Guest Post: Feminist Planning Visionary Jane Jacobs

And hi from Korea!

I’m putting together this week’s newsletter from Daejeon, Korea, where we’ve been meeting with our sister school Hannam University (co-founded by a PC alum in the 1950s). It has been so lovely to be in a country with abortion rights and gun control and the most organized mass transit I’ve ever seen. Why can’t the US have nice things?

In any case, this week’s newsletter is a guest post by my dear colleague and friend, Justin Brent, who probably belongs in an Pacific Northwest eco village but is nonetheless holding down a principled environmentalism that is not easy in rural South Carolina. He’s one of my favorite people and reminds me, by his example, that we can always do better.

Ecocyclist Justin Brent on Jane Jacobs

One of the reasons I love this blog is because it takes on entrenched powers, widely shared cultural assumptions, and blatant misrepresentations of our lived experience. It fearlessly challenges these entities, no matter how uphill the battle. Author Emily Taylor, moreover, is a terrific networker and collaborator, and through her connections has demonstrated the virtue of strength through numbers.

On both fronts – her courage and networking – Emily reminds me of another female journalist who did not advocate explicitly for women’s rights, but who like so many feminists was ignored or rebuked by institutions of power in our country. The institutions were the traffic engineers and city planners of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the female dissident was Jane Jacobs, now considered the inspiration for New Urbanism. Alas, Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of the Great American City did little to stop the patterns of development in our country (though her work in organizing protests and sit-ins did). But her book inspired a new generation of reformist engineers and city planners, who all now read Jacobs’s book in their first-year college classes and later cite it as though it were gospel. Unlike them, Jacobs had no degree in engineering or urban planning; in fact, she never graduated from college.

Perhaps some of her expertise came from writing about working-class districts in New York City, or from her time as Associate Editor for Architectural Forum. But most of it seemed to have come from her observations of city neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village or the housing projects in Harlem. What she saw led to deep skepticism of the urban planning industry, at which she takes aim in the first sentence of Death and Life: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught….”

Over the next twenty-two chapters, Jacobs repeatedly shows the disfunction caused by top-down planning projects and their paternalistic attempts to solve the problems of the poor. At the same time, she offers strategies for supporting messy, crowded and chaotic streets, at once celebrating their vitality and challenging assumptions that high concentrations of people lead to disease and crime. On the contrary, she argues, the presence of people on the streets makes them safer for everyone.

Perhaps her most enduring legacy was her justification of diversity. In her mind, cities need all kinds of people, who all play some invaluable role in the thriving of city life. Like a richly diverse ecosystem, the cities with the most diversity are most likely to survive and over the long term build prosperity. Spreading people out – the goal of most top-down urban designers – was a catastrophe for cities because density provides the eyes on the street, the diversity of use, the sensual interest, and the economic opportunity that people need.

Some critics have been quick to note that Death and Life had its shortcomings. Jacobs, for instance, dismisses all top-down attempts – whether government or private sector – to improve city life, yet such blanket statements disregard many of the contributions that government has made to city life (requirements for indoor plumbing or fire alarms, for instance). Moreover, by celebrating bottom-up community planning, she perhaps placed too much faith in the benevolence of local citizens.This attitude empowered the NIMBYs of our more recent times who “protect” their own neighborhoods by blocking the construction of affordable housing. But to hold Jacobs accountable for these criticisms misses the point of the catastrophic development model our country had assumed and continues to pursue even today–building remote suburbs, expanding highways, and destroying low-income communities for the sake of “progress.”

Today, Jacobs’s ideas are no-brainers to all but the most profoundly corrupt and narcissistic. If global warming is real, of course we must figure out how to rely less on automobiles. If obesity is an epidemic, then of course we must build walkable neighborhoods. If mental health problems are on the rise, then of course we need to promote more human connection through mixed-use urban design. For modern readers, therefore, Jacobs’ ideas may seem (pardon the pun) pedestrian.

But in the early 1960s when the interstate system, slum clearing, and far-flung suburbs still held out the promise of utopia, Jane Jacobs was an irreverently loud woman who by some gross oversight was granted a megaphone. And thank heavens for that! Let us all celebrate the loud dissenters of our past, the Rachel Carsons, the Betty Friedans, and yes, the Jane Jacobses. Their ideas may have occasionally been coopted for problematic purposes, but that should not diminish the lifesaving tonic conjured through their acerbic pens.

For readers like you and me, these visionaries remind us to promote courageous voices like Hot Feminism. Viva la Resistance!