What We See

Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Stephen A. Goldsmith, Lynne Elizabeth

• Verlag: New Village Press
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781613320716
• Thema: Arquitectura
• Thema: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs' lifework, What We See invites thirty pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs' economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs' insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.The book models itself after Jacobs' collaborative approach to city and community building, asking community members and niche specialists to share their knowledge with a broader community, to work together toward a common goal of building the 21st-century city.The resulting collection of original essays expounds and expands Jacobs' ideas on the qualities of a vibrant, robust urban area. It offers the generalist, the activist, and the urban planner practical examples of the benefits of planning that encourages community participation, pedestrianism, diversity, environmental responsibility, and self-sufficiency.Bob Sirman, director of the Canada Council for the Arts, describes how built form should be an embodiment of a community narrative. Daniel Kemmis, former Mayor of Missoula, shares an imagined dialog with Jacobs, discussing the delicate interconnection between cities and their surrounding rural areas. And Roberta Brandes Gratz?urban critic, author, and former head of Public Policy of the New York State Preservation League?asserts the importance of architectural preservation to environmentally sound urban planning practices.What We See asks us all to join the conversation about next steps for shaping socially just, environmentally friendly, and economically prosperous urban communities.

SECTION 1

Vitality of the Neighborhood

1 . 1

BETWEEN UTOPIAS

Deanne Taylor*

UTOPIA IS A DESTINATION so beautiful and beneficial for all, quite a few must be hideously sacrificed en route. The city of Toronto does not dream of such perfection. Its civic imagination is shaped by generations of immigrants unfit for utopias around the world: people who fled Divine Monarchs, Great Oarsmen, Beloved Leaders, Infallible Clerics, Infamous Tyrants and Obscure Social Engineers, war, reservation, pogrom, gulag, holocaust, apartheid, genocide, slavery, conscription, torture, and endless utopian techniques of great evil for a Greater Good. Toronto’s collective anthem or civic prayer might be “No megalomania, please, we’re between utopias.”

Between -Isms, between Ideals, between Paradise and Hell, Torontonians are free from the weight of a purely racial, religious or ideological destiny—relieved by the relative lightness of being Canadian. Thanks to centuries of creative resistance by Aboriginals and les Canadiens français, Canada’s nationality is not based on the simple solidarities of ethnicity but on shared political ideas like liberty, justice, and enfranchisement—complex principles and instruments that evolve with use. Once acquired, these legalistic entitlements may not fire the blood, wet the eye, set armies marching, or unleash collective passions as flags, martyrs, myths and hymns can do, but that’s the idea. Citizens are free to be as English or Irish, as American or Iraqi, as Indian or Pakistani as they can, as long as they don’t blow up each other’s discos.

Toronto’s messianic potential is tempered not only by a cool nationality but by an even cooler climate. The city’s natural antidote to old crusades and new insurrections is winter, when all Torontonians are created equal and made peaceful by wearing parkas. Shivering in slush, reaching home before frostbite, thawing out, ensuring supply lines: the tyranny of winter demands alliances with neighbors and co-workers on the ecumenical and apolitical basis of a war against cold. The city unites in puffy coats and runny noses; newcomers are woven into the ancient rhythm of shoveling snow for people who threw their backs out while shoveling snow; all are linked for survival in mitt-borrowing and boot-lending without regard for race or creed. In spring, Torontonians are filled with gratitude for the return of light and warmth and are not the fodder of grandiose missions, but more inclined to cultivate their own gardens, water their neighbors’ yards while they’re away, and pick up litter in the local park.

Toronto is a young metropolis whose taxation and planning powers are firmly in the parental grip of a provincial government. Whenever the city threatens to mature, it is restructured or vastly expanded, arresting its sense of city-hood. Now comprised of 640 square kilometers, a hundred languages and ten centuries of custom, Toronto is almost unknowable. In the outlying areas, dispersed suburban tracts, high-rise slums, and expressways conspire to stunt social and economic life; but in the older and densely residential core, the city’s scale and cultural dissonance are moderated by hundreds of village-like neighborhoods, which socialize and civilize their inhabitants with human-scale buildings and byways created and recreated since the nineteenth century. Few neighborhoods are monocultural, or homogenously rich or poor; most embrace residents of many mother cultures and means, and feature modest homes, decent schools, safe parks, community centers, snow removal, tree doctors, wildlife rescuers, and a billion dollars worth of policing to discourage sociopaths and illegal parking.

