By Michael F. Duggan
“Who is this crazy dame?”
-C.D. Jackson, Publisher
Long before it was Star Wars Day, May the 4th was Jane Jacobs’ (1916-2006) birthday. She was an intuitive genius and one of the great nonfiction writers of the late 20th century. Her groundbreaking book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), changed the discussion about city planning and preservation over night. It is considered a classic (although I think her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” is just as good).
With modest formal credentials, and not looking the part of a revolutionary, Jacobs took on Le Corbusier and the big boys in urban planning, and is generally considered to have won the debate. She challenged conventional ideas about how cities and neighborhoods really work and was pilloried for her views. The problem was that she was usually right (and wrote in remarkable prose–a stylistic quality of writing that can’t be taught). She wrote books–about 10 of them–up to the end of her life. Some of her later writings (e.g. “Dark Age Ahead”) are not as optimistic her earlier writings.
Jacobs believed that neighborhoods and cities are complex organic structures and that excessive planning created new problems and made existing problems worse (she wrote that “urban renewal” was based on “the myth of the salvation of bricks”–the fallacy that new buildings alone would somehow cure deeply-seated social ills of neighborhoods). Some critics have observed that she may have underestimated what would become urban gentrification.
In the 1960s, she warned against tearing down old neighborhoods and putting up the much vaunted Title 1 urban “projects” that she prophetically warned would become high-rise hellholes that would end up being worse than what they replaced. Neighborhoods should be saved and nurtured, not destroyed. Her writings on how economies work as naturalistic local and regional phenomena is equally impressive, and she offered a model of capitalism that is less predatory that what we have.
Banding with local groups in her neighborhood, she took on Robert Moses when he wanted to push a freeway through Greenwich Village (and Midtown, and Uptown) and won (not many people beat Moses on his own turf). Imagine if the Village and lower Manhattan had gone the same way as the Bronx.
She was one of those public intellectuals, who, when they are gone, makes you feel as if the world has lost some of its rationality, insight, and sanity. If you have not yet read her, you should add her to your list.