The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs

Sonia Hirt, Diane Zahm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136211898
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Here for the first time is a thoroughly interdisciplinary and international examination of Jane Jacobs's legacy. Divided into four parts: I. Jacobs, Urban Philosopher; II. Jacobs, Urban Economist; II. Jacobs, Urban Sociologist; and IV. Jacobs, Urban Designer, the book evaluates the impact of Jacobs's writings and activism on the city, the professions dedicated to city-building and, more generally, on human thought. Together, the editors and contributors highlight the notion that Jacobs's influence goes beyond planning to philosophy, economics, sociology and design. They set out to answer such questions as: What explains Jacobs's lasting appeal and is it justified? Where was she right and where was she wrong? What were the most important themes she addressed? And, although Jacobs was best known for her work on cities, is it correct to say that she was a much broader thinker, a philosopher, and that the key to her lasting legacy is precisely her exceptional breadth of thought?

Chapter 1

Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary¹

Sonia Hirt

If the President of the American Planning Association were to follow the example of the British Crown and bestow the honour of a knighthood on the most meritorious community members, Jane Jacobs would have become a Dame long ago.² After all, Jacobs is occasionally referred to as ‘folk hero’, ‘Queen Jane’, ‘Saint Jane’ and ‘Jane of New York’.³ Such statements of near-religious worship cannot, of course, be taken seriously. There is, however, little doubt that Jacobs is one of the most influential thinkers who contributed to the revolutionary intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s, along with Thomas Kuhn, Ian McHarg, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, John Rawls, to name a few. It has become customary to associate these authors with a ‘paradigm shift’ in some aspect of human thought and practice. According to Max Page, the term applies well to the impact of Jacobs’s works and activism: after mistakes in urban renewal practices were laid bare in the 1960s, the city-building paradigm changed ‘not slowly and steadily but rapidly and radically, with Jane Jacobs leading the campaign’ (Page, 2011, p. 7).

Jacobs is ranked no. 1 on the list of urban thinkers of all time according to Planetizen, a popular urban planning website. These rankings were the result of an online poll, in which Jacobs received an ‘impossibly wide lead’ above her competitors.⁴ True, we sometimes hear dissenting voices — ‘enough with Jane Jacobs already’ (Manshel, 2010) and ‘outgrowing Jane Jacobs’ (Ouroussoff, 2006) - but these remain in the minority. In fact, based on the number of citations, fifty years after the publication of her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs’s influence has only been growing with time (Harris, 2011).

I am saying all this not to advertise Jacobs (she clearly does not need it) or to advertise this book (which clearly does need it), but to ask why, among urban planners, designers and others who claim expertise on cities, her popularity is peculiar, since she was not particularly kind to them. But she was exceptionally kind to their subject, cities, and this may hold the secret to her appeal.

My colleague Diane Zahm and I put this volume together hoping to understand better why Jacobs’s legacy persists. Is her reputation warranted? What did she bring to the way we think not ‘just’ about cities but about society and space?

We organized the contributions in four groups: I. Jacobs, Urban Philosopher; II. Jacobs, Urban Economist; III. Jacobs, Urban Sociologist; and I V. Jacobs, Urban Designer. This disciplinary division was not easy. Jacobs disliked specialized knowledge and what she had to say never fits into neat disciplinary boxes. This may be why so many find her work appealing. We did not include a part on Jacobs as a planner. This is because it seems that her impact on planning — itself an inter-disciplinary field — has been exerted not only directly but also through her influence on philosophy, economics, sociology, design, etc. In this sense, all chapters fit under ‘Jacobs, Urban Planner’. We could envision a different, conceptual/empirical division. Some of the chapters discuss Jacobs’s influence on an entire discipline (e.g. Jonathan Barnett’s chapter on design), or on concepts that permeate the core debates within a discipline (e.g. Sanford Ikeda’s presentation on the ‘Jacobsonian’ view of economic development and Emily Talen’s on ‘design for diversity’); whereas others attempt — empirically or through a review of the literature — to substantiate or refute particular Jacobs’s propositions (e.g. Paul Cozens and David Hillier’s critical query into the connection between Jacobs’s idea of ‘eyes on the street’ and safety). We believe, however, that the grouping of chapters we have chosen emphasizes more than other books Jacobs’s intellectual breadth.

