Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs

Reassessing the Impacts of an Urban Visionary

Dirk Schubert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317160625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jane Jacobs's famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) has challenged the discipline of urban planning and led to a paradigm shift. Controversial in the 1960s, most of her ideas became generally accepted within a decade or so after publication, not only in North America but worldwide, as the articles in this volume demonstrate. Based on cross-disciplinary and transnational approaches, this book offers new insights into her complex and often contrarian way of thinking as well as analyses of her impact on urban planning theory and the consequences for planning practice. Now, more than 50 years after the initial publication, in a period of rapid globalisation and deregulated approaches in planning, new challenges arise. The contributions in this book argue that it is not possible simply to follow Jane Jacobs's ideas to the letter, but instead it is necessary to contextualize them, to look for relevant lessons for cities and planners, and critically to re-evaluate why and how some of her ideas might be updated. Bringing together an international team of scholars and writers, this volume develops conclusions based on new research as to how her work can be re-interpreted under different circumstances and utilized in the current debate about the proclaimed 'millennium of the city', the 21st century.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1

50 Years: “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”

Dirk Schubert

In 1981 the editor of this volume had the pleasure to hear a lecture by Jane Jacobs in Hamburg. At that time the great expectations about radical transformations of historic cities through modernistic principles came to an end. A shift to conservation and rehabilitation was on the agenda not only in German but also in many European cities. Jane Jacobs’s advice “don’t make big plans,” reversing Daniel Burnham’s famous statement for the Chicago Plan of 1909, met exactly the zeitgeist. Nevertheless, the final idea of preparing a publication based on cross-disciplinary approaches came to me during a visit to her house in New York, Greenwich Village, Hudson Street 555, in 2010, where I saw a bouquet of flowers with a dedication: “From this house a woman changed the world.” This was one of many good reasons for re-reading Jane Jacobs’s book. However, it also raised some questions: How can we contextualize her book more than 50 years later, are there relevant lessons to be learned for cities and planners, what kind of impact can we note, why and how should some of her ideas be updated?

Figure 1.1 Bouquet of flowers before Hudson Street 555

Source: © Dirk Schubert (1998).

Jane Jacobs’s famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), begins:

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding […] It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning.

With this radical approach she challenged the discipline of urban planning. Jane Jacobs developed a critique on the “almighty” planners and undermined their professional competence. She calls planning a “pseudoscience,” but how could a layperson like Jane Jacobs, who was not part of any scientific networks, develop new paradigms? Today many theorists and practitioners are thinking about a new paradigm shift in the current period of rapid globalization and neoliberal as well as deregulated approaches to planning. In this context it is useful to reflect on the background and context of paradigm shifts and their chief players and theoreticians.

In 2011 we celebrated this famous book’s 50th anniversary. Ever since her first book was published there has been discussion on whether she should be called “urban hero” or “trouble maker.” She is variously referred to as “Queen Jane,” an “urban visionary,” “anti planner” or even “urban guru.” We are now in a position to reflect upon her impact on urban planning and urban renewal in both North America and Europe. Within a decade or so after publication most of her ideas had become generally accepted. Probably her most important ideas were those about (higher) densities, pedestrian orientation and mixed-use developments which had not been feasible beforehand in North America because of zoning regulations. The bulldozer approach to old buildings was reversed and transformed into an attitude of conservation which incorporated her idea “older buildings for new ideas.”

Meanwhile a flood of publications has appeared about her and her book.¹ Around 100 editions of her book have been published to date and it is still available. It is included in the list of the most important 100 books of the twentieth century. Many colleagues frequently refer to her book but have not read or understood it completely. Also it is more or less forgotten that she wrote other books on a great variety of topics. While her work was polarizing at the time of publication, nowadays a positive reception outweighs. While most of the publications about Jacobs focus on her work in New York or Toronto and refer to her first three books, this reader takes a broader approach and specifically looks at her work as it is embedded in the transatlantic discourse.

