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Observer Walt
Guest
^ Thank you Darkstar. There seems to be a wealth of info there; I will certainly go through some of it.
G
ganjavih
Guest
A
alklay
Guest
A balanced, if not critical look at Jacobs (NYT):
Critic's Notebook
Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
TIME passes. Jane Jacobs, the great lover of cities who stared down Robert Moses' bulldozers and saved many of New York's most precious neighborhoods, died last week at 89. It is a loss for those who value urban life. But her death may also give us permission to move on, to let go of the obsessive belief that Ms. Jacobs held the answer to every evil that faces the contemporary city.
For New Yorkers, Ms. Jacobs's life remains suspended between two seismic events: The publication, in 1961, of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and her showdown in the late 60's with Mr. Moses over a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have reduced much of SoHo's handsome cast-iron district to rubble. The expressway was killed by Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1969.
By then, Ms. Jacobs had fled for Toronto, and Mr. Moses, who died in 1981, had lost much of his power and prestige. But in the popular imagination, the two are forever at odds: the imperious city planning czar versus the tireless public advocate. Today, the pendulum of opinion has swung so far in favor of Ms. Jacobs that it has distorted the public's understanding of urban planning. As we mourn her death, we may want to mourn a bit for Mr. Moses as well.
Her argument was simple enough, radically so. Horrified at the tabula rasa urban renewal strategies of the 1950's, she argued for a return to the small-scale city she found in Greenwich Village and the North End of Boston — the lively street life of front stoops, corner shops and casual personal interaction.
Mr. Moses, tellingly, once dismissed her and her ilk as "nobody but a bunch of mothers." He was partly right. By standing up for the intricate, individual relationships that define the inner life of cities, she allowed a generation to challenge the authority of patronizing — and uniformly male — city planners in gray suits.
An urban flâneur of the first order, she reminded us that cities could only be fully understood with our eyes, feet and ears — not from the distant abstraction of architectural drawings.
But the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation's dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification. And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.
The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs's generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses' bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.
The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
Nor did Ms. Jacobs really offer an adequate long-term solution for the boom in urban population, which cannot be solved simply through incremental growth in existing neighborhoods.
Just as cities change, so do our perceptions of them. Architects now in their mid-40's — Ms. Jacobs's age when she published "Death and Life" — do not share their parents' unqualified hatred of Modernist developments.
They understand that an endless grid of brick towers and barren plazas is dehumanizing. But on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center — or even at the old World Trade Center — can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Perhaps her legacy has been most damaged by those who continue to treat "Death and Life" as sacred text rather than as what it was: a heroic cri de coeur. Of those, the New Urbanists are the most guilty; in many cases, they reduced her vision of corner shops and busy streets to a superficial town formula that creates the illusion of urban diversity, but masks a stifling uniformity at its core.
This is true in large-scale projects as diverse as Battery Park City or Celebration, Fla., where narrow streets and parks were supposed to create an immediate sense of community. As it turns out, what the New Urbanists could not reproduce was the most critical aspect of Ms. Jacobs's vision, the intimate neighborhood that is built — brick by brick, family by family — over a century.
For those who could not see it, the hollowness of this urban planning strategy was finally exposed in New Orleans, where planners were tarting up historic districts for tourists, even as deeper social problems were being ignored and its infrastructure was crumbling.
The answer to such superficiality is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure — roads, parks, bridges — that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.
The lesson we should take from Ms. Jacobs was her ability to look at the city with her eyes wide open, without rigid prejudices. Maybe we should see where that lesson leads next.
Critic's Notebook
Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
TIME passes. Jane Jacobs, the great lover of cities who stared down Robert Moses' bulldozers and saved many of New York's most precious neighborhoods, died last week at 89. It is a loss for those who value urban life. But her death may also give us permission to move on, to let go of the obsessive belief that Ms. Jacobs held the answer to every evil that faces the contemporary city.
For New Yorkers, Ms. Jacobs's life remains suspended between two seismic events: The publication, in 1961, of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and her showdown in the late 60's with Mr. Moses over a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have reduced much of SoHo's handsome cast-iron district to rubble. The expressway was killed by Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1969.
By then, Ms. Jacobs had fled for Toronto, and Mr. Moses, who died in 1981, had lost much of his power and prestige. But in the popular imagination, the two are forever at odds: the imperious city planning czar versus the tireless public advocate. Today, the pendulum of opinion has swung so far in favor of Ms. Jacobs that it has distorted the public's understanding of urban planning. As we mourn her death, we may want to mourn a bit for Mr. Moses as well.
Her argument was simple enough, radically so. Horrified at the tabula rasa urban renewal strategies of the 1950's, she argued for a return to the small-scale city she found in Greenwich Village and the North End of Boston — the lively street life of front stoops, corner shops and casual personal interaction.
