The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs
Review by Anthony Flint, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
In considering the enduring legacy of Jane Jacobs, it is not only true that the self-described housewife from Scranton left us an owner's manual for successful urbanism. Her principles related to block size, building diversity, walkability, street-level storefronts, and eyes on the street, are all spelled out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities(Random House, 1961) and are accepted as gospel in the planning and design professions today. That nearly universal embrace is all the more remarkable because hers was such a thorough and harsh critique of planning, if not a rebuke, especially in her later work, of the very concept of planning.
Jacobs panned not only the play, but the idea of directing a play. She scoffed at Daniel Burnham's admonition tomake no little plans. In her lifetime she was beloved by right-leaning libertarians, including William F. Buckley, Jr. She contributed to an amicus brief against takings in economic development initiatives in the landmark case Kelo v. New London. More recently, Tea Party activists have employed tactics to shut down planning hearings that are straight from Jane Jacobs, as she practiced civil disobedience fighting slum designation for the West Village and Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway.
Sonia Hirt gets right to the point in the introduction to The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs, a rich collection of essays from a wide range of thoughtful contributors. She aptly poses the question of “why, among urban planners, designers, and others who claim expertise on cities, her popularity is peculiar, since she was not particularly kind to them” (p. 1). Has Jacobs been properly interpreted? Or perhaps more accurately, have her ideas been appropriated, tailored, or extrapolated? These are important questions to ask.
To try to better understand the persistence of the Jane Jacobs legacy, the book is organized in four major sections: Jane Jacobs as Urban Philosopher, Urban Sociologist, Urban Economist, and Urban Designer. The essays are best in shedding light on the current context for planning, as in the contribution of James Stockard, who examines the sometimes tortured public process and consensus-building framework for city building today.
In considering the diversity ideal Jacobs espoused, Emily Talen's chapter takes a step back to assess diversity writ large, not only in physical form, but also socioeconomic composition. That Jacobs's neighborhood today includes some of the hottest real estate in the country underscores the continuing problem of housing supply and gentrification, which Jacobs called oversuccess, and suggests that solutions lie beyond self-organizing processes, in more intentional planning policies such as inclusionary zoning.
The breadth and depth of this collection is impressive, including an analysis of Jacobs's eyes-on-the-street framework in the context of crime in the 21st-century built environment. Her principles are also analyzed in the context of such diverse topics and contexts as urban form in medieval China, open and public space in Thailand, and redevelopment in Beirut. A central theme in the international realm is left largely unaddressed, however: the notion of scale.
Mega-cities in the developing world are bracing for a massive influx of hundreds of millions of predominantly poor people in search of a better life and in need of decent housing and services. The urban expansion project of the next half-century, chronicled in Schlomo Angel's Planet of Cities (Lincoln Institute, 2012), suggests the great challenge of replicating Greenwich Village in these rapidly growing metropolitan areas.
In the absence of long-range planning and attention to infrastructure and density at a greater scale, the proliferation of informal settlement seems inevitable. Jacobs, of course, saw value in the self-organizing dynamics of the favela. But one wonders, given the 6.2 billion people projected to be in urban areas by 2050, how these cities will not unravel without, well, big plans.
What's missing is not so much a rejection of Jacobs (the pendulum need not swing wildly back and forth) but a synthesis. For that the prerequisite is a fuller understanding of her work, which this collection unquestionably helps us to achieve.