Abstract
Without a doubt, Jane Jacobs and her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, are still highly relevant for urban planners and indeed for every city dweller. One is even tempted to say that, over time, both Jane Jacobs and her book have reached the realm of the mythical as she has become the patron saint of everything that carries the word “urban.”
The danger of apotheosis, of course, is that contents and concepts are distorted and instrumentalized either because they are not fully understood or because they promise to be a useful marketing ploy. At the same time, more than fifty years after the first edition of Death and Life was published in 1961, the societal context in which the book was written has dramatically changed. Today’s West Village, which served as one of Jacobs’s study objects for Death and Life, would be difficult to recognize even for her, probably less for its physical appearance than for its dramatically different socioeconomic makeup, as the American city, and New York City in particular, have undergone dramatic socioeconomic transformations since the book’s publication.
In any case, there is more than enough reason to critically reevaluate Death and Life on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication and to reassess the contributions of one of the most influential writers on urbanity in the last half-century. The three books discussed here—Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, edited by Max Page and Timothy Mennel, 1 Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs—Reassessing the Impacts of an Urban Visionary, edited by Dirk Schubert, 2 and Peter L. Laurence’s Becoming Jane Jacobs 3 —have exactly done that.
Although all three books share the same subject matter, Jacobs’s long-lasting impact on urban planning, they approach it quite differently. Laurence wrote a classic biography centered on the intellectual development of and influences on Jane Jacobs from her move from her native Scranton, Pennsylvania, to New York City in 1934 to the publication of Death and Life in 1961. The collection of articles edited by Schubert is decidedly, although not entirely, European in perspective, while Page and Mennel, even though their volume provides short sidebar chapters highlighting how Jane Jacobs was perceived around the globe, are significantly more North American in focus.
A monograph, of course, provides a very different depth on a topic, while articles from authors from different disciplines and with various backgrounds, including academics, practitioners, and journalists, give a wider variety of perspectives on the subject. Nonetheless, in viewing all three volumes together, three common threads appear, which are explored to different degrees. The first theme is the attempt to explore and appropriately place Death and Life in its historical context and in Jane Jacobs’s life experience and to evaluate how she impacted today’s planning discussion. Second is how Death and Life was received and perceived by planners, architects, and other urban aficionados around the globe. And lastly, several authors tackle the question of why at least some aspects of Jane Jacobs’s work are still so relevant and popular today.
The first theme, putting Jane Jacobs and Death and Life in their historical context and attempting to explain the genesis of central ideas of the book, is the focus of several of the represented authors. In particular, Becoming Jane Jacobs, a synopsis of which is also provided in Page’s and Mennel’s volume, 4 is a thorough and engaging work that relies on a wealth of sources to provide the essential background to understanding the genesis of as well as the ideas in Death and Life. Laurence vividly describes the intellectual ferment in architectural and planning circles in the New York City of the 1940s and 1950s, where discontent with urban renewal and modern architecture was slowly brewing even among its original supporters—of whom Jane Jacobs originally was one. 5 He also debunks several myths of the Jane Jacobs folklore that characterize her as the idiot savant who, in her naiveté and with her common sense, embarrassed the planning establishment. Rather, he shows that Jacobs underwent a substantial if somewhat informal training when she took classes—mainly in geography and urban geography—at Columbia University. 6 Laurence points out that her extensive work at Douglas Haskell’s Architectural Forum, among other publications, 7 gave her “access to research and resources, entree to architectural and academic circles, and a privileged view of the world of modern architecture and city planning.” 8 Laurence also challenges the notion that Jacobs was mainly an activist and not a theorist by shedding light on the intellectual influences on her thinking, for example, the role of Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, 9 a position supported by Richard Harris in his article in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. 10
The importance of understanding the historical context surrounding the writing of Death and Life in order to fully understand it, as Laurence argues, is also examined by authors in the other two volumes. Madeleine Lyes, in her analysis of Jane Jacobs’s view of gentrification, rightly argues that at the time when Death and Life was published, gentrification was an absolute nonissue and that accusing Jacobs of neglecting it, as Sharon Zukin and others have done, is ahistorical. 11 In the same vein, Jill L. Grant 12 reminds the reader that Jane Jacobs’s idealized Greenwich Village was not only a function of its specific spatial attributes—which can be reproduced globally. She suggests that how this specific neighborhood worked in 1950s New York was also, if not primarily, the function of the particular moment in time: Jacobs’s famous “sidewalk ballet” was perhaps more often the result of overcrowding and a lack of air conditioning that drove people in the streets and “eyes on the street” was a much easier concept when the social norms were stricter and allowed, for example, strangers to reprimand children in the street. 13 In pointing out Jacobs’s “physical determinism” 14 —her belief that a certain urban form based on dense, walkable mixed-use blocks with a building stock of varying age create the conditions for a working neighborhood—Grant, echoed by Harris, also point to one of the elements of Jane Jacobs’s continued acclaim: the focus on the physical and aesthetic aspects of the city allow both developers and community activists to co-opt her ideas. As Grant pointedly shows, 15 the reason why New Urbanists were able to make Jane Jacobs their heroine and, in the process, mostly ignore the grassroots/community activist tenets of her work, can be attributed to Jacobs’s focus on the urban form, which allows for her ideas to be easily disaggregated for various purposes.
