of politics in city-making. Politics is the planners, and exists as an afterthought to the natural order of cities. And it’s true: politics isn’t a self-organizing system. It’s not a ballet. It’s a battle. But it remains essential to reconcile goods, like free streets and fair housing, that will never reconcile themselves. Some basic differences in what’s desirable in human affairs can never be resolved, only reconciled on an episodic and empirical basis, as best we can manage.

Most big ideas turn out to be half right, half wrong—and, as time goes on, the right bits look ever more obvious, while the wrong bits look really wrong.

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