Cities, Suburbs and Local Shopping Centres
I live in Canberra, and in some respects I can claim to live in an ideal neighbourhood. My apartment is just off Northbourne Avenue, perhaps 300m away from a stop on the light rail that can take me down to Civic, the ‘centre’ of Canberra, or up to Gungahlin with its convenient pedestrian shopping centre. I am within a few yards of a crossroads where three suburbs join, Dickson, Lyneham (where I live) and Downer. I’m within 500m of the Dickson Shopping Centre, where there’s branch of the Canberra public library system, a number of excellent shops, supermarkets and other outlets, and a key junction for several public bus routes. I’m probably a kilometre from the Lyneham shops, and close to four schools and three parks. There are a variety of cafes, coffee shops and restaurants in easy reach (I no longer have a car), and from my place I have quick access to such delights as a tempting second-hand bookshop and the wonderful Tilley’s Devine Cafe Gallery, both in Lyneham.
Look, I wasn’t going to do this, but I have to say a bit about Tilley’s. It’s an institution, named after the colourful Tilley Devine, Sydney’s infamous madam and ‘Bordello Queen’ of the 1920s. The café was opened in January 1984 by Paulie Higgisson. To quote: “With elegant, dark wood fittings, a moody, deep red colour scheme, and soft jazz wafting between the old-fashioned booths lining the walls, there are some things essentially nostalgic and cinematic about Tilley’s romantic atmosphere, reminiscent of a Hollywood film noir. Its timeless in a way that’s hard to emulate in a youngish, fickle town like Canberra, where high turnover of night spots seem inevitably dictated by the relative hip-factor of the décor, the DJ and the cocktail menu” (from The Australian Women’s Register, 2006).
Initially established to create a safe and comfortable environment for women, for its first two years Tilley’s banned groups of men drinking inside unless accompanied by at least one woman. It was the first licensed outdoor venue in Australia and the first bar to ban smoking indoors, eight years before any laws. For 21 years it was famous for its weekly schedule of concerts. The stage remains, with live jazz many Saturday nights. It’s a community focus.
Community is what takes me on to my main theme, which was talk about Jane Jacobs. Born Jane Butzner, she moved to New York City in 1935 with her sister Betty. Initially, she worked as a stenographer and a freelancer writing about city working districts. She joined the staff of a trade magazine, first as a secretary, then as an editor. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue. After two years at the School of General Studies at Columbia University, she joined Iron Age magazine. Her 1943 article on economic decline in Scranton was well regarded , but after experiencing job discrimination at Iron Age, she became an advocate for equal pay for women and for the right of workers to unionize.
She moved on, spending several years working for a magazine called Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. In the mid-nineteen- fifties she began writing about urban issues and architecture, first for Architectural Forum and then for Fortune, which offered a surprisingly welcoming home for her polemics against edifice-building! She married an equally cheerful, nonconformist architect, Robert Jacobs, and they moved, just before the first of their three children was born, into a house at 555 Hudson Street, (which for some has attained the status of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden). A sceptic of authority, she staged a grade-school rebellion against pledging to brush your teeth (she wasn’t against the brushing, just the coercion) and was being briefly expelled. She believed that authority could be laughed away, a powerful notion for a provocateur to take through life.
Though Jacobs was later portrayed as an engaged, block-party concerned mother, in fact she was much too busy writing and working to do much real street living; her shopping was mostly done by phone! It was her more abstract experience reading about large-scale urban renewal elsewhere, particularly in Philadelphia under the then much praised Edmund Bacon, that really developed her growing indignation about what was happening to cities.
A paragraph in Fortune summed up her new belief on the ‘smallness of big cities’. “Big cities thrived”, she wrote, “because they were full of healthy micro-villages; small ones became overdependent on one or two businesses, turning into plantation towns with company stores”. She became notorious for attacking Lincoln Center, then under construction. Described an example of everything forward-looking in urban design, she saw it as an example of the ‘super blocks’ destroying the hurly-burly of city life. She was an early anti-modernist. In 1956 she was invited to a symposium on cities at Harvard. It was to prove transformative: she went up to the lectern an unknown and came back to her seat a star.
It was against this background of established notoriety that Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, very much under the guidance of an editor. Written in 1961, I think the book is still astonishing and fascinating. That’s not because it is written in brilliant prose so much as its analytical style, making unexpected connections among things which are illuminating yet you’d missed, but had always been there if only you had paid attention.
In a celebration of what she described as the unplanned, improvised New York City of streets and corners, Jacobs praised an urban landscape that architects at time were seeking to replace with large-scale apartment blocks adorned with balconies and surrounding inner-courtyard parks. She was determined to make clear these super blocks tended to isolate their residents, depriving them of the ‘eyes-on-the-street crowding’ she argued was essential to city safety. She used stories, like one about a little girl apparently being harassed by an older man when all of Hudson Street emerged from stores and stoops to protect her (Jacobs later confessed that the man eventually turned out to be the girl’s father!). Famously, she pointed out that informal local ‘eyes on the street’ were replaced on the new rich city blocks with a whole class of hired eyes: “A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a hired neighbourhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes.” As she saw it, a hired neighbourhood was replacing what a local network did for free, obvious once said, but no one had noticed what the neighbourhood had been doing.
Describing eyes-on-the-street was an important contribution, but it was far from observing something new. When I was a child in suburban London, with semi-detached houses strung along low-density streets, there were watchers there, too. They were usually women, either not working or looking after young children, keeping an eye on the outside world through their windows’ net curtains. When boys like me were up to no good, they saw. When we needed to be brought back in line, they reported. Regarded as busybodies, they had their role. When my mother was told the grocery delivery man often took the boxes inside at one house to ‘unpack’, but was there for quite a long time, my mother said “Pigs” (‘pigs might fly’!).