Mr. Moses, tellingly, once dismissed her and her ilk as "nobody but a bunch of mothers." He was partly right. By standing up for the intricate, individual relationships that define the inner life of cities, she allowed a generation to challenge the authority of patronizing — and uniformly male — city planners in gray suits.
An urban flâneur of the first order, she reminded us that cities could only be fully understood with our eyes, feet and ears — not from the distant abstraction of architectural drawings.
But the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation's dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification. And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.
The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs's generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses' bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.
The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
Nor did Ms. Jacobs really offer an adequate long-term solution for the boom in urban population, which cannot be solved simply through incremental growth in existing neighborhoods.
Just as cities change, so do our perceptions of them. Architects now in their mid-40's — Ms. Jacobs's age when she published "Death and Life" — do not share their parents' unqualified hatred of Modernist developments.
They understand that an endless grid of brick towers and barren plazas is dehumanizing. But on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center — or even at the old World Trade Center — can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Perhaps her legacy has been most damaged by those who continue to treat "Death and Life" as sacred text rather than as what it was: a heroic cri de coeur. Of those, the New Urbanists are the most guilty; in many cases, they reduced her vision of corner shops and busy streets to a superficial town formula that creates the illusion of urban diversity, but masks a stifling uniformity at its core.
This is true in large-scale projects as diverse as Battery Park City or Celebration, Fla., where narrow streets and parks were supposed to create an immediate sense of community. As it turns out, what the New Urbanists could not reproduce was the most critical aspect of Ms. Jacobs's vision, the intimate neighborhood that is built — brick by brick, family by family — over a century.
For those who could not see it, the hollowness of this urban planning strategy was finally exposed in New Orleans, where planners were tarting up historic districts for tourists, even as deeper social problems were being ignored and its infrastructure was crumbling.
The answer to such superficiality is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure — roads, parks, bridges — that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.
The lesson we should take from Ms. Jacobs was her ability to look at the city with her eyes wide open, without rigid prejudices. Maybe we should see where that lesson leads next.
E
Ed007Toronto
Guest
And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.
Only someone from LA can say that.
O
Observer Walt
Guest
Ouroussof's critique does have merit. Jane Jacobs analyzed the cities around her, but as I understand it her experience was based on her observations of older cities or parts of cities (lower Manhattan, Boston, the Annex district of Toronto). She criticized those who wanted to go into these older areas with bulldozers, demolish everything in sight, and build sterile new developments of uniform age and design, not to mention expressways. She celebrated short blocks, a mix of uses in close proximity to each other, and especially a mix of ages and styles on the blocks.
The suburbs around most cities, built since about 1960, almost by definition can't accommodate what Jacobs wanted to see. The suburbs are characterized by housing of uniform age and, usually, style. It will take a long time for them to age and slowly morph into the type of neighbourhood Jacobs saw in the central city. It's true that she did not offer "an adequate long-term solution" for the problems of growth (usually defined in the real world as suburban growth), but then, who has?
The good news is that urban designs have changed. Look at neighbourhoods dating from the 1960s, then look at many of the areas developed over the past 10-15 years. Short blocks and a grid pattern of streets have pretty much replaced the long loopy crescents. People can walk more easily from A to B, and transit can actually run along straight streets and get closer to residential areas. Townhouses are close to detached houses. More small neighbourhood plazas are being built, putting at least a few stores and services within walking distance of where people live. True community centres are being built with arenas, libraries, daycares, schools, and bocce courts all under one roof. We are no longer afraid of employment centres being relatively close to residential areas. It's not the final answer, obviously, but it's better than what was built during the 60s and 70s.
The influence of her ideas can be seen literally in the streets in the central city, but perhaps it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that these ideas have also had some influence on the burbs. Until someone comes along with those answers, I'd like to think that this might do as an interim theory.
The suburbs around most cities, built since about 1960, almost by definition can't accommodate what Jacobs wanted to see. The suburbs are characterized by housing of uniform age and, usually, style. It will take a long time for them to age and slowly morph into the type of neighbourhood Jacobs saw in the central city. It's true that she did not offer "an adequate long-term solution" for the problems of growth (usually defined in the real world as suburban growth), but then, who has?
The good news is that urban designs have changed. Look at neighbourhoods dating from the 1960s, then look at many of the areas developed over the past 10-15 years. Short blocks and a grid pattern of streets have pretty much replaced the long loopy crescents. People can walk more easily from A to B, and transit can actually run along straight streets and get closer to residential areas. Townhouses are close to detached houses. More small neighbourhood plazas are being built, putting at least a few stores and services within walking distance of where people live. True community centres are being built with arenas, libraries, daycares, schools, and bocce courts all under one roof. We are no longer afraid of employment centres being relatively close to residential areas. It's not the final answer, obviously, but it's better than what was built during the 60s and 70s.