In short, what do the chapters tell us? To begin with, Jacobs was certainly a philosopher. We could guess this from the fact that she explicitly moved in this direction in her later years; two of her last books, Systems of Survival (1992) and Dark Age Ahead (2004), are statements on political philosophy. After all, philosophers write about three things: the good, the true and the beautiful and Jacobs hit them all. Paul Kidder argues that Jacobs made a major contribution to philosophy by exploring the balance between the good and the right. In my chapter, I discuss how Jacobs arrived at her notion of what is true. Ben Fraser seeks to prove Jacobs’s influence on philosophy by pointing to her influence on two prominent philosophers: Lefebvre and Delgado Ruiz. James Stockard’s lively essay is not technically on philosophy but implicitly applies Jacobs’s ideas of right and good — the ones discussed by Kidder — to planning and citizen participation.

Part II comprises two chapters: one by Sanford Ikeda showing how Jacobs countered prevailing wisdom in economics by arguing that cities are a major cause of economic development (rather than a spatial artefact that occurs at a certain point of economic development), and one by Saskia Sassen which speculatively explores what Jacobs would have seen in present-day debates of the global city — one of the hottest topics in economic geography today.

The third part on Jacobs and sociology includes two essays dealing with a crucial issue in sociology: race, space and inequality. The authors, Marie-Alice L’Heureux and Mindy Fullilove, somewhat disagree. L’Heureux appears to support Herbert Gans’s (1968) claim that Jacobs underestimated the structural obstacles surrounding African Americans, whereas Fullilove takes a more positive view of Jacobs’s legacy by focusing on the role that space plays in transforming social relations.

Jacobs’s influence on urban design comprises the largest part of the book. Part IV starts with Emily Talen’s evaluation of Jacobs’s contribution to a key topic in this field: designing cities to promote social diversity. Talen asks a question that has cast a long shadow on designers: if serendipity and flexibility are part of good urban form, much as Jacobs, Christopher Alexander (1965) and Richard Sennet (1970) argued, can it be designed? Talen’s piece is followed by three empirical attempts to answer this question, all in cities outside of the USA. Jing Xie’s essay on medieval China gears towards answering this question in the negative. In Xie’s view, there is no straightforward connection between spatial configurations and human activity. The essay implicitly supports Jacobs’s claim that rigid intentional ordering of space does not produce better urbanism but challenges her position that space and behaviour are tightly related. By taking us to Beirut and Chiang Mai respectively, Ibrahim Maarouf and Hassan Abdel-Salam, and Kan Nathiwutthikun take a more benign view of Jacobs. Maarouf and Abdel-Salam apply Jacobs’s proposition of the four ‘generators’ of urban diversity (mixed uses, short blocks, aged buildings and concentration) to central Beirut, ultimately claiming that the proposition holds true. Nathiwutthikun’s piece offers a perspective that is in short supply in the literature: it concretely operationalizes the diversity of human activities and assesses whether Jacobs’s spatial ‘generators’ of diversity impact these activities in the way she would have expected. Paul Cozens and David Hillier’s chapter challenges one of Jacobs’s most famous theses: that collective security can be achieved through having people (and their ‘eyes on the street’) in vibrant public spaces. The next three essays, although technically on urban design, take us implicitly back to the philosophical concepts of the start of the book. Anirban Adhya connects Jacobs’s thinking to design paradigms popular today, such as sustainable urbanism and placemaking. But beneath the design focus lurk bigger, philosophical questions of how people know and construct the world around them. Similarly, B.D. Wortham-Galvin’s contribution on design as cultural practice touches upon deeper issues of people, power and knowledge. Jonathan Barnett’s text comprehensively synthesizes Jacobs’s contribution to urban design and planning, which warrants its position as a concluding chapter.