The myth that grew around Jane Jacobs was based on her first book as well as her involvement in the grassroots movements of New York City, where she (and others) fought against slum clearances and Robert Moses’ highway construction projects which proposed to cut through urban neighborhoods. In 1968, as this approach to urban renewal was slowly beginning to change in New York City, she and her family moved to Toronto to avoid her two sons being drafted into the Vietnam War. On her arrival in Canada she was celebrated as “our Jane” and soon accepted as the expert on urban issues and urban renewal.

Jane Jacobs’s approach in all her publications was unusual; she did not work with statistics and maps, but aimed simply to “seek the truth from the facts.” A recent article claimed that “she had more enemies than any American woman.” In her last book Jane Jacobs referred to a paradigm shift, although not to the one she had influenced. She quoted Thomas Kuhn and his famous book on paradigms: Her impact is not limited to the North American perspective. Unaffected by criticism she continued her unconventional thinking, which led to other economic, philosophical, historic and ethical writings. Even though she overstepped the conventional boundaries time and again scientists in planning related disciplines exploited her arguments. Not only did Jane Jacobs’ ideas and influence cross the Atlantic to Europe, they also influenced urban planning and urban renewal worldwide. For this reason we want to open up a transnational as well as cross-disciplinary discussion about Jane Jacobs’s work. This volume demonstrates a great variety of approaches to the consideration of Jane Jacobs’s achievements and impact.

Most people do not enjoy having their entire worldview discredited; it sets them uncomfortably adrift. […] If a paradigm is truly obsolete, it must finally give way, discredited by testing of the real world.²

The book starts with a couple of personal assessments based on contacts and interviews with Jane Jacobs. The contributions by Roberta Brandes Gratz and Mary Rowe offer intimate perspectives including descriptions of her way of working and writing. Central elements of her philosophy and the principles of self-organization and formal as well as informal complexity are analyzed. Richard White evaluates her impact on Toronto, after she moved to the Canadian metropolis in 1968. Although her influence was often overestimated, she was highly influential “in the background” and her book became “basic knowledge” in local grassroots movements. Based on interviews with planners and colleagues who worked with her in Toronto he portrays a picture of planning cultures and controversies in Canada.

Most of Jacobs’s publications are focussed on cities – she was a “city lover” and influenced by various sociologists, journalists, and architects, but remained critical of “planners.” The “master builder Robert Moses” was, in a way, such a typical planner, and he refused even to look at her book. In the beginning she had the support of the famous writer and urbanist Lewis Mumford, but they became antagonists after she criticized his theories based on the Garden City Movement. Mumford subsequently published a critical review of Jacobs’s book entitled “Mother Jacobs’s Home Remedies.” The debate, especially with Lewis Mumford, was highly theoretical and concerned with important questions of planning, decentralization, density, and mixed-use developments; the discussions focused on long-term effects and referred back to a critical interpretation of Ebenezer Howard and his garden city, which was described by Jane Jacobs as “city-destroying ideas.”

Jörg Seifert relates her approach to Kevin Lynch’s urban design perspective. While Lynch formulated a more objective expert viewpoint illustrated by maps and drawings Jacobs’s is a layperson’s subjective perception based on descriptions. Madeleine Lyes evaluates her impact on theorists and sociologists like Sharon Zukin and her concept of “authenticity.” In her latest book Zukin transfers Jane Jacobs’s ideas to the New York of 2010. The famous “side walk ballet” on Hudson Street is now performed by other actors. But are her observations still useful and helpful for explaining trends of gentrification and relocation of displaced people today? Nicolai Roskamm takes up the current discussion on higher densities for more sustainable cities. While planners for a long time insisted on thinning urban populations through decentralization, lower densities, and the Garden City model, Jane Jacobs proposed higher densities than in the suburbs and a complex, dense, mixed-use urban fabric.