The influence of her ideas can be seen literally in the streets in the central city, but perhaps it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that these ideas have also had some influence on the burbs. Until someone comes along with those answers, I'd like to think that this might do as an interim theory.
A
adma
Guest
Who says we can't have a little potential "ich bin ein Los Angelino" in us?
Anyway, the Gutter guts Sticky Nicky...
Anyway, the Gutter guts Sticky Nicky...
A
adma
Guest
And remember the subtler aspect of Jane Jacobs being more sanguine about the MissiBramptonian suburbs (especially latterly) than her blinder adherents are prepared to admit.
Indeed, by extension, I can see her finding more to admire in LA than Nikolai's giving her credit for. Granted, the "more to admire" might have less to do with urban form a la Death & Life, and more with the thrust towards urban economics etc. of her more recent works--almost like even she came over time to realize how stifling and even self-consciously commodified "Jane Jacobs urbanism" has become. Maybe not like she was going all Joel Kotkin on us, but still...
Indeed, by extension, I can see her finding more to admire in LA than Nikolai's giving her credit for. Granted, the "more to admire" might have less to do with urban form a la Death & Life, and more with the thrust towards urban economics etc. of her more recent works--almost like even she came over time to realize how stifling and even self-consciously commodified "Jane Jacobs urbanism" has become. Maybe not like she was going all Joel Kotkin on us, but still...
A
ahrvojic
Guest
And remember the subtler aspect of Jane Jacobs being more sanguine about the MissiBramptonian suburbs (especially latterly) than her blinder adherents are prepared to admit.
You just reminded me of this recent Globe article (don't think I've seen it on UT yet) where it specifically mentions that:
Article
JANE JACOBS, 1916-2006
The places that mattered to Jane Jacobs
In remembering the city's favourite adopted urbanologist, who passed away on Tuesday, DEIRDRE KELLY asks her friends and fellow fighters about the places she held dearest to her heart. Photographs by SIMON HAYTER
DEIRDRE KELLY
Kensington Market
When Ms. Jacobs and her family first moved to the city from New York in 1968, it was the market's humming chaos -- live chickens in cages, a multitude of languages, and thick knots of pedestrian traffic -- that made for love at first sight. Before renting their first apartment on Spadina Road, the family looked for flats along Baldwin Street. When they began house hunting, they revisited the neighbourhood before settling into the Annex. "There was no question that it felt like home to us," Jim Jacobs, her son, remembers of Kensington. "It was the variety, and all the things going on in the street and all the different people. It was the most intense mixture."
69 Albany Ave.
A former rooming house renovated by her late architect husband, Bob Jacobs, Ms. Jacobs's home of 37 years had a telephone booth preserved from the building's previous incarnation, and, at least during the visit of one guest a decade ago, white plastic patio chairs in the living room. Conversations with guests would often be interrupted by phone calls. After closing the door for privacy, Toronto city councillor Nadine Nowlan remembers, "she would emerge declaring, 'Oh that was so-and-so from New York, or that was so-and-so from Brazil.' " Once a year, Ms. Jacobs feted the past and present recipients of the Jane Jacobs Prize -- founded in 1997 to honour citizens that have contributed to the city's vitality -- at a legendary potluck dinner in her home. Rollo Myers, who won the 2000 prize, says the get-togethers were gruelling. "There'd be a swarm of ideas, and you'd have to be on your toes and be prepared to defend your point of view. After the first one I was shell-shocked, and [her friend] Mary Rowe said, cheerfully, 'You got off light.' "
Spadina Road
The site of her first public Toronto victory -- against the proposal to extend the Spadina Expressway (now Allen Road) through the centre of the city. The 1971 achievement was the cumulative effort of Annex residents, but Ms. Jacobs, a newcomer fresh from a neighbourhood urban-renewal fight in New York, inspired and galvanized the Stop Spadina Save Our City group. She never lost her distaste for expressways that divided a city. "She always hated the Gardiner," recalls Councillor Nowlan, a group member. "She just hated elevated expressways. They were ugly, and they were a barrier to people enjoying the waterfront, and they funnel cars into the central part of the city and create bottlenecks. She never tired of complaining about them."
The suburbs
In 2001, when her doctor prescribed regular walks for exercise, Ms. Jacobs began heading outside the city core for "discovery" strolls. Some of what she discovered -- monolithic subdivisions with no pedestrian life -- dismayed her. Elsewhere, such as in Brampton and Mississauga, she saw potential. But she never referred to them as the burbs, says journalist Sid Adilman, a long-time neighbour who accompanied her on her walks -- "she always named them, because they weren't faceless to her." On one trip, she paid a visit to Mississauga's town hall to pore over urban-development plans -- amid the buzz of an excited planning-department staff. "I thought Mississauga was a hellhole," says Mr. Adilman. "But she didn't. She actually liked what she saw. She liked their plan to expand and improve the downtown core. She was more the optimist."
