By the time you read this, Jane Jacobs will have been gone for about a month. She died in Toronto on April 25 at the age of 89. There are probably few readers who haven’t heard or read multiple stories about Jacobs’s life in recent weeks — but I couldn’t let her passing go unremarked in New Urban News.
Jacobs differed in significant ways from new urbanists. She disliked and distrusted large-scale planning. She focused exclusively on cities and concerned herself little with the problems of small towns and suburban sprawl. She didn’t think her ideas about how cities work applied outside of cities. Not surprisingly, Jacobs didn’t see herself as a new urbanist and was at times critical of New Urbanism. Despite all that, new urbanists saw Jacobs as a heroine, an inspiring figure who was almost above criticism: I have never personally heard a new urbanist speak critically of her.
New urbanists were not alone in their immeasurable regard for Jacobs. Often, people saw in Jacobs’s writings a confirmation of their own beliefs. Libertarians praised her for her opposition to heavy handed government urban renewal projects. Leftists admired her as an antiestablishment rebel. She was many things to many people.
What was her appeal to new urbanists? Jacobs hated intellectual dishonesty. She also hated ideologues who ignored or were blind to observable reality. She saw plenty of both in the modernist planners and architects of the 1950s and 1960s — the worst decades of city design and development, not just in US history, but ever. Moreover, Jacobs was not afraid to publicly state an iconoclastic view and she pulled no punches.
Still influential
Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one tough book. It continues to inspire, but in 1961 it was a revelation. It literally turned planning on its head. At the time, planners and urban designers were drastically increasing block sizes, separating uses fanatically, moving the functions of life away from the street, and reducing density.
“At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space,” noted Douglas Martin in The New York Times, “Ms. Jacobs’s prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a joyous urban jumble.”
Death and Life made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity, Martin notes: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.
All of these principles are aligned, more or less, with the New Urbanism. Even the stipulation that buildings must vary in age is not contrary to a movement that builds neighborhoods and towns from scratch. Where preservation of old buildings is possible, new urbanists are eager to do it, for many of the reasons that Jacobs espouses.
Jacobs’s ideas hold up well. One can find, for example, in Death and Life, support for form-based codes four decades before they began to catch on in mainstream planning. What new urbanists have most in common with Jacobs is a deep respect for observation and the details of urban form, and a visceral disdain for city planning in the middle of the 20th century.
The agenda of new urbanists is far broader than Jacobs’s agenda ever was — it takes in the physical form of entire regions and offers an alternative to conventional suburban development, for example. New urbanists believe that compact, mixed-use, walkable development with small blocks is just as important in small cities, towns, villages, and hamlets as it is in Jacobs’s beloved Greenwich Village and Toronto. But these ideas are translated differently in different places. That takes away nothing from Jacobs’s seminal influence on the planning profession in general, and new urbanists in particular.
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