The book is really a study in the miracle of self-organization, like the nature of living things that D’Arcy Thompson’s studies of biological growth On Growth and Form had revealed. Without plans, shapes and systems can emerge from necessity. One of the unforgettable passages in her book is a revealing commentary on the “sidewalk ballet”:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. The order is composed of movement and change . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole . . . Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English that his mother cannot speak. . . . [A]fter work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teen-agers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.
When I went back to rereading this commentary, it now seems rather long and over-dramatic. However, one writer observed that anyone who lived on a New York block would have recognized its essential truth, adding: “a single Yorkville block, when I moved there, thirty-five years ago, had a deli, a playground, and a funeral home; the guys from Wankel’s Hardware on an avenue nearby gathered for lunch at the Anna Maria pizza place on the corner. The ballet happened.” (Adam Gopnik, Street Smarts, New Yorker, September 2016).
Rereading Death and Life of Great American Cities sixty years later it is easy to see that some of Jacobs beliefs and expectations weren’t born out in practice. She believed the long block lengths on the Upper West Side would keep its streets stagnant, compared with those of her Village. In fact, streets like Columbus Avenue have become as lively as the Hudson Street she had described. This is because it isn’t block lengths that mattered as compared to attractive rents. However, she was right about many things. She suggested bad old buildings are as important to civic health as good old buildings because, while the good old buildings get recycled upward, the bad ones prove to be a kind of ‘urban mulch’ in which prospective new businesses could make a start, a process we still can see in cities around the world.
Through its anecdotes and analyses, Jacob’s book emphasises two core principles. First, cities are their streets. To use a human analogy, streets are not just a city’s veins but rather they represent its neurology, the distribution and concentration of knowledge and intelligence. Second, urban diversity and density can reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations they demand; and the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them. This is a message about diversity: the greater the city density there’s increasing diversity, and if you have diversity things get denser and deeper. Jacobs was making explicit something we see so clearly now: the more you build major isolated suburbs, or what Americans call plaza-and-park housing, the more the city declines as a living centre. Perhaps Jacobs’s idea can be summed up simply: If you don’t build it, they will come.
Today, she seems like a figure addressing a past long gone. She wanted to see New York as a city of short blocks and small green spaces. Now the city has standardised blocks and a proliferation of tall buildings. Old neighbourhoods are helpless in the face of new pressures, from market forces. Even when she observed it, the intricate ‘ballet’ Jacobs described was, of course, supported by commerce. Today small business can’t compete with retail chains and can’t pay their landlords high rents. City governments seek ways to sustain micro business zones and foster diversity but often end up promoting conformity – a Starbucks everywhere!
Jane Jacobs’s perspective was focussed on the small scale. Her name is still associated with such ideas as eyes on the street, the much-watched corner, the mixed-use neighbourhood. Her admirers and interpreters fall into almost polar opposites: leftists who see her as the champion of community against big capital and real-estate development; and free marketeers who see her as the apostle of self-emerging solutions in cities. In his commentary Gopnik observed “In a lovely symmetry, her name invokes both political types: the Jacobin radicals, who led the French Revolution, and the Jacobite reactionaries, who fought to restore King James II and the Stuarts to the British throne.” Today she would be called pro-growth: she made it clear ‘stagnant’ was one of the worst terms in her vocabulary. But if she had been asked to choose any term that offended her most it would be ‘planned economy.’ A cultural liberal, she was opposed to oligarchy, suspicious of technology, and hostile to big business and the military. She offers a rich, original mixture of ideas illuminated with some lovely, observational details, and reading Jacobs seriously today is still delightfully informative.
Polarisation always leads to exaggeration, and I think it is easy to believe suburbs move to one extreme or the other. I have to be careful, of course. I am living in Canberra, not New York. However, it is tempting to over-amplify difference. There is continuing real estate development around me. Much of the time that is both necessary and acceptable. Necessary, because the population of Canberra continues to grow, and there is an evident need for more housing. Acceptable, because Canberra, possibly unusually, still manages to build suburbs with parks, relatively low-density housing, new schools and shopping areas, and yet retain some sense of being a cohesive city. It’s easier in a small city.
Equally, technology that Jacobs couldn’t have imagined is having an impact. The Internet has made it simple to directly order some goods from almost anywhere in the world and have them couriered to your home. Local stores deliver everything from beer to baked goods, bananas to complete meals. Despite this, people eat out frequently. You can have all your entertainment delivered through your PC and television, but cinemas, concert halls and theatres continue, though it’s possible the downturn during the Covid years might continue.
Cities have neither died nor have they flourished. The city is an amazing solution to a problem: how enable huge numbers of people to live together. While the pace of the world’s population growth may start to slow soon, we will need cities for the foreseeable future. However, there isn’t a template for the ideal city. The cities I know and the cities I have lived in are always developing and changing. Some solutions are discouraging to people who have lived in a different way before. I still find the huge tracts of Melbourne’s suburbs off-putting. But I am not so foolish as to believe that big cities are failure, and I know that we find ways to create neighbourhoods as best we can, whatever the overall urban landscape. I don’t read Jane Jacobs outstanding books as nostalgic descriptions of a world we have lost. I don’t read them as guides to how we should live to today. I read them as a reminder that cities are about people, and that people keep finding new ways to deal with the problems technology, growth and resource challenges present to us. I like to think that were she assessing what is happening today, she would comment, as she did sixty years ago, by pointedly highlighting poor strategies, praising good ones, and helping us see more clearly the ways cities can and frequently do enrich the lives of the people who live in them.