401 Richmond St. W.
It's no surprise that Ms. Jacobs enjoyed visiting the converted warehouse near the corner of Spadina. With its mix of tenants -- galleries, studios, a café, a daycare -- "it embodies all of her ideas about mixed uses and of people interacting with each other to be creative and innovative under one roof," says former mayor John Sewell. Community-friendly property developer Margie Zeidler, who completed the building's conversion in 1994, chalks up its inspiration, in part, to a chapter of Ms. Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. "She wrote, 'Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.' When I read that, at age 18, it was such a flash. I thought, "Yes! Warehouses -- they have a purpose."
The Toronto Islands
Ms. Jacobs's fondness for the islands was demonstrable: When the city proposed demolishing the houses on Ward's and Algonquin islands to increase parkland -- as it had done to Centre Island and Hanlan's Point -- Ms. Jacobs was invited to attend a Canada Day rally in support of the community. Writer and archivist Sally Gibson remembers Ms. Jacobs's call-to-arms that day in 1980: "She said, 'This community shouldn't be destroyed, because it's loveable. It's unique. It's a lovely thing. It's wicked to destroy loveable, unique and lovely things. When people defend a place the way you islanders are defending this, that's the greatest argument of all. It says it's worth saving.' "
Dundas and Sherbourne
It's a pivotal moment that many remember well: a morning in 1973, at a protest to preserve the neighbourhood at Dundas and Sherbourne -- part of a planned razing of Sherbourne Street's east side. As the bulldozers reared into action, Ms. Jacobs called on picketers to rip down the hoardings, without which, according to a city bylaw, the developers could not proceed. The tear-down was averted. The standoff led to high-density infill housing in the laneways behind the historic homes -- downtown's first non-profit housing project. "It was a brilliant example of her being active within the rest of the community, and of her ingenuity," says Mr. Sewell, an alderman at the time. The partially demolished porch still stands at 241 Sherbourne.
The island airport
First, there was the Harbour City project, a plan to turn the site of the island airport into a 60,000-strong residential development. She was integral, architect Ed Zeidler remembers, to his vision of houses, retail, hotels, recreational spaces in a mostly car-free environment. She was particularly adamant that it be not just for the wealthy. The plan was scuttled in 1974, but her interest in the development of the island never abated. In opposing the expansion of the airport in 2003, she threw her support behind then-long-shot mayoral candidate David Miller. "Jane felt very passionately that to build a bridge and expand the airport was inimical to building a great neighbourhood," says Mayor Miller. "She understood that there could be great neighbourhoods on the waterfront if only they weren't under the flight path of a busy Toronto airport."
Royal St. George's College
Ms. Jacobs's last battle was, fittingly, in her own backyard: the proposed three-storey addition to a boys' private school less than a block from her house. "She didn't want the expansion to stop -- she wanted the school to move altogether," says Lynn Spink of the Neighbours of St. Alban's Park group that has spearheaded the fight. "And on that point she was a lot more radical than the other neighbours." City council and community council voted to halt the expansion in November, but the school appealed the decision to the Ontario Municipal Board. On Wednesday, her son attended the hearing to speak on her behalf. "She wasn't the retiring type," Jim Jacobs says. "I think that it's inevitable that she died fighting."
***
It was a brilliant example of her being active within the rest of the community, and of her ingenuity.
Former mayor John Sewell, recalling how Jacobs's quick thinking averted the demolition of the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne. A partially demolished porch at 241 Sherbourne still stands.
***
She wrote, 'Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.' When I read that, at age 18, it was such a flash. I thought, 'Yes! Warehouses -- they have a purpose.'
Community developer Margie Zeidler on Jacobs's influence on 401 Richmond. Her favourite spot: the rooftop garden.
***
She always hated the Gardiner. She just hated elevated expressways. They were ugly, and they were a barrier to people enjoying the waterfront, and they funnel cars into the central part of the city and create bottlenecks. She never tired of complaining about them.
Stop Spadina Save Our City co-organizer Nadine Nowlan, on Jacobs's continued distaste for expressways. The proposed Spadina Expressway extension would have run through the Annex neighbourhood they shared.
***
There'd be a swarm of ideas, and you'd have to be on your toes and be prepared to defend your point of view. After the first one I was shell-shocked, and [her friend] Mary Rowe said, cheerfully, 'You got off light.'
Rollo Myers of Architectural Conservancy Ontario, on the get-togethers at Ms. Jacobs's Albany Avenue home. Every year, she hosted past and present recipients of the Jane Jacobs Award for a potluck dinner.
