It has already been diaried twice today that Jane Jacobs, a famous author and urbanist, passed away today at 89 (a little over a week from her 90th birthday). But I wanted to do a different kind of diary. A tribute in some ways. Jane Jacobs is my favorite philosopher. I recently (about a month ago) finished reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was written in 1961 but to me is still such an important and relevant work. Although Jacobs never took credit for her accomplishments, there were many. All one has to do is stroll through Greenwich Village and think how much it would suck if it wasn't there and was instead a massive housing project and freeway. It is the same way walking around neighborhoods saved from demolishment, Boston's North End comes to mind. I have never been to Torronto but she has often been credited for saving neighborhoods from destruction there. What did I glean from her work though?
With spiraling gas prices, there has been much debate about transporation and oil dependency. The appreciation of cities by Jacobs at that time was rare. Famous traditional urban planners spent much time attacking cities. Cities were disorderly, disorganized, dirty, nasty places. Their remedies were to destroy the existing city. Many planners in the late 40's, 50's, and 60's came up with highly utopian plans for projects. These highly utopian plans are what we know today as failed housing projects. Jacobs laid down a smack down on famous and widely respected urban planners (Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford) and forcefully argued that high density developments are good. She also argued that high density is not overcrowding. Her works were influential to future generations of urban planners.
I admire Jacobs because she stood up and spoke out against real injustices and plain stupidity at a time when almost no one else could see it. She made herself heard and organized resistance against New York Master Builder Robert Moses. Now I am a great admirer of Robert Moses. He was very effective and made many positive contributions to the lives of modern day New Yorkers. However, he was so powerful and so enthralled in his own power, that he also hurt a great many New Yorkers and left many lasting negatives, huge unworkable, disastrous housing projects. Moses could not see the error in his ways. Moses and Jacobs never met (she claims to have only seen him once in person and he threatened to sue her) but they were arch enemies in the 60's because she helped lead the resistance to his redevelopment schemes.
Housing projects across the country today are symbols of urban failure. Moses was not the only urban planner who built these sources of misery and destruction. Moses was also not the only builder of freeways that split apart neighborhoods. Now I look at Los Angeles (which is not always the best place to make examples about urban planning since we're so spread out and so varied) and look at what we did. Now the initial freeways built in LA destroyed neighborhoods. East LA went from a nice middle class area to a slum after the East LA interchange was built, destroying more than half of beautiful Hollenbeck Park. The 101 freeway sent Hollywood into a long decline as well as Angeleno Heights (once one of LA's premier neighborhoods. I might add, some of the homes have been restored today, these are beautiful victorians and while there are neighborhoods in LA which have names repeated across the world, there are no other Angeleno Heights anywhere else). The 110 freeway and the 10 freeways were no better. They ripped apart neighborhoods in Mid City and South Central and sent them into a long declines. They also did not serve as buffers to gang activity. Downtown LA was nearly destroyed when its anchor residential neighborhood, Bunker Hill, had its beautiful Victorians ripped down for a modern office project. Those office towers are very tall and pretty in their own right but downtown commerce suffered for years without a residential population. If you look at LA, most of our most crime infested and gang turf neighborhoods are low density. They're built in a way that urban planners once reccomended. What does this have to do with Jacobs? She was an advocate for mixed use and high density zoning. She understood that crowded sidewalks (not always found in LA) were critical for a functioning of society and successful development. She wrote about how slums had the potential to un slum themselves if they were not completely torn down. She understood that what developers and planners thought was great (destroying old cities) was actually high destructive.
Now Los Angeles also got rid of its wonderful trolley system that was over 1100 miles. Today we are trying to rebuild a transit system. Across the country, numerous cities are trying to build and expand mass transit. And many (Republicans and DLC Democrats and stupid, young, naive, shortsighted people aka. Libertarians are questioning the point of mass transit. Just as Jacobs forcefully wrote about the problems of tearing down people's urban homes and stuffing them into housing projects, we cannot today just tear down suburban homes and force people to live in high density development. However, I look at public policy today and wish that more of our politicians had read Jane Jacobs. Our cities are the center of our civilization. Although in recent decades there has been a renewed desire for urban living (I partly credit Jacobs for this), our urban cores still are the face of much decline. At the same time, we have unsustainable urban sprawl occuring. We cannot force people to give up their cars and their big suburban homes and we cannot move people around as we please. However, we can encourage more city redevelopment (especially development geared towards the middle class and lower class), we can build more comprehensive mass transit systems, and we can encourage more Transit Oriented Development (Peter Calthorpe's great concept which has high density, mixed use development in small developments along mass transit lines in mostly suburbs). The federal government had the power back then to build an extensive highway system across the country. And for the most part, that was good with of course the exceptions of those cities who took out entire neighborhoods for their freeways. The federal government has the power to build and finance clean and efficient mass transit today.
My tribute to Jacobs is this, she forced urban planners to reconsider their planning schemes. She forced politicians and public policy makers to rethink what had been the policy. Today, we face new sets as well as old sets (the kind Jacobs addressed) of problems. People are forced into obscenely long commutes, we face increasing pollution, mind numbing traffic, continued inner city decay, new inner suburb decay, and increased poor health and obesity. You can't force people to change but you can provide the incentives. You can provide the impetus for change. Jacobs is a role model for those of us who challenge the status quo or current policy and want to make positive changes. Although she is no longer with us, her strength and her accomplishments and her intelligence should serve as a model and inspiration to all of us. I am truly sorry to see Jane Jacobs pass away. But she will still remain my favorite philosopher and she will still have left a deep impact.