Photo credit: Maggie Steber, Planning Magazine , September 1986
“And this year’s recipient of ‘The Janey’ is ————-.”
Many years ago, when I directed the Masters Program in City Planning at SDSU, I instituted an award that was bestowed upon one of the graduating students at our annual banquet. “The Janey,” a large, framed photograph of writer-activist-urbanist Jane Jacobs, was somewhat tongue-in-cheek (the reason the awardee received it was never disclosed, so they could supply their own accolade). But like the real Janey, they were “exceptional” in some way and showed promise to make a mark on their chosen field. Jacobs was revered by some students, a foil for others, but respected by all. She was rather unique, a street level battler for the urban neighborhood who took on the likes of New York City’s Robert Moses and prevailed in keeping him from slicing an expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.
Jacobs wrote the second book I purchased when I first became interested in urban planning. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was probably the first book of its sort to make the New York Times bestseller list. It was critical of the prevailing approaches to city planning and urban redevelopment, and explicated Mrs. Jacob’s ideas about what made lively, functioning neighborhoods and cities. She was an activist, but a theorist at her core. She was hard to resist.
The first book I bought was Lewis Mumford’s The City in History , a classic in its own right. The two books didn’t reside comfortably beside one another on my shelf. While both author’s were celebrants of urban life they seemed to come at it from different ends of the telescope. Jacobs’ view was street level. She saw the vitality of the city in the fundamental interaction between urbanites and the streets and sidewalks. Where planners tended to see chaos and clutter she saw an urbanscape articulated with traces and subtle functions of urban living. To Mumford’s dismay, she maintained that it was the very crowdedness of the city that made them safer—the “eyes of the city” as she put it.
Such notions were “Mother Jacob’s Home Remedies . . . “ as Mumford put it in an article. Where Jacobs was molecular, the renowned social historian was molar. Mumford had come from a “regionalist” perspective, honed on utopian socialists like England’s Sir Ebenezer Howard and social ecologist Sir Patrick Geddes. He championed the building of entirely new towns that might avoid repeating the mistakes of gigantic urbanism. [1]
But this is a remembrance of Mrs. Jacobs, not of her critic. [2] She came along at the right time, a countervailing force in a cloth coat, sensible shoes and her Prince Val cut who forced planners to consider the subtle, fine grain of urban life that is constructed out of loyalty to place, experience, memory, association, and all the other elements that make a place a place, a neighborhood and a community. Planners were in their salad days when she wrote Death and Life; they had their renewal legislation from the Housing Act of 1949, public housing, the interstate highway program, and an array of new programs from JFK’s “Great Society” and they were having at cities sometimes with the abandon of kids kicking over ant hills.
Her appeal was that she viewed the city like a flaneur , at the same eye level as the average urbanite, not from 35,000 feet, which was a common map scale for large cities. Things look different up close (and personal). Her approach was inductive; she started with the individual, and the web of local connections, working her way up. The idea that working deductively, from some abstract design concept to be downwardly imposed upon the character of indigenous communities led, in her view, to a stultifying urbanism. Where planners depicted abstracted people plying mall-like open spaces, Jacobs saw tight streets, stores with merchandize spilling onto sidewalks, and people chatting on stoops.
Yet not every district of a city with older streets and buildings was a viable, dynamic, and quaint neighborhood like the Greenwich Village and Boston North End, or parts of Toronto to which Jacobs eventually decamped. Some possessed neither the location and loyal residents, nor the commercial and social viability, although planners, as Herbert Gans [3] pointed out, often could not see the life in them because of the dereliction and land use clutter.
But sometimes you have to get up a little higher and see what’s going on at a larger scale. The neighborhood may be the mosaic tile of the urban pattern, but its relationship to the connective infrastructure. Cities needed to respect their indigenous “villages,” but they existed, and their very character depended upon. an encompassing and expanding metropolitanism.
Not that Jacobs ignored the more theoretical aspects of urbanism, but she tended to explain them to her readers in ways that seemed to reflect her almost colloquial examples and metaphors. In her The Economy of Cities (1970), she characteristically took on the establishment, reversing the anthropological theory that cities emerges only after the development of agriculture. She explained how urban economies expand and prosper by making “new work” with the example of the woman who conceived of the brassiere.
In the final analysis, Jacobs was not the bane of planners. Many respected her, other came around to her way of thinking, and some, like neo-traditionalists, bastardized her ideas. But it was not Jacobs who vanquished the planners; it was the urban riots of the 1960s, Vietnam, the dismantling of urban programs by the Nixon Administration, the recessions of the seventies, the emerging political conservatism and its anti-urbanism. In the final analysis, planners would be fools not to claim her as one of their own, a tough-minded conscience who made them re-think their concepts and learn to love what makes cities vibrant when they became detached, and lost in their bureaucratic and dogmatic ways.
She was special, the genuine article, like the parts of cities she loved and fought for. I guess if I was still handing out “Janeys” I would have to say that this year’s recipient of “The Janey” is . . . who else, . . . Janey.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.2.2006)
[1] Mumford lived his later years in the small town of Amenia, New York, with a population less than 5000.
[2] I covered Mumford’s passing some years ago, remembering a personal “encounter” with him as well.
[3] Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (1962 )