S
spmarshall
Guest
Elsewhere, such as in Brampton and Mississauga, she saw potential. But she never referred to them as the burbs, says journalist Sid Adilman, a long-time neighbour who accompanied her on her walks -- "she always named them, because they weren't faceless to her."
In Dark Age Ahead, she wrote quite a bit about Brampton - and the potential she saw - at that book signing, I asked her about that, telling her that I lived there, and saw little more than a suburb - she said that there's more going on than what most would think - there's a lot of positive things going on. That really surprised me.
S
Sir Novelty Fashion
Guest
As a counterpoint to the New York Times piece, here is a thoughtful critique from the Toronto Sun, which at long last has come out against anti-intellectualism.
(The piece, incidentally, appeared across the page from a Sue Ann Levy column that began 'I think Mayor David Miller's new "Building a Great City" website should be renamed "How to Destroy Toronto the Good in Six Easy Socialist Steps."...')
----
Jane Jacobs: She listened to no one
John Downing
Toronto Sun
I was admiring the Jean Grogne cheese in a hot new California restaurant when the owner said that he and his wife had been architecture profs and liked their visits to Toronto.
And so the conversation shifted to Jane Jacobs -- because when you talk about urban planning and Toronto with professionals anywhere, her name's inevitable.
And then we drove back to the new suburban city of Aliso Viejo, quiet expanses of large homes around a core of a huge plaza, fed by a network of big roads and traffic controls -- the antithesis of everything Jacobs stood for, but also a delightful place to live.
I confess that for me, Jacobs was like that verse in Matthew about a prophet without honour. Much praise for her comes from activists who would follow a moose statue if it suited their ideology. Then there are those who admired her blunt talk but never puzzled their way through her books.
They call her the intellectual warrior who stopped the Spadina expressway. Actually, she was the anti-intellectual, who dropped out of university, refused honourary doctorates and often scorned the thinking in fields ranging from urbanology to economics -- although how can you be wrong when you attack economists?
As for stopping the Spadina, that's nonsense. The plan won every political and court challenge but was stopped by Bill Davis and aides who thought it would make the bland new Tory premier more electable.
What people forget is that when Jacobs and her late husband, an architect, came here in 1968 to settle near Bathurst and Bloor, they were fleeing not only a corrupt New York but the Vietnam draft that might seize their sons. Jacobs made her huge rep in the street battles of Manhattan, fighting the evil planner Robert Moses, whose dictatorial corruption was unmasked in the classic Putlizer-winning book The Power Broker.
She didn't like us talking about her past books because, I suspect, she realized her best fight was the first.
Her followers here are said to include ex-mayors David Crombie and John Sewell, but Crombie was talking about neighbourhood power and sensible planning to classes at Ryerson before she arrived. Sewell, who spoke affectionately after her death this week about how Jacobs had advised him in civil disobedience, didn't need instruction from anyone.
(In 1980, Sewell, the darling of the Jacobs crowd, lost to Art Eggleton in eight out of the 11 city wards, proving those who control downtown and had too much influence at City Hall were not liked by most Torontonians. The Jacobites also failed to get Barbara Hall elected as the big-city mayor, but did win with David Miller -- who in my view is a failed mayor.)
Predictably, Jacobs opposed amalgamation (a good idea done the wrong way); the Island airport (a good idea common in the world); planners and waterfront stagnation.
Well, she's right about city planners, but then any vision here has been perverted by council's ruling coalition of gliberals and socialists.
It's easy to agree we've ruined our waterfront. But Jacobs wouldn't listen to anyone on anything. Her way was right, and pols, bureaucrats, media and experts were charlatans.
Her great enemy was urban sprawl, although she didn't much like the family farms that were replaced by Don Mills. She liked kids playing on sidewalks, when most of us would prefer them in parks and schoolyards. She liked mixed-use streets, but most don't want to live beside shops.
It's hard, however, to attack her idolization of diversity. She wrote in her last book, on her typewriter, about how she thought this age of computers threatens us with mass amnesia, a new dark age. Urban sprawl was at the root of her fears -- she felt the way that most of us have chosen to live would ultimately collapse our culture around our ears.
In nearly 90 cranky years, Jacobs was called a guru, but she was more a guard, a sentry outside the urban camp, challenging everyone from generals to privates, insisting only she knew the password. The tragedy in her adopted city is that many of us liked it the way it was before she came.
(The piece, incidentally, appeared across the page from a Sue Ann Levy column that began 'I think Mayor David Miller's new "Building a Great City" website should be renamed "How to Destroy Toronto the Good in Six Easy Socialist Steps."...')
----
Jane Jacobs: She listened to no one
John Downing
Toronto Sun
I was admiring the Jean Grogne cheese in a hot new California restaurant when the owner said that he and his wife had been architecture profs and liked their visits to Toronto.