Let us now return to the original questions driving this project. What explains Jacobs’s lasting appeal? Is her influence justified? Was she right? What was the most important theme she addressed? Where was she wrong? And, although Jacobs is best known for her work on cities, are we correct in saying that she was a broader thinker and this may be the key to her lasting legacy?

The following partial answers seem to emerge. First, Jacobs was an author of big, paradigm-shifting ideas and not ‘just’ on cities. Far from being a ‘victim’ of mere, even ‘extreme empiricism’ — long the conventional wisdom and still held by some today (Roweis, 2004) — Jacobs was a theory-builder who asked big questions about society and space but gave only a general direction for the answers (Harris, 2011). I am more sympathetic to those who accuse her of unsystematic research than those who accuse her of being averse to theory. Jacobs’s work is significant because it produced path-breaking ‘starting points’ for new research, in the terminology of her contemporaries Glaser and Strauss (1967). It is not the type of work focused on empirical verification/ falsification of existing theories (although she certainly sought to refute some). Xie’s and Nathiwutthikun’s chapters are examples of verification/falsification work; Jacobs’s writings belong in another category. The ‘big ideas’ along with the fact that Jacobs appears to have proposed several of them generally ahead of others, as Barnett shows, qualifies her for the ‘urban visionary’ label.

Now, some of her ideas continue to be controversial (e.g. Ikeda illustrates how Jacobs went against conventional wisdom on cities and economic development and her argument is still a subject of controversy). Jacobs proposed but sometimes lacked the rigour to prove her ideas. She overstated the role of space in shaping behaviour (as Xie, Cozens and Hillier, and Wortham-Galvin argue, partially in the footsteps of Gans). But that seems to be the faith of big thinkers: they give the genesis of big and controversial starting points for others to prove or disprove.⁵ I am not sure which of Jacobs’s ideas was ‘biggest’. But from the chapters in this volume, it seems that her ‘discovery’ of the functional and normative value of diversity as a necessary component of successful, self-organizing and complex systems comes very high on the list. Along with this conceptual contribution, she also made an important methodological one. She shifted the scale of analysis and interpretation: from abstract to concrete; from statistically ‘representative’ to everyday; from bird’s eye view to street level; from coldly ‘scientific’ to warm and human. She shifted the way we view cities and other things around us (as Adhya’s chapter explains). No wonder a very good recent volume on Jacobs is titled What We See (Goldsmith and Lynne, 2010). Jacobs’s humanization of the object of analysis and narration⁶ is most evident in The Death and Life, but she puts it succinctly in one of her best signature phrases, which she used during a speech at Harvard: ‘A store is also a storekeeper’ (1956).

Jacobs may have been wrong on some issues (e.g. in overemphasizing the role of local, physical agency in changing societal, structural conditions), but some of her ardent followers have taken this flaw to an extreme (e.g. the New Urbanists in their confidence they can produce better society through better architecture, as argued by Wortham-Galvin). At least Jacobs, even in her old age and having acquired a near-beatification status, retained a sense of modesty. Writing to New York’s Mayor, she introduced herself simply: ‘Dear Mayor Bloomberg: My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities.’ Perhaps she would have appreciated this label, ‘student of cities’, more than the ‘urban visionary’ stuff.

Notes

1. This is also the title of Alexiou’s book (2006).

2. This is not just a joke. Lewis Mumford became a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975 and Peter Hall in 1998, both for services to town planning.

3. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/janejacobs/ and http://www.planninghistory.org/JJ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Contributors
• 1 Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary
• Part I Jane Jacobs, Urban Philosopher
• Part II Jane Jacobs, Urban Economist
• Part III Jane Jacobs, Urban Sociologist
• Part IV Jane Jacobs, Urban Designer
• Index