Most vitally, at the physical centers of these neighborhoods are low-rise, fine-grain, mixed-use mainstreets where the social, entrepreneurial, and recreational energies of the community gather, recombine, and evolve. Blessed with laws, humbled by climate, unburdened by history or destiny, Torontonians remake the world in their small communities, adding yoga, sweat lodge, dim sum or donuts to their lives. Neighbors meet easily and frequently in local stores, schoolyards, parks; they transcend private beliefs to share common aspirations—healthy children, peaceful streets, stable work, helpful neighbors, mutual respect. Toronto’s genius for hyper-local improvisation and collaboration sustains social peace and economic stability in hundreds of organically grown neighborhoods. Here, Toronto fashions small miracles of civilization: multiple urban ecosystems of social and entrepreneurial imagination, the DNA of civic life.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

To live in Toronto is to live in two cities at once, one real, one virtual. For most residents the real city is a few neighborhoods, the familiar places of home, work and play, experienced with feet on the pavement, hand on a tree, eye on a sunrise, ear to the street, nose in the bakery. Beyond the body’s intimate knowledge is a virtual city of words and images, a postcolonial city built with shards of history and avalanches of media, a city of myths, brands, and megaplans. Those who create the virtual Toronto, who spin virtu-topian stories of its gifts and possibilities, who frame the city’s history and therefore its future, are always those who own the biggest microphones. Toronto’s most amplified mythmakers are the oracles of media, business, politics, and city planning.

In the mirror of the local mass media, Toronto glimpses its cutest, saddest, proudest, most horrifying features, and wherever a little is magnified, much is hidden. Some journalists seek to reflect the city’s true character, but most publishers and broadcasters are faithful to Toronto’s colonial tradition of emulating or importing rather than creating, and derive the bulk of their advertising and content from the American infotainment empire. So complete is the local habit of self-effacement, many broadcasters, editors and reporters are proud to call Toronto “Hollywood North”—to honor the city’s branch-plant film industry. “Hollywood North” and “Broadway North” are the simu-topian dreams of those who see Toronto as a sequel to a really successful utopia. Industriously, they shape the city as a local backdrop for the foreign celebrities of mass-market TV, movies, music, sports, and fashion, and much profit is made without risk by those with no need to invent, develop, produce and distribute original goods.

Imported vision is the preference not only of the media but of all the higher echelons of Toronto’s corporate class. In the boardrooms and conference rooms of big business, the ideal city is a franchise, based on the magic formulae, branding and investment of a mightier power: this is The City That Goes Ka-Ching. For these corporate utopians, Toronto is real estate and ad space, where citizens are consumers, City Hall is a business facilitator, and politics is an extension of deal-making. To make their dreams come true, corporate leaders and lobbyists groom political candidates, finance and run election campaigns, write and promote public policy for private profit, and show an enthusiasm for civic politics that literally knows no bounds. With the passion of soothsayers, they urge Torontonians not to hoard public property as their grandparents did; not to pass on to their children the natural infrastructure of the city, the waterfront, greenspace, sky, sunlight, vistas; not to bequeath public space, public services, public institutions, but rather to unload these assets quickly to stave off the virtual bankruptcy of the virtual city.

The ideal Toronto conjured by the media and big business is well represented at City Hall, where few challenge the basic models of Hollywood North or The City That Goes Ka-Ching. Indeed, the better to serve such visions, City Hall has largely replaced the old language of the public interest with the shiny new ad-speak of profit and promotion. The idea of taxation as a collective investment in social harmony has been succeeded by tax phobia, a disorder accompanied by the wasting disease “downloading” in which expenses rise and tax revenues shrink until local government is all stick and no puck. Understaffed and underfinanced, the public service often depends on private studies and statistics, on private development or purchase of public assets, on privately underpaid workers and the “lower costs” they are said to ensure. With think tanks and summits, with Power Point spiels and adbuys, with job offers and junkets, with campaign-financing and editorial endorsements, Toronto’s most powerful private interests engage the minds and gild the tongues of public servants. And City Hall, grappling with hundreds of thousands of micro-decisions, is all too grateful for utopian metaphors and slogans, language that orders the chaos of democracy, language that conjures the common good while justifying particular evils.