And so the conversation shifted to Jane Jacobs -- because when you talk about urban planning and Toronto with professionals anywhere, her name's inevitable.
And then we drove back to the new suburban city of Aliso Viejo, quiet expanses of large homes around a core of a huge plaza, fed by a network of big roads and traffic controls -- the antithesis of everything Jacobs stood for, but also a delightful place to live.
I confess that for me, Jacobs was like that verse in Matthew about a prophet without honour. Much praise for her comes from activists who would follow a moose statue if it suited their ideology. Then there are those who admired her blunt talk but never puzzled their way through her books.
They call her the intellectual warrior who stopped the Spadina expressway. Actually, she was the anti-intellectual, who dropped out of university, refused honourary doctorates and often scorned the thinking in fields ranging from urbanology to economics -- although how can you be wrong when you attack economists?
As for stopping the Spadina, that's nonsense. The plan won every political and court challenge but was stopped by Bill Davis and aides who thought it would make the bland new Tory premier more electable.
What people forget is that when Jacobs and her late husband, an architect, came here in 1968 to settle near Bathurst and Bloor, they were fleeing not only a corrupt New York but the Vietnam draft that might seize their sons. Jacobs made her huge rep in the street battles of Manhattan, fighting the evil planner Robert Moses, whose dictatorial corruption was unmasked in the classic Putlizer-winning book The Power Broker.
She didn't like us talking about her past books because, I suspect, she realized her best fight was the first.
Her followers here are said to include ex-mayors David Crombie and John Sewell, but Crombie was talking about neighbourhood power and sensible planning to classes at Ryerson before she arrived. Sewell, who spoke affectionately after her death this week about how Jacobs had advised him in civil disobedience, didn't need instruction from anyone.
(In 1980, Sewell, the darling of the Jacobs crowd, lost to Art Eggleton in eight out of the 11 city wards, proving those who control downtown and had too much influence at City Hall were not liked by most Torontonians. The Jacobites also failed to get Barbara Hall elected as the big-city mayor, but did win with David Miller -- who in my view is a failed mayor.)
Predictably, Jacobs opposed amalgamation (a good idea done the wrong way); the Island airport (a good idea common in the world); planners and waterfront stagnation.
Well, she's right about city planners, but then any vision here has been perverted by council's ruling coalition of gliberals and socialists.
It's easy to agree we've ruined our waterfront. But Jacobs wouldn't listen to anyone on anything. Her way was right, and pols, bureaucrats, media and experts were charlatans.
Her great enemy was urban sprawl, although she didn't much like the family farms that were replaced by Don Mills. She liked kids playing on sidewalks, when most of us would prefer them in parks and schoolyards. She liked mixed-use streets, but most don't want to live beside shops.
It's hard, however, to attack her idolization of diversity. She wrote in her last book, on her typewriter, about how she thought this age of computers threatens us with mass amnesia, a new dark age. Urban sprawl was at the root of her fears -- she felt the way that most of us have chosen to live would ultimately collapse our culture around our ears.
In nearly 90 cranky years, Jacobs was called a guru, but she was more a guard, a sentry outside the urban camp, challenging everyone from generals to privates, insisting only she knew the password. The tragedy in her adopted city is that many of us liked it the way it was before she came.
A
adma
Guest
And somewhat in-between...
www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008319
What Jane Jacobs Really Saw
Today's urban planners falsely claim her legacy.
BY LEONARD GILROY
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Legendary author and urban theorist Jane Jacobs passed away last week at the age of 89. Her classic 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," delivered a damning indictment of postwar city planning and urban renewal efforts, revolutionizing the way we think about and plan our cities.
A working mother with no formal education in urban planning, Jacobs became an icon in the 1960s when she mobilized citizens to fight the redevelopment and highway-construction plans of New York City planning czar Robert Moses, who wielded almost unchecked power over the city's urban development during the mid-20th century. She famously led the effort that defeated Moses' plan to build an expressway through Manhattan's Washington Square Park and West Village, which would have displaced nearly 10,000 residents and workers and destroyed thousands of historic buildings.
Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Life"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners.
Modern planners have contorted Jacobs's beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools--like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and high-density development built around light-rail transit systems--to design the city they envision. They try to "create" livable cities from the ground up and micromanage urban form through regulation. We've seen these tools at work in Portland, Ore., for more than three decades. But the results have been dismal and dramatic. The city's "smart growth" policies effectively created a land shortage, constricting the housing supply and artificially inflating prices. By 1999, Portland had become one of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation, and its homeownership rate lagged behind the national average. It has also seen one of the nation's largest increases in traffic congestion and boasts a costly, heavily subsidized light-rail system that accounts for just 1% of the city's total travel. Not exactly how they planned it.
That's because these planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial and error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity. Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.
She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories. "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.
