Jane Jacobs
I often describe myself as a wanderer. I have lived in twenty homes, two with my parents in my childhood, and all the rest as an adult: seven of these were in the UK, ten in Australia, in Adelaide and Melbourne, one in the US, and now two more back in Australia. After studying at university, I’ve often changed my areas of work, too, from being an academic, to being a consultant on organisational change, to working in industry, working in the public sector, running a membership organisation, and then returning to the university sector. As I look back, I can see the places where I lived were only part of my life at the time: I would spend more waking time with people at my workplace, I travelled often and widely, and I knew only a few of my neighbours. Indeed, if I am honest, the few friends I have from the first six decades of my life are family, and one schoolfriend and his partner. I was never significantly involved in my local community, and the people I spent time with were based on work and not-for-profit boards. Today, I keep some contacts alive from my recent sojourn in the US. Having moved to Canberra, the people I’m likely to spend most time with are family, a few contacts from years in Melbourne, and new friends as a result of various voluntary activities.
I don’t think I am unusual. Like many other people, employment dominated my life with various activities from when I was 23 years old until I stopped working full-time. It is also a male problem. We tend to think of ourselves as self-reliant, and place relatively little emphasis on building networks – unless they are related to work, of course. It is also a knowledge worker problem. If you teach, research, write academic books and articles, the focus is on ideas, and so even leisure time gets eaten into by the next class preparation task, the article you are drafting. In addition, it is cultural problem. Increasingly we live in a world where individualism dominates. Finally, it is a mobility problem. The more you move from place to place, country to country, the network you begin to develop in one place largely falls away with a couple of years of arriving in a new location, and these changes are aggravated if the new place is linked to a new area of work, employed by a new organisation.
I think all these issues are the source of my fascination with the idea of community. I recently wrote about a very short visit to the Trobriand Islands. What I failed to mention was one lingering attraction. There I could see a real community, people whose social lives were entirely intertwined with their neighbours. There is something alluring about the idea that you really know and spend time with the people who live close by. Some of them will prove to be difficult for one reason or another, some will be silly, some will be demanding, some will be inspirational. In those respects that is no different from the group that sits around you at work. But in a community, we become intra-dependent. Not in-dependent, looking after ourselves, but our lives woven together with the community close to us. I had experienced something like that as a child: I had a circle of friends and neighbours that constituted ‘my community’. Perhaps it wasn’t the same for my parents, but I do know that circle kept in touch, and that included some of them regularly reporting on my activities to my mother!
Jane Jacobs was nineteen years old when she moved to New York City with her sister, and soon they settled in Greenwich Village. The mid-1930s were a time when it was possible to have a variety of jobs and explore various occupations. It was a relatively carefree time, much as young people in the UK were to experience twenty years later. She was a part-time typist, a part-time writer. Starting as a secretary for a trade magazine, she soon began writing about working districts in the city, experiences she later explained “gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like”. She enrolled at Columbia University’s School of General Studies for two years and became a feature writer for the US Office of War Information, and then a reporter for Amerika, a US government publication in Russian. During this time, she married, and continued to live in Greenwich Village, enjoying life in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area. She even found moments to create a garden in her backyard. During the McCarthy era she was briefly investigated. In 1952 she was hired as an associate editor at Architectural Forum.
After a short and successful time there as an editor, Jacobs began to take on assignments on urban planning. In 1954, she was assigned to cover Edmund Bacon’s plans for developing Philadelphia. It was a turning point. Jacobs criticized Bacon’s project, especially its lack of concern for the poor African Americans who would be directly impacted. When she was shown examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she decided Bacon’s development would put an end to community street life. Two years later she addressed a group including leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals at Harvard on the topic of East Harlem, urging the audience to “respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order”.