The vernacular spirit of Toronto is informal, ingenious, quite romantic and full of fun... The official spirit of Toronto is... impressed with mediocrity if it’s very very big and expensive.

—Jane Jacobs, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Constructed of hype, branding, polls, and other rumours, the virtual Toronto is a comforting home filled with flattering portraits of the leading citizens, a glamorous home adorned by celebrity architects and visiting superstars, a wealthy home that desires only an Olympian bankruptcy to cap its ambitions. Through years of practice Toronto residents manage to ignore the contradictions between the virtual city and their own tangible neighborhoods; that is, until the two collide—and in the oldest parts of the city collisions are constant. Though already marred by decades of ugly “renewal” and mall-aping “transition,” the civility and creativity of residents and entrepreneurs make the area vitally attractive, and the let’s-make-a-deal zoning offered by City Hall has made the area speculatively priceless. Every day on someone’s block the megadreams of developers and planners crash into the treasured equilibrium of a neighborhood ecosystem, demanding the sacrifice of a precious aspect—a sunny sidewalk or window, a fine-grain block of main street, a lakefront, a vista of natural or architectural grace. At City Hall, where dreams become bylaws, where abstractions become all too concrete, Virtu-topia meets the Neighborhood in a contest of urban vision.

This contest plays out continuously for stakes great and small. On one side are corporate lobbyists and strategists, paid by the year, friendly with politicians and bureaucrats, fluent in laws and loopholes, and armed with the civic goods of Progress, Development, Investment, Intensification, or Tourism. On the other side of the contest is the volunteer neighborhood group, funded by bake sales, composed of a few veterans and raw recruits, and armed with the civic goods of Stability, Harmony, Beauty, Heritage, Local Innovation. Some call this no contest, some call it the tough love of democracy.

In every neighborhood battle lost or won, residents and small business owners grow new civic muscles. For every condo tower eclipsing the sun, for every threat of an expressway, airport, incinerator or megaproject, new political energy gathers in quiescent neighborhoods. As long as planners, developers and politicians blueprint perfect cities, real communities resist.

When citizens have activism thrust upon them, they discover there is honor in being a member of the unofficial government of the verifiable Toronto, but the price of voluntary participation in politics is dear—thousands of life-hours for meetings and mailings, for studies and bylaws opaque in their specialized idioms, years of deputations to inattentive City Councillors, and lifelong status as Nimbys (Not In My Back Yarders), or Selfish Interests, or A Few Malcontents Standing In The Way Of Market Forces and Other Inevitabilities. In any development skirmish, neighborhood residents are not in the right until proven wrong, but immediately charged as Enemies of the Common Good, and forced to defend what Arundhati Roy calls the Greater Common Good, the officially unrecognized Good that does not sacrifice the small, real and irreplaceable treasures of nature and culture.

I hate the government for making my life absurd.

—Jane Jacobs on activism. Interview with the journal Government Technology.

Such citizen-governors stand in the path of the utopian bulldozers and cranes that would plunder the land and sky and diminish community wealth for the benefit of a few, all in the name of “growth.” As victories are usually temporary and losses usually unjust, many inspired or irate citizens do not return to an apolitical state, but rather are propelled deeper into the mysteries of electing city politicians, providing them with evidence and direction, cultivating a neighborhood meeting by meeting, voter by voter. Yet most of these battles are so local and idiosyncratic they have yet to snowball into a citywide movement for better planning—most planners and even most politicians seem to prefer it that way. For decades, the left wing of council has joined the right wing in support of large developments and grotesque rezoning. No doubt some councillors truly love these towering, big-boxing, block-busting edifices, but just as surely almost all are addicted to the crack cocaine of city planning—large dollops of cash from de...