Sadly, many in the Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements cite Jacobs as the inspiration for their efforts to combat so-called "urban sprawl" and make over suburbia with dense, walkable downtowns, mixed-use development, and varied building styles. While Jacobs identified these as organic elements of successful cities, planners have eagerly tried to impose them on cities in formulaic fashion, regardless of their contextual appropriateness and compatibility with the underlying economic order. In short, they've taken Jacobs's observations of what makes cities work and tried to formalize them into an authoritarian recipe for policy intervention.
As Jacobs opined in a 2001 Reason magazine interview, "the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop. . . . And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect."
Jacobs's ideas came from the heart. Her foray into urban theory was partly inspired by the failed urban renewal efforts of the post-World War II era that displaced tens of thousands of poor and minority residents and resulted in the isolation or destruction of previously vibrant neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
Fundamentally, there is little difference behind the social engineering mentality of those who wrought the disaster of postwar urban renewal and the mindset of today's planners trying to regulate away suburbia in hopes of master-planned urban living for everyone.
More and more, these planners are calling for the centralization of land-use control under state and regional governments, usurping the American tradition of local control over development. In the view of many planners, this command-and-control bureaucracy is needed because municipal planning is too "uncoordinated" to achieve "societally beneficial" goals like open-space preservation, mass transit and urban densification.
But if they go back and reread "Death and Life," they'll find Jacobs rightly asking, "How is bigger administration, with labyrinths nobody can comprehend or navigate, an improvement over crazy-quilt township and suburban governments?"
She went on to ridicule the idea of regionalism as "escapism from intellectual helplessness" predicated on the delusion that the problems planners are unable to solve at the local level will somehow be more easily addressed on a larger-scale, concluding that "no other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning."
Politicians and planners would do well to commemorate Jacobs by revisiting her work. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned planners, you can't "create" a vibrant city or neighborhood. The best cities and neighborhoods just happen, and the best thing we can do is to step out of the way of innovators and entrepreneurs.
Mr. Gilroy is a certified planner and policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.
www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008319
What Jane Jacobs Really Saw
Today's urban planners falsely claim her legacy.
BY LEONARD GILROY
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Legendary author and urban theorist Jane Jacobs passed away last week at the age of 89. Her classic 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," delivered a damning indictment of postwar city planning and urban renewal efforts, revolutionizing the way we think about and plan our cities.
A working mother with no formal education in urban planning, Jacobs became an icon in the 1960s when she mobilized citizens to fight the redevelopment and highway-construction plans of New York City planning czar Robert Moses, who wielded almost unchecked power over the city's urban development during the mid-20th century. She famously led the effort that defeated Moses' plan to build an expressway through Manhattan's Washington Square Park and West Village, which would have displaced nearly 10,000 residents and workers and destroyed thousands of historic buildings.
Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Life"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners.
Modern planners have contorted Jacobs's beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools--like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and high-density development built around light-rail transit systems--to design the city they envision. They try to "create" livable cities from the ground up and micromanage urban form through regulation. We've seen these tools at work in Portland, Ore., for more than three decades. But the results have been dismal and dramatic. The city's "smart growth" policies effectively created a land shortage, constricting the housing supply and artificially inflating prices. By 1999, Portland had become one of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation, and its homeownership rate lagged behind the national average. It has also seen one of the nation's largest increases in traffic congestion and boasts a costly, heavily subsidized light-rail system that accounts for just 1% of the city's total travel. Not exactly how they planned it.
That's because these planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial and error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity. Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.
She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories. "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.
Sadly, many in the Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements cite Jacobs as the inspiration for their efforts to combat so-called "urban sprawl" and make over suburbia with dense, walkable downtowns, mixed-use development, and varied building styles. While Jacobs identified these as organic elements of successful cities, planners have eagerly tried to impose them on cities in formulaic fashion, regardless of their contextual appropriateness and compatibility with the underlying economic order. In short, they've taken Jacobs's observations of what makes cities work and tried to formalize them into an authoritarian recipe for policy intervention.
As Jacobs opined in a 2001 Reason magazine interview, "the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop. . . . And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect."
Jacobs's ideas came from the heart. Her foray into urban theory was partly inspired by the failed urban renewal efforts of the post-World War II era that displaced tens of thousands of poor and minority residents and resulted in the isolation or destruction of previously vibrant neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
Fundamentally, there is little difference behind the social engineering mentality of those who wrought the disaster of postwar urban renewal and the mindset of today's planners trying to regulate away suburbia in hopes of master-planned urban living for everyone.
More and more, these planners are calling for the centralization of land-use control under state and regional governments, usurping the American tradition of local control over development. In the view of many planners, this command-and-control bureaucracy is needed because municipal planning is too "uncoordinated" to achieve "societally beneficial" goals like open-space preservation, mass transit and urban densification.