After writing an article for Fortune, “Downtown is for People”, the Rockefeller Foundation gave her a grant to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the U.S. The result, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, appeared in 1961. It was to prove influential for years in city planning, exploring the importance of ‘social capital’ (her term) and issues such as ‘mixed primary uses’, and ‘eyes on the street’, which were soon adopted by urban designers, sociologists, and planners. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s out of date and out of touch in some ways, given the limited attention she paid to race, and her support for practices like ‘unslumming’, which we now know causes gentrification. Despite limitations like these, it offers a powerful argument to place community at the centre of the urban planners’ focus. In that, I would argue she is still right: community is what is missing in cities today, replaced by social isolation, individualism, and self-centred lifestyles.
The agenda of Death and Life of Great American Cities is clear from the outset: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding”. Jacobs sets the scene by describing her visit to Boston’s North End, which she found friendly, safe, vibrant and healthy. However, the planners she met there described it as a ‘terrible slum’ in need of renewal. For her, what was terrible was the consequence of well-planned, low density suburbs designed to thin out crowded urban cores, based on the view that communities should be self-contained units; that mixed land use created a chaotic, unpredictable, and negative environment; that the street was a bad locus for human interactions; that houses should be turned away from the street toward sheltered green spaces; that super-blocks fed by arterial roads were superior to small blocks with overlapping cross-roads; that development should be dictated by a permanent plan rather than emerge organically; and that urban density should be discouraged.
Terrible? Jacobs acknowledged that plans like these would create suburban towns appealing to privacy-oriented, automobile-loving residents, with green spaces and low-density housing. She was frustrated by these proposals, which she saw as were essentially anti-urban, and she was concerned that people who “wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly appeared devised for undermining their economies and killing them”. In seeking to avoid contamination by ‘the workaday city’, she suggested these beautiful suburbs would fail to attract visitors and become prone to “unsavoury loitering and dispirited decay, and ironically hastened the pace of urban demise”. By the end of the 20th Century her predictions were proved right, as suburbs and inner-city areas collapse into slums, infected by crime, and racism. She could not have seen that this process would be partly reversed twenty years later by high rise apartment living in urban central districts, restoring some of what the movement out to the suburbs had lost.
Jane Jacobs was well aware of the challenges of city centres, especially as they would be full of strangers, non-residents. To deal with this, she saw the sidewalk (the pavement) as the setting for an “intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole”. She recognised the sheer numbers in a city offered the challenge of making its inhabitants feel safe, secure, and socially integrated in the midst of an overwhelming volume of rotating strangers. She argued that city sidewalks and people who used them actively participate in fighting against disorder, not through constant police surveillance, but on an “intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves and enforced by the people themselves”. She observed a well-used street is apt to be relatively safe from crime, while a deserted street is apt to be unsafe. Her ‘healthy sidewalks’ would transform a high volume of strangers from a liability to an asset, a self-enforcing mechanism especially strong when the streets are supervised by their ‘natural proprietors’, individuals who enjoy watching street activity, invested in its implicit codes of conduct, with the confidence that others will support their actions if necessary.
She suggested three requirements a city street needs to meet and maintain safety: a clear demarcation between public and private space; places for eyes upon the street and sufficient buildings facing streets; and continuous eyes on the street to guarantee effective surveillance. Subsequent criminological studies have applied the concept of ‘eyes on the street’ in crime prevention. “Empty streets in low density areas and the deserted corridors, elevators, and stairwells in high-rise public housing projects are ‘blind-eyed’ spaces, drawing on upper-class standards for apartment living but lacking the amenities of access control, doormen, elevator men, engaged building management, leaving them are ill-equipped to handle strangers, allowing strangers to become an automatic menace … [they would] lack the checks and inhibitions exerted by eye-policed city streets, becoming flash points for destructive and malicious behaviour”. She went further. If a busy pedestrian environment was a prerequisite for city safety, she recommended that there should be stores, bars, restaurants, and other public places “sprinkled along the sidewalks” as a means to this end. She argued that if city planners ignored sidewalk life, residents would move out of the neighbourhood, allowing the danger to persist for those too poor to move anywhere else, while former residents retreated to visiting the city as motorists. Eventually upscale developments could be cordoned off from their unsavoury surroundings with cyclone fences and private security. And they were.