It is important to discuss not only Jane Jacobs’s first book, but also to include her later books in order to get a deeper insight into her thinking. “Trust your eyes and instincts” and “eyes on the street” was Jane Jacobs’s simple advice. “Most planners are men,” she states. In her later books she develops an economic theory of shrinking and growing cities and includes many theoretical, philosophical, and ethical considerations. She challenged what was generally regarded to be good practice and approved methods such as “social engineering” and what she called “the doctrine of salvation by bricks” as well as accepted paradigms. Jane Jacobs supported unplanned, dense, and mixed-use neighborhoods, and was critical of controlling, arraying, regulating or demolishing urban structures.

Her prominence and status in North America is not reflected in European urbanism discussions yet. However, she was influenced by the British Townscape Movement, and later her US-based ideas gained acceptance in Britain as well as in other European countries. Not only did Jane Jacobs’s ideas and influences cross the Atlantic, they also had an impact on urban planning and urban renewal in Europe. Of course, Jane Jacobs and her book were not solely responsible for the paradigm shift that extended to Europe. Many European and Asian cities had been bombed and large areas destroyed. The resulting housing shortage lasted much longer than in North America, and older buildings were not demolished during this period. However, with a delay of one or two decades, similar strategies and the “bulldozer approach” were also applied in Europe, until tenants, neighborhood organizations, and grassroots movements began to revolt against them. The methods that were used to reverse the urban renewal strategies were even more radical and included the squatting of buildings. This led, within a relatively short period, to a shift towards the protection and conservation of almost all old buildings and to the participation of local citizens.

The next chapter explores her impact on Europe by looking at references to her book and her work. Christiane Feuerstein analyzes the way in which urban renewal is conducted in Vienna and the shift from demolition towards a gentler approach to regeneration. She explains how the change to maintenance and neighborhood-orientated approaches was enforced by trend-setting projects. Other theorists and urban thinkers from the French and Spanish speaking world had to be included to offer insights into Jane Jacobs’s influence there. José Luis Sáinz Guerra discusses this perspective using the example of Spain, not only referring to theoretical debates but also to design problems, examples in the built environment and implemented projects in a strongly market-led context.

Gert-Jan Hospers looks at the Netherlands, a country with a long tradition of state interventions, spatial planning and public housing. How was Jane Jacobs’s book received there and what kind of influence did it have on the current debate about urban policies, planning, and urban renewal? Jane Jacobs was exploited as a reference by popular urbanists who sought to improve the image of cities by instrumentalizing her ideas. Dirk Schubert examines the adoption of her book in Germany, how its translation was made possible and the sort of reviews it received. He demonstrates how the paradigm shift in urban renewal to a more gentle urban regeneration came about, how participation became widespread and where and how practices in cities like Berlin and Hamburg were transformed. In the end there are not only personal correlations but also impacts on urban renewal strategies as well as on the built environment that can be observed. Christopher Klemek puts Jane Jacobs’s work into a transatlantic discourse about urban renewal on both sides of the Atlantic. He draws conclusions about procedures, institutional as well as personal networks and their influence on urban renewal, especially in the USA and in Western Germany.

Finally the question is discussed: “Are we all Jacobseans?” Recent decades have seen the development of a great variety of new urban strategies based on local issues, governance structures, and planning cultures. Jane Jacobs had already touched on many concepts including shared space, infill, mixed-use, conservation of old buildings, pedestrian-friendly traffic, and expansion of public transport, although her approach was sometimes relative to a different background. Even the Shared Space, Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements make reference to Jane Jacobs’s ideas.

The work of Jane Jacobs cannot be classified into strict disciplines. Her work was always cross-disciplinary, innovative, and unconventional. In this book her lines of argument are not just reflected theoretically but also analyzed with reference to the (non-)realization in the planning practice in North America and Europe. Meanwhile many planners in Europe and North America claim to be working according the principles she developed without actually doing so; others do so without being familiar with the details of her work.

