The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs has
become a classic in urban planning since its publication in 1961. I had long
wanted to read it, especially since Jacobs lived in Toronto for over forty
years. Although Jacobs was an American, I as well as many
Torontonians considered her one of our own. Our library system chose
Cities as one of its highlighted Raves & Faves several years ago
and when new titles were introduced to this ongoing series, I picked up one of
our withdrawn copies.
It took me five weeks to finish Cities. During my first two days I
was spellbound by the lengthy introduction; so much so that I read it
through twice. All I could talk about was how visionary Jacobs was. That is no
exaggeration; I did in fact rave about the introduction to several people,
including to my partner who has a degree in urban planning. I could see Jacobs's
genius in the introduction alone, and after I finished reading it the first
time, I felt I had to read it over again. It was so full of valuable insights,
that had I been given a highlighter to mark the key points, I would have given
every sentence a golden hue.
For good reason Cities has earned its reputation as a
groundbreaking work on city planning. Jacobs was not afraid to turn the
prevailing orthodoxy on urban planning upside down by calling some of its
prevailing attitudes foolish. Her views which shook the 1960's are now on
university curricula. Some of her theories seem so basic now, that even one like
myself who is not schooled in urban design can see the sense in them. How could
her ideas have been so controversial over fifty years ago? I feel that her
outright challenge of the orthodoxy really threw her urban colleagues. Jacobs
rocked the boat, which had been idly floating by for decades. It's as if your
mother, fed up with your messy bedroom, had finally had enough: she tore her way
in there and started cleaning up and reorganizing. She grabbed your head,
focussed your attention on what she was saying and made you listen. And then no
one could deny that she was right.
I cannot state enough how mesmerized I was by this book. At the beginning I
was nodding in agreement with her views on sidewalks and the whole idea of using
them to create vibrant, well-used and most importantly, safe urban
spaces:
"When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle
what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks."
How true. When children play outside they often stay close to home, and use
the sidewalk adjacent to their home. Jacobs was not swayed by the prevailing
view that sidewalks were places to be avoided. Clearly, sidewalks were the
lifeblood of the city and where children, as well as all inhabitants, should
find the greatest sense of security:
"Some city sidewalks are undoubtedly evil places for rearing children. They
are evil for anybody. In such neighborhoods we need to foster the qualities and
facilities that make for safety, vitality and stability in city streets. This is
a complex problem; it is a central problem of planning for cities. In defective
city neighborhoods, shooing the children into parks and playgrounds is worse
than useless, either as a solution to the streets' problems or as a solution for
the children.
"The whole idea of doing away with city streets, insofar as that is
possible, and downgrading and minimizing their social and their economic part in
city life is the most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city
planning. That it is so often done in the name of vaporous fantasies about city
child care is as bitter as irony can get."
Instead, one should develop the urban landscape of the sidewalk as a safe
environment for all city citizens, not just children. Jacobs dismisses
the zoning of urban play spaces, and goes to great length to reveal how these
artificial playgrounds, often situated far away from residences, are often
vacant even during the summertime:
"It is futile to try to evade the issue of unsafe city streets by
attempting to make some other features of a locality, say interior courtyards,
or sheltered play spaces, safe instead. By definition again, the streets of a
city must do most of the job of handling strangers for this is where strangers
come and go. The streets must not only defend the city against predatory
strangers, they must protect the many, many peaceable and well-meaning strangers
who use them, insuring their safety too as they pass through. Moreover, no
normal person can spend his life in some artificial haven, and this includes
children. Everyone must use the streets."
Jacobs grabbed your attention and forced you to confront
reality. Open spaces and fields of grass within urban settings may look good
on paper and on designers' cutesy mock-ups but they were dead zones in real
life:
"But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because
city planners or designers wish they could."
Jacobs herself visited these spaces in New York City, where she then lived,
and also visited urban green spaces in other American cities, and noted how few
visitors they received. She saw more children at play on the streets surrounding
their homes, either on the sidewalk or in the alleys or rear parking
lots. Planners cannot expect people to visit their green spaces just because
they are there:
"You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's
conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into
proposed neighborhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can
conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse
surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of
life and use. Superficial architectural variety may look like diversity, but
only a genuine content of economic and social diversity, resulting in people
with different schedules, has meaning to the park and the power to confer the
boon of life upon it."
Integration of work and play is essential in vital city planning. Jacobs
was no fan of creating these special parklands. She crushed the prevailing
belief that urban centres needed to be dispersed over fields of verdant lawns,
as if grass was the all-encompassing solution to relieving planners' needs.
People who were living in such high concentrations were considered to be a
danger to themselves. Open grassy spaces to the rescue!:
"American downtowns are not declining mysteriously, because they are
anachronisms, nor because their users have been drained away by automobiles.
They are being witlessly murdered, in good part by deliberate policies of
sorting out leisure uses from work uses, under the misapprehension that this is
orderly city planning."
and:
"The development of modern city planning and housing reform has been
emotionally based on a glum reluctance to accept city concentrations of people
as desirable, and this negative emotion about city concentrations of people has
helped deaden planning intellectually."
While the first three chapters of Cities, all devoted to
sidewalks, captivated my attention, I was less interested when Jacobs
discussed districts versus neighbourhoods within cities. I could not grasp the
differences between the two. Nor was I moved by the chapters on the slumming and
unslumming of cities or "gradual money" and "cataclysmic money". These were the
rare chapters where I just couldn't wait to turn the last page. However Jacobs
covered topics--perhaps never addressed before 1961--about border vacuums, mixed
uses and diversity of city businesses and facilities, and even the schedules of
urban citizens. I could see how these subjects revolutionized the then current
world of city planning. Later chapters covered such topics as subsized
dwellings, erosion of cities and salvaging projects. All of these topics were in
can't-put-down chapters. Jacobs was able to make such topics read as
page-turners and not just for a readership of urban planners.
Cities was at times a laborious read, yet for the most part its
448 pages of jam-packed text sped along. If this book was reprinted, it
would be three times as long owing to today's trend of fleshing out pages with
wide margins and gaping spaces between lines. Don't let the formatting--black
slabs of solid text--dissuade you from reading this classic.
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