There is so much more in her analysis.
Her critique of urban planning noted the orthodox view that the city neighbourhood is a modular, insulated groups of around 7,000 residents, the estimated number of persons to populate an elementary school and support a neighbourhood market and community centre. Sounds familiar? Instead, Jacobs argued a feature of a great city is the mobility of residents and fluidity of use across diverse areas of varying size and character, not modular systems to fragment and define neighbourhoods, operating at the three levels of geographic and political organization: city-level, district-level and street-level. Thus, the city of New York as a whole is itself a neighbourhood. The key local government institutions operate at the city-level, as do many social and cultural institutions – from opera societies to public unions. At the opposite end of the scale, individual streets – such as her street in Greenwich Village – can also be characterized as neighbourhoods. Street-level city neighbourhoods, as she argued elsewhere in her book, should create a context to support a sufficient daily level of commerce, general liveliness, use and interest so as to sustain public street life. Finally, the district of Greenwich Village is itself a neighbourhood, with a shared functional identity and common fabric. The primary purpose of the district neighbourhood is to provide a link and interface between the needs of the street-level neighbourhoods and the resource allocation and policy decisions made at the city-level. Jacobs estimates the maximum effective size of a city district to be 200,000 people and 1.5 square miles but she preferred a functional definition over a spatial one: “big enough to fight city hall, but not so big that street neighbourhoods are unable to draw district attention and to count”. She saw neighbourhoods encouraging lively and interesting streets, using parks, squares, and public buildings as part of the street fabric, building neighbourhood complexity and multiple uses.
I first read her book back in the 1980s, and it was exciting, a mixture of thoughtful analysis and trenchant criticism. It was Jacobs use of the term social capital that caught my attention: it’s a concept I have made use of over the years, and it’s one on which she drew in her emphasis on combining primary uses, neighbourhoods that contained businesses, leisure facilities and homes all mixed together, to create real communities. She was an advocate for the thoughtful development of cities but doing so without rigid plans but rather resting on “a legacy of empowerment for citizens to trust their common sense and become advocates for their place”. Jane Jacobs didn’t just write about these issues. She was an activist, helping stop poor development in New York, and later in Toronto, where she moved in 1968.
While I could continue to describe her impact on urban planning, Jane Jacob’s concerns were wider. In 2004 she published Dark Age Ahead, in which see anticipated a continuing decay of five key ‘pillars’ in the USA: community and family; higher education, science and technology; taxes and government responsiveness to needs; and professional self-regulation. It was a dark view, one in which she foresaw a “mass amnesia” where even the memory of what was lost was lost. Her concerns included that people are increasingly choosing consumerism over family welfare; consumption over fertility; debt over family budget discipline; fiscal advantage to oneself at the expense of community welfare. She felt universities were becoming more interested in credentials than providing high quality education. She was worried about the elevation of economics as the main ‘science’ to consider in making major political decisions. As we know now, she was right.
Perhaps it is two other of her concerns that are particularly relevant to our situation now. She commented that governments appeared to be more interested in deep-pocket interest groups than the welfare of the population. More generally, she foresaw a culture that prevents people from understanding the deterioration of the fundamental physical resources on which the entire community depends. Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of ‘ideology’ is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum the ideology reflects. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become “unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, and simply fall back on their beliefs for ‘prefabricated answers’ to any problem they encounter.” I think you could describe her approach as advocating ‘on the ground’ democracy and participation,
Written at the beginning of the 21st Century, Dark Age Ahead could have appeared this year. Her concerns sound so familiar. Some critics are easily forgotten over the decades. While Jane Jacobs missed a few of the concerns we face today, she offered insights and proposals about how we can live together that should be on every government and planners agenda. Her books deserve rereading. Please don’t forget and don’t ignore Jane Jacobs.