On paper nearly all planners would now agree with Jane Jacobs’s approach to mix-use, higher density, pedestrian-based urban structures. But what about reality and the influence of new actors like developers and the real estate business, which were not that important when Jane Jacobs wrote her book. How can her idea of “old buildings for new uses” be implemented? Within a decade or so of the publication of Jane Jacobs’s book, most of her ideas had become generally accepted; probably because they had not been feasible beforehand due to zoning regulations. The bulldozer approach to old buildings was reversed and transformed into a mind-set of conservation which incorporated older buildings. The concept of participation also became widespread, since it was often easier to involve people early on rather than having to alter projects at a later stage, or modify them over and over again. Birgit Dulski and Gerben van Straaten show examples of how Jacobs’s ideas became built reality in the Netherlands and also how developers’ strategies can include participation, mix-use, and higher densities. They refer to urban politics in the Netherlands (VINEX 1995) which often generated housing in the form of mono-structures in the periphery. They demonstrate how Jane Jacobs’s ideas can help to create attractive and more diverse neighborhoods.

Today many theorists and practitioners are thinking about a new paradigm shift in the current period of rapid globalization, peak oil and neoliberal as well as deregulated approaches to planning. In this context it is useful to reflect on the background and circumstances of paradigm shifts and their chief players and theorists. There seem to be some indications that large-scale redevelopment projects are experiencing a renaissance. Many metropolitan areas are now competing in this field seeking to upgrade their image. In a way it seems to be easier for cities to focus on a few spectacular large-scale redevelopment projects rather than to work on a variety of smaller projects. Is it still possible to work in the spirit of Jane Jacobs, by way of participation, inclusion of local (poorer) people, affordable housing and mixed-use development, and a “bottom-up” strategy? Friedhelm Fischer and Uwe Altrock transfer her ideas to a period of globalization and deregulation, and demonstrate why and how they were used and abused. There is a confusing variety of built examples worldwide which allude to Jane Jacobs’s ideas. But are they implemented in a way she would have agreed with? Or are the Jacobsean ideas just a fashion to justify any kind of urban (re-)development? Stephen Goldsmith reflects on Jane Jacobs’s ideas in a broader context of urban ecology and includes perspectives of cities as organized complexity. She often used biological metaphors to explain her ideas. How can we learn from nature in order to transform our cities and regions in a more sustainable way? Klaus Brake discusses her relevance for today and tomorrow and opens up windows of opportunities for showing how we can learn from her. He underlines that there are many structural changes, new agents of transformation and a new affinity to the city which must be considered before we copy proposals made half a century ago.

Finally a lecture given by Jane Jacobs in Hamburg in 1981 is included, when the shift to more flexible strategies of rehabilitation in urban renewal began in Germany. Her polemic against Daniel Burnham’s famous statement “make big plans” includes perspectives of incremental strategies with involvement and participation of local people. The final section of this book includes some information to help readers understand the background of Jacobs’s life and work.

All authors in this volume assume that different values, traditions, assumptions, and habits will influence (planning) culture. Within situation-specific contexts and through particular value propositions, rituals, routines, procedures, approaches, and networks a specific planning culture is represented. This book provides the missing link through “cross-national studies” and comparative (e.g. transatlantic) analysis which makes the particular cultural context assessable and ratable. “Turns” have become quite a fashion in many scientific disciplines. The “spatial turn” was followed by the “visual turn” in social and humane sciences. In their development of a comparative cultural dimension of planning, the authors do not follow yet another fashion, but break new scientific ground and develop a more sustainable way for planning and urban rehabilitation for the future.

It is no exaggeration to proclaim that Jacobs’s book and ideas were important for a transatlantic (or even global?) paradigm shift in urban planning and urban renewal. Jane Jacobs herself helped create the myth that arose around her.³ The authors of this volume go beyond historic aspects, but develop conclusions on how the work of Jane Jacobs could be re-interpreted under other circumstances and employed in the current discourse about density and diversity in the field of urban planning. Jane Jacobs did not deliver recipes and best-pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• About the Editor
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Jane Jacobs: Roots, Basics and Impacts
• Jane Jacobs "A Radical Thinker" – "Cities First"
• Jane Jacobs and Her Impact on Urban Planning Outside North America
• "We are all Jacobseans" – Are We?
• Index