Rather personal reflections from two of Jane Jacobs’s collaborators, Roberta Brandes Gratz 16 and Mary Rowe, 17 provide some insights into and context for Jacobs’s community activism. While not being strictly academic texts, they provide valuable firsthand accounts, which should be treated as such. To a certain degree, this makes perfect sense in the context of Jane Jacobs’s approach, which was highly skeptical of all kinds of experts, and in particular planners, but, once again, need to be taken with a grain of salt.
The second theme in the three books focuses on Jane Jacobs’ influence on the discourse of urban planning and development around the globe. As mentioned before, Schubert’s book mainly focuses on European examples while the sidebar essays in Page’s and Mennel’s volume have a more global perspective ranging from Australia 18 and Latin America 19 to Abu Dhabi 20 and China. 21
Unfortunately, many of the articles that examine Jane Jacobs’s global impact remain somewhat flat. The case studies from China 22 and Abu Dhabi, 23 for example, exhaust themselves in identifying some design influences of vaguely Jacobsean origin without being able to demonstrate if and how the “full” Death and Life impacted planning there or if the book is even available in their respective languages. In particular, the Chinese example is problematic, as the author almost celebrates the Chinese government for “getting things done.” To characterize the planning approach of many officials in this country as top-down is an understatement and stands in clear conflict with Jane Jacobs’s attitude toward “official” planning. Similarly, the study on Jane Jacobs influence on planning in Vienna 24 cannot clearly explain if the shift in Austrian urban renewal practices was mere coincidence or directly influenced by how planners and architects there incorporated Jacobs’s thinking.
The Dutch case study 25 succeeds better in making that connection and also shows convincingly how selectively Jacobs’s ideas—mainly the ones focused on urban design—were appropriated for Dutch planning. Unfortunately, the author who is represented both in Schubert’s and Page’s and Mennel’s volumes occasionally recycles his ideas and examples and, thus, does not provide the reader with many new insights.
An important exception with regard to the otherwise mostly disappointing essays on Jane Jacobs’s impact on planning worldwide is Dirk Schubert’s article 26 on the perception and reception of Jane Jacobs’s work in Germany. This highly informative and well-founded analysis of her influence on postwar planning in Germany shows scrupulously, how the early translation of Death and Life, which was already published in German in 1963, 27 and how Jacobs’s personal contacts with German planners influenced the planning discourse in this country. Ironically, Jacobs’s most ardent German supporters, who in turn left a deep impression on Jane Jacobs for their employment of sound planning principles as well, were some of the most vocal proponents of the “car-friendly” city. 28 Obviously, car-friendly cities mean different things in Europe and the United States, but it also demonstrates how difficult it is to export planning ideas into different cultural and socioeconomic contexts without just focusing on certain design elements.
