Often the Google Doodles honor someone I don’t know, but that’s all good because those form Teaching Moments. Today’s Doodle, honoring the 100th birthday of Jane Jacobs (she died in 2006), is one of these (click on the screenshot to go where the Doodle goes):
I’ll let reader Barn Owl, who sent me the link, sum up the honoree:
Today’s Google doodle features Jane Jacobs, a journalist and community activist who wrote an excellent book entitled The Death and Life of Great American Cities (among many other articles and books). It’s so full of insight and wisdom about urban planning and city life, that it’s difficult to believe (with the arrogance of 21st century hindsight) that the book was published in 1961.
But I also found a piece in today’s Slate, right at the top of the Google search, called “Bulldoze Jane Jacobs.” (Subtitle: “The celebrated urban thinker wrote the blueprint for how we revitalize cities. It’s time to stop glorifying her theories.”). It claims that the communities she advocated: diverse, small-scale, and containing local businesses, eventually become gentrified, like Greenwich Village. This is above my pay grade, I don’t know what to think, and so throw it to interested.
Urban planning is America is a great idea but there has never been much of it. She was fighting a losing battle most of the time.
I agree with her thinking, such as the suburbs are a joke but what can you do. The money and land developers call the shots. Also, segregation has always been a requirement.
If you are old enough you can remember when the cities had a transportation system and often it was clean. It was called the trolley car. But GM and the oil companies did not like it.
You need to spend a day in the car with my wife. The continual complaint (correctly) about the near complete absence of planning in British cities is a constant litany. I do point out that she is pretty much completely correct – in that most British cities, at least in their centres, are fossilised on lines laid down in the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, somewhat before the invention of the motor car ; that most of them didn’t get carpet-bombed in the 1940s (unlike many European and Russian cities), and so still didn’t get much provision for cars, and since home ownership (as opposed to renting from a relatively limited number of landlords) makes re-building city streets an absolute nightmare, the 2-fold expansion in car use in the last 30 years has very little provision for it. But even though I agree with her that it’s a mess, she still seems to think it’s my fault!
So, America has even less urban planning? Great! Is negative planning logically possible (as opposed to mere bad planning)?
“…she still seems to think it’s my fault!”
When my husband used to vent, he just assumed I knew he was merely letting off steam, not ranting at me. But when I’d do the same to him he’d get defensive and assume he was being attacked.
Are you sure your wife’s not just expressing her frustration?
Oh, just expressing frustration I’m sure. but she still seems to think that cities should be torn up and re-built for mere century-long fads like motorised personal transport. That’s insane when the reasonable expected lifetime for cities can easily be in the multiples of centuries, and they are very energy-intensive artefacts.
It’s interesting to me the Jacobs helped save Toronto, her birthplace, and mine. The Spadina expressway would have chopped through the neighborhood where I grew up, but it was stopped after initial work.
Lawrence Avenue went through an empty farm field when I was born. After the war, every Canadian soldier like my father was given, I think, $20,000 and many used it to build homes in the suburbs. My father build on Lawrence doing all the work himself. We lived in the basement while he added the upper stories, cement block by cement block.
“Notable among the opposition was urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who moved to the Annex in 1969, fresh from a battle to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York City. Marshall McLuhan, too, was opposed to the expressway.” – Wikipedia.
The Slate article was terrible. It says that she had the right ideas, but city planners ignored half of them, and now that the results have led to gentrification. It’s all Jacob’s fault. But by the end, the city planners should listen to the other ideas, too, but also not “deify” her. What a nonsense.
Agree. Article reads like a vindication of her theories, not a repudiation of them. The author is right to point out that social and economic inequality is a barrier to reproducing these communities where they are most needed, but that’s hardly Jacob’s fault.
My disclaimer is that I’m merely a dabbler in urban studies and an observer of city life and adaptations – I have no expertise on these topics, just long-standing interest, and experience living in several large cities as a middle-class person. The author of the Slate article is being taken apart in the comments section, possibly deservedly so. It doesn’t seem to me that he’s actually read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, or much of anything else substantive on urban studies. He doesn’t offer any alternatives, or mention other, more recent, books on urban planning. One such book I can recommend is Urban Acupuncture, by Jaime Lerner, an architect who was the mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, and helped implement some sustainable and innovative transformations there. I’d love to read some first-hand experience of Curitiba from another WEIT reader(s) in the comments here!
I just know her as one of the people credited with helping to stop Robert Moses from going ahead with the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have destroyed Greenwich Village and Soho, IIRC.
Seems like a noble thing to me.
The author of the Slate article is an idiot. He blames Jane Jacobs for saving lower Manhattan and other urban areas from insane overdevelopment and highways–because some of those places have gentrified more than he likes. He himself admits that Jacobs addressed the fact that over-gentrification could happen if planning didn’t, wasn’t able to, include affordable housing etc. But then continues to blame Jacobs anyway. Kudos to Google for celebrating Jane Jacobs.