But if they go back and reread "Death and Life," they'll find Jacobs rightly asking, "How is bigger administration, with labyrinths nobody can comprehend or navigate, an improvement over crazy-quilt township and suburban governments?"
She went on to ridicule the idea of regionalism as "escapism from intellectual helplessness" predicated on the delusion that the problems planners are unable to solve at the local level will somehow be more easily addressed on a larger-scale, concluding that "no other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning."
Politicians and planners would do well to commemorate Jacobs by revisiting her work. Despite the best efforts of well-intentioned planners, you can't "create" a vibrant city or neighborhood. The best cities and neighborhoods just happen, and the best thing we can do is to step out of the way of innovators and entrepreneurs.
Mr. Gilroy is a certified planner and policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.
A
adma
Guest
Paradoxical as it may sound, I feel more comfortable with Janey's embrace by the Reason crowd than by Pitfield/Stintz NIMBYs...
Jane Jacobs, who protested innumerable times and didn't take any shit, was punk before punk was cool. She stood up for the common person, and didn't take any shit.
Jane Jacobs, who protested innumerable times and didn't take any shit, was punk before punk was cool. She stood up for the common person, and didn't take any shit.
A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
re: Op Piece
Beware of the fine print - here is a description of Reason Foundation pulled from Google search.
To argue that the dislike of authoritian planning by Jane Jacobs is an endorsement of [sic] suburbanism and low density development through the current economic order is about as authentic as communism as interpreted by the Chinese Communist Party.
AoD
Beware of the fine print - here is a description of Reason Foundation pulled from Google search.
Reason Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to individual liberty, limited government, and advancing free minds and free markets.
To argue that the dislike of authoritian planning by Jane Jacobs is an endorsement of [sic] suburbanism and low density development through the current economic order is about as authentic as communism as interpreted by the Chinese Communist Party.
AoD
A
adma
Guest
I know that. But somehow, Reason still manages to catch the truest Jane Jacobs boogie-woogie better than Jane Pitfield.
I guess, it's like choosing Vice magazine over Bateman prints...
Oh, and here's Kunstler talking.
Sun April 30
Since this is a blog not subject to corporate fashion-think, I feel free to say that New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's front page article in the Sunday Op-Ed section, "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs," was a load of vicious and stupid fashionista crap.
Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died last week at 89. Starting in the early 1960s, Jacobs led a brave revolt against the dogmas and destructive practices of Modernist city planners who had wrecked one city after another in their neurotic campaign for urban purification. In 1961, she famously battled (and defeated) Robert Moses's scheme to drive a freeway across lower Manhattan.
In dissing Jacobs, Ouroussoff invokes the memory of the World Trade Center as a "welcome contrast in scale" to the rest of Manhattan. Similarly," he writes, "the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side." Pure bullshit. The twin tower buildings themselves were boring, grandiose death-traps, and the plaza between them was for thirty years a sterile wasteland of shearing winds, avoided even by winos, an object lesson in the failures of Modernist public space design.
These buildings, and the voids of empty space they entailed, were suited to exactly the culture of myrmidons we became in the late 20th century, which is to say of enterprises such as the New York Times. Jane Jacobs knew better than that, and she said it powerfully.
In any case, as America sleepwalks into the Long Emergency of energy scarcity, we are going to learn the hard way that a city composed of ever more shimmering towers and megastructures has a tragic destiny.
I guess, it's like choosing Vice magazine over Bateman prints...
Oh, and here's Kunstler talking.
Sun April 30
Since this is a blog not subject to corporate fashion-think, I feel free to say that New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's front page article in the Sunday Op-Ed section, "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs," was a load of vicious and stupid fashionista crap.
Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died last week at 89. Starting in the early 1960s, Jacobs led a brave revolt against the dogmas and destructive practices of Modernist city planners who had wrecked one city after another in their neurotic campaign for urban purification. In 1961, she famously battled (and defeated) Robert Moses's scheme to drive a freeway across lower Manhattan.
In dissing Jacobs, Ouroussoff invokes the memory of the World Trade Center as a "welcome contrast in scale" to the rest of Manhattan. Similarly," he writes, "the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side." Pure bullshit. The twin tower buildings themselves were boring, grandiose death-traps, and the plaza between them was for thirty years a sterile wasteland of shearing winds, avoided even by winos, an object lesson in the failures of Modernist public space design.
These buildings, and the voids of empty space they entailed, were suited to exactly the culture of myrmidons we became in the late 20th century, which is to say of enterprises such as the New York Times. Jane Jacobs knew better than that, and she said it powerfully.
In any case, as America sleepwalks into the Long Emergency of energy scarcity, we are going to learn the hard way that a city composed of ever more shimmering towers and megastructures has a tragic destiny.