Abstract
Once again, esteemed professor of planning Allan B. Jacobs has written a very engaging and thought-provoking planning text. However, unlike Great Streets, this time the focus is on cities, or to be more exact, Jacobs reflects on his career as an international planning consultant and on the many experiences that he and his family encountered in great cities such as Calcutta, India; Caprano, Italy; Vancouver, British Columbia; Curitiba, Brazil; and the Pudong area of Shangai, China. Jacobs also writes at length about his childhood memories about the city in Cleveland, Ohio, and he devotes an entire section to San Francisco, where he was planning director from 1967 until 1975. In this section Jacobs provides important background information to various planning projects in San Francisco, such as the Urban Design Plan, which was proposed in 1972. In addition, his blueprint for what constitutes “the good city” is presented in the final chapter. Savvy readers might read this chapter first since the book is not written in chronological order. A collection of short stories and essays, this is a very personal snapshot of Jacobs’s professional career. Reading like a memoir, The Good City is an excellent book for thoughtful planners who want to think long and hard about their personal and professional ties to cities where they have lived and worked.
Responses to this book, however, may be quite varied. Those who are familiar with Jacobs’s teaching and writing style may be prepared for his engaging writing style, which proceeds in a very probing, observant, very raw kind of way. As demonstrated in previous works by Jacobs, observation is a dominant feature of this writing (Jacobs 1995, 1997). This time, however, Jacobs makes himself the subject of his own attention. Looking backwards, he gives considerable thought to his professional role as a designer and what it was like to collaborate with others “in an unknown culture” (p. 7). For instance, in Part II, Learning from Calcutta, Jacobs recalls his first corporate assignment in Calcutta, India, via the Ford Foundation. Concerning this early planning assignment, Jacobs grapples with a web of personal, social, political issues related to his being there: colonialism, nationalism, classicism, institutionalism, and, of course, the use of power. Candidly, he reflects on how others perceived his authority, and he recalls how he exercised that authority as an outsider in geographical and social contexts and people that were foreign and somewhat unimpressed by his presence. On the other hand, in Part V, Breaking and Making Community, he presents a very different, more positive, professional self-assessment, praising what he calls “conscious” urban design efforts in Curitiba, Brazil, during the 1970s. In contrast to his Calcutta–Ford Foundation experience, Jacobs writes with passionate support for planning and urban design that took place under the leadership of Jaime Lerner, who was then the city’s mayor. Jacobs’s interactions with Lerner and his administration are presented within the context of a partnership; this is not the case as presented in the Calcutta essay, which is, tellingly, titled “Why India?” Juxtaposed, these accounts of his experiences in Calcutta and Curitiba are very different, but they illustrate that Jacobs is willing and able to struggle with the complexities and ethics of planning in developing countries.
This willingness to personally struggle with the details associated with one’s professional career is very important, and, it is this praxis, or back and forth movement, between the personal, the theoretical, and the professional, that makes this a very timely and provocative book. In each narrative, Jacobs proposes some perspective or theory about urban design or planning, like pedestrian flow or tourist planning. For example, in Part VII, City Certainties, he begins each essay with pithy little sayings such as “Cities that are obsessed with the movement of cars and spend a lot of time and money trying to avoid or solve traffic problems are invariably less livable than cities that don’t” (p. 125). In other sections, Jacobs’s perspective or position is not so clear-cut, and some stories, such as “Traffic Cop” and “Excellent,” are just a page or two. These essays, especially the ones that are difficult to understand or follow, such as “Traffic Is Not a Problem” and “Excellent,” will inevitably provide Jacobs readers with something to talk or perhaps debate about.
Planning feminists and community planners who advocate storytelling in planning education and research might find Jacobs’s approach and use of narrative quite validating and even revolutionary. Gradually, the narrative or story format is finding its way into the planning canon and, if used ethically and more regularly, it will assist researchers in raising legitimate questions about the political and public economy of planning (Sandercock and Attili 2010). Story, however, is always a contested terrain, and Jacobs’s recollection of these experiences, written from his standpoint or social location as a white, male academician who enjoys some degree of institutional privilege and power, may likewise be contested by critique or disagreement. In the long run, this could be a positive for Jacobs and his readers. His essay on Cleveland, for example, and what led to the increasing outward migration of whites who lived in the central city could benefit from a more complex understanding of how central city white flight, in addition to a racial and economically-motivated maneuver, was also influenced by subversive forms of white power at a time in American history when hundreds of former black Southerners moved north and west (Foner 1970). It is no accident that many rust belt cities, like Cleveland and Kansas City, began to lose economic and residential bases in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, the preoccupation with suburban life in the United States was (1) an Anglo-American phenomenon (Fishman [1987] 2002), (2) antiurban, and (3) a function of white resistance to black social and spatial progress, which was also systemically and structurally tied to federally sponsored local planning practices, which has left many cities socially and spatially divided along racial lines (Silver 1984, 1991; Thomas 1997; Thompson Fullilove 2001).
On the other hand, readers who prefer a straight, linear, or positivist approach to planning subjects might perceive this book as much too subjective to be useful in the classroom. But, overall, The Good City will be very beneficial to planning educators as they prepare themselves and their students for twenty-first-century planning initiatives, especially those that occur in or are related to developing countries. A group of PhD students might read and discuss this book in a seminar setting before departing for a visit to such a country. Those interested in planning history might propose a panel discussion or symposium and debate Jacobs’s claim that Cleveland ceased to be a real city sometime after 1960, that is, whether urban renewal left behind too much vacant and underdeveloped land. In response to this claim, a group of urban designers might find Jacobs’s narratives on previous planning activities in Cleveland and San Francisco useful in developing a solution, such as an urban tree-planting program to address blight or derelict buildings. Jacobs suggests this remedy in the essay on Cleveland.
In summary, through The Good City, Jacobs has presented planning academicians with a creative platform to critically explore discussions on the interconnectedness of planning history, theory, and practice, which often have important social and ethical implications. This collection of Jacobs’s essays and stories illustrate precisely that it is fundamentally important for the thoughtful planner or designer to engage in critical filtering, which, according to British planning theorist Patsy Healey, is an internal process by which planners struggle with the complexity (Healey 2007). In The Good City, Jacobs demonstrates that there are new and critical issues yet to be imagined when it comes to urban design and planning for the world-class city. Furthermore, this is a book that will prompt planners and designers to think personally, deeply, and critically about the sociospatial and political economy of the city. Are good cities “great people watching environments” as Jacobs asserts (p. 8)? And how does one plan with others across language barriers and cultural assumptions for the sustainability and progress of world cities like New York City, Mexico City, or Pudong in an age when global markets and computer technologies make it possible to communicate within nanoseconds? In conclusion, the possibilities for this book’s future contribution to knowledge and planning scholarship are quite interdisciplinary, which underscore that the power of story and professional risk-taking are making a difference to urban planners. Although Jacobs claims that he wrote this book in “a light hearted tone” (p. 9), this reviewer finds that he has written a very unique and challenging text that has the potential to bring academicians, students, and practitioners to the table to talk very seriously about urban processes and what it takes, in theory and in practice, to make or break the good city.