The third theme examines the continued popularity of Death and Life’s and its author, which, according to Harris is still growing, based on the increasing number of annual citations. 29 Even though this analysis is somewhat flawed as the number of scientific publications is growing geometrically, 30 how can it be that Death and Life is still undoubtedly very popular even though the socioeconomic, cultural, and technological context in which the book was written has dramatically changed, as Laurence, Grant, and Lyes show? And what is the reason that—even though many of the ideas that Jacobs expressed are by no means original but for the most part just echoed contemporary voices as Richard White, 31 Jörg Seifert, 32 and Dirk Schubert 33 point out—Death and Life still dominates the discourse and practice of urban planning as Thomas Campanella 34 complains?
To a certain degree, Death and Life is a typical example of the right ideas being advanced at the right time. It was Jane Jacobs who was able to best synthesize and express an existing, widespread discontent with how urban planning at the period—with its focus on large-scale urban renewal, de-densification, increasing car dependency, and an overly strict separation of uses—neglected or even negated community interests. She was not the first to write about the problems plaguing the American city in the age of mass suburbanization and motorization, but her style, both polemic and poetic, appealed to a wide readership not just on an intellectual but, more importantly, on a deeply emotional level as Jamin Creed Rowan has pointed out. 35 It was exactly this difference in style that made Jacobs distinct from other planning and architectural critics who criticized her approach toward density and other urban design features. As Nikolai Rosskamm shows in his well-balanced observations her ideas about the city were not unlike that of the very writers she vehemently criticized—and who criticized her. 36
Another quality of Death and Life is that it successfully exploits what could be called the David versus Goliath factor. In combination with Jane Jacobs’s biography as an activist, her book paved the way for local and individual empowerment vis-à-vis large, collective, and somewhat ominous powers. In her time, those powers were government planners promoting slum clearance and urban renewal with little regard for affected communities. As Laurence shows, Jacobs’s distrust of government planning was in part rooted in her biography because she had, in her view unjustly, been scrutinized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “un-American activities” in the early 1950s, an “experience [that] left her with pent-up anger toward government bureaucracy—which would later release against the urban renewal regime.” 37 David versus Goliath, the individual against the alleged powers of a “system” are memes that still work today and maybe even better. Even as large-scale government-led planning was largely dismantled—not least through Jane Jacobs’s influence, as Christopher Klemek 38 points out—her book can still be read as a rallying cry of communities against those big threatening, diffuse entities, and forces, be it the government, large corporations, globalization, or gentrification.
In the end, however, Jane Jacobs’s work—in particular, Death and Life—has held up so well not simply because of its powerful prose and its author’s authenticity but because of the city it evokes. What some, like Friedhelm Fischer and Uwe Altrock, 39 identify as a weakness or at least a shortcoming of her work—her perceived lack of analysis of the underlying socioeconomic dynamics of the neighborhoods she studies—is in fact Death and Life’s strong suit that helps explain its unchanged popularity: even though, as Klaus Brake 40 points out, the industrial city of Jane Jacobs’s day has been replaced with the city based on the knowledge economy—the city of our imagination and ambition is still the same Jane Jacobs described, at least for the most of us. That her city could also be an Orwellian nightmare of New Urbanist design that attempts to strictly regulate (and enforce) certain designs and what a “good” community should look like is often overlooked. Because she did focus mainly on the physical attributes of the good city—density, short blocks, and a mix of uses and old buildings—it allowed her ideas to remain current. The lack of a specific historical context is exactly what allows for the “hybridization” and “commodification” 41 of her ideas. This allows both community activists to hold Jane Jacobs up as a shield against gentrification and large-scale real estate developers to instrumentalize her ideas to shamelessly market certain developments as “Jacobsean,” even though they might be highly disruptive to existing communities. Our overreliance on Jane Jacobs’s ideas—which is our fault not hers—has led us to replace the Corbusian gospel of the modernist town to the equally elusive Jacobsean ideal of the sidewalk ballet that ignores or disregards other valid and necessary forms of urbanity as Mennel 42 has pointed out. Jane Jacobs’s legacy and gift is that she has given us the city we all think we want. How to exactly get there, unfortunately, she did tell us not, and the casualty, as Thomas Campanella shows in acerbic but nonetheless insightful analysis, was the profession of urban planning. Will Death and Life still be relevant fifty years from now? Maybe, at least for some of its universal design ideas. But where there are saints there are also iconoclasts and on the 100th anniversary of her birth this year, “the halo above the saint’s head fades.” 43