"A genius version of the little old lady in tennis shoes"

Why it's better for "older" -- in pre-pc days known as "old" --  women to go the brain-in-a-jar route. Jane Jacobs (above), who just died, made her sparkling, indelible mark with The Death and Life of American Cities, but her image as a "little old lady in tennis shoes" is writ large in the image above. (Aaron Harris - AP) You don't want to go there. Update: Apparently Ms. Jacobs herself would have begged to differ with us, having told the photographer Alex Waterhous-Hayward ten plus years back "Don't try to soften up my face, this is who I am." On the other hand, reports the NYT, "Roger Starr, a former New York City housing administrator and sometime opponent of Ms. Jacobs, keenly noted the steel just beneath her folksiness. 'What a dear, sweet character she isn't,' he said." Nobody's perfect.

"In a way, she's a genius version of the little old lady in tennis shoes -- the cranky broad in the visor cap who hangs out at the library, and who shows up at every town meeting to let her views be known," wrote Michael of 2blowhards just two months ago before the timely death Tuesday -- she was a grand old 89 -- of Jane Jacobs.

"We're still living in the shadow of this gigantic mistake, just as we're still living in the shadow of Vietnam," Michael wrote recently re the unintended consequences of the "pave-the-country-over hyperdrive" known as "urban renewal" that ran roughshod over the rich tapestry of our nation's urban landscape a couple of generations back. As far as we know, that movement reflected the unforeseen consequences of good intentions, but we can't help but think of the intentional Gramscian infiltration of our intellectual institutions during the same period that led to the politically correct anti-Americanism that infects our nation's intelligentsia in academia and the media to this day. Michael continues:

What in God's name were they thinking of? In short order, steel-and-glass towers were being thrown up all over the country; the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed into law, leading to the biggest engineering feat in the country's history; and the atrocity known as "urban renewal" was set in train. Plow it under! Build it anew!

. . . Thousands of communities were destroyed. Millions of people were forcibly relocated. So many of these people were black that black people joked about urban renewal, bitterly calling it "Negro removal." Tens of billions of dollars were spent in an almost entirely destructive fashion . . .

Has anyone ever fully explained what was going on in people's minds during those Le Corbusier-besotted/big-project/top-down years? As far as I can tell, the country was high on its victory in World War II, was thrilled to be done with the Depression, was delighted by the new and the shiney, couldn't have liked automobiles better, and was feeling even more can-do than usual. Still, is that enough to explain how far things went?

Not at all. The All-American love affair with the automobile had nothing to do with it. Transportation innovations, from the trolley and railroad to the SUV have always enticed our fellow Americans to head out of the city to greener pastures:

Planners and bureaucrats were determined to "rationalize" everything they could get their hands on. Where cities were concerned, this meant separating functions out from one another. Places where people lived were to be made distinct from the places where they worked. "Open space" -- open space in the abstract -- was considered to be everywhere and always a good thing. After all: sunlight, fresh air, etc. In practice many of the new "open space"-style parks simply didn't work. Not a surprise: Parks need to be crafted as carefully and respectfully as buildings do. Many of these new-style empty-space parks quickly turned into windswept blights: garbage-dumps and crime-nests.

We trace it back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "noble savage," unwitting progenitor of  "post-modernism, Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Transcendentalism and both Thoreau and avant-garde art," according to Mark Brittingham. Their Utopian dreams imagined wiping the slate clean and recasting the future in their own image.

These sad and horrifying developments brought out the best in Jane Jacobs. While the experts (and their propagandists) grew ever more drunk on their do-gooding, egomanical, sci-fi visions, Jacobs went out and looked at what was actually happening. The new towers, the freeways, and the slum-clearances were pitched as efficient and hygienic solutions to the chaos of urban life. But where clarity, order and ease were promised, Jacobs saw monocultures going quickly to seed. Where new blocks of apartments were announcing that "we got it under control," Jacobs saw over-regimented, inhuman nightmares. The slums that were being plowed under for redevelopment struck her as anything but hopeless. They struck her, in fact, as functioning neighborhoods, even if poor ones. Where the planners saw mess and disorganization, Jane Jacobs saw life and vitality.

Lots of good planning ideas listening to what folks really want since then, from Seaside to our own Harvard Design School smart growth project, Mass Bay Commons. Adam Smith still has the last word.

Update: The NYT obit brought blogging to mind:

At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism -- in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a joyous urban jumble.

Ms. Jacobs was able to summon a freshness of perspective. Some dismissed it as amateurism, but to many others it was a point of view that made new ideas not only thinkable but suddenly and eminently reasonable.

"When an entire field is headed in the wrong direction, when the routine application of mainstream thinking has produced disastrous results as I think was true of planning and urban policy in the 1950's, then it probably took someone from outside to point out the obvious," Alan Ehrenhalt wrote in 2001 in Planning, the magazine of the American Planning Association.

'Reminds us of the effect of blogging is having on the conventional wisdom of  the intellectual powers that be.

Update II:  Be sure to check out Witold Rybczynski's appreciation of "original thinker" Jacobs at Slate:

Death and Life, which is still in print, went on to change the way that succeeding generations of architects and planners thought about cities . . . That vision of the urban good life had wide appeal, but the supply of old cities that offered the requisite mix of street life, architecture, and diversity was limited. The lively city districts that Jacobs championed, including her beloved Village, have become exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the extremely wealthy.

Those pesky unforeseen consequences.

Comments

[goomp]

Jane Jacobs a calm voice in the wilderness caused by the hubris of those who know what is best for everyone else.

[enrevanche]

She had some pretty moronic political views, but the woman knew the urban landscape inside and out, and much can be forgiven of genius. JJ ranks high in my personal pantheon of heroes.

(How many standard-issue East Coast liberals had sufficient courage of their convictions to relocate the entire family to Canada to facilitate the draft-dodging of their military-age sons?)

Unsurprisingly, Sissy, you picked up on my favorite grace note from the NY Times obit... "What a dear, sweet character she isn't."

Indeed.

Her work on urban planning, along with Whyte's "The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces" should be required reading for anyone who cares about cities.

[Sissy Willis]

Hey, Barry . . . You might be interested in Polis blog's "Nominate the Best Jane Jacobs Block in NYC":

http://nycenvirons.blogspot.com/2006/04/nominate-best-jane-jacobs-block-in-nyc.html

I wouldn't be surprised if you, Carrie, Mr. G and the Chows live in just such a block. :)

[enrevanche]

Sissy, check your mailbox. Just tried to e-mail you, and got a "mailbox full" message.