Governing Magazine/May 2001
ASSESSMENTS
CAN YOU BE AN URBANIST AND STILLLIKECITIES?
By Alan Ehrenhalt
The 20th century produced a pantheon of brilliant urban thinkers andplanners. Some built, some mostly wrote, some did both. Some didbetter than others at translating their ideas into reality. But oneway or another, we are living with the consequences of their vision: Ebenezer Howard's "garden cities," Le Corbusier's "radiant city,"Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City"--even Lewis Mumford's unrealizeddream of regional planning--all of them represent the baseline foranyone who wants to create a modern urban revival. But there's a dirty little secret that nearly all the legendarymembers of the urbanist Hall of Fame have in common. They reallydidn't like cities very much--at least the ones they lived in and knewabout. Wright and Le Corbusier considered the urban industrialmetropolis of their time to be dirty, smelly, noisy, crowded andvastly inferior to the skyscraper-and-park cities they could conjureup on their drawing boards. Mumford acquired a reputation as one ofthe most passionate urbanists of all time, but what he really admiredmost was the medieval village, where, as he saw it, people could be intouch with nature every moment of the day. The more he saw ofmid-century Manhattan, the unhappier he became.
The purpose of this column, however, isn't to focus on this set ofindividuals, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of the onegreat 20th-century urbanist who really loved cities--loved them fortheir noise, their energy, their complexity, for the sheer quantity oflife they managed to generate.
As you may have guessed, I'm referring to Jane Jacobs. This yearmarks the 40th anniversary of her masterpiece, "The Death and Life ofGreat American Cities." Happily, Jacobs is alive and well, stillwriting and lecturing from her home in Toronto at age 85. Even morehappily, her work has become a readily available classic, still on theshelves in almost every good bookstore in the country.
Nobody, of course, would be foolish enough to claim that Jane Jacobs'wisdom has become settled doctrine in the world of city planning andurban design. The battles she ignited are still being fought, and notalways with success for her side. But to a remarkable extent, she setthe agenda in 1961, and it remains about where she set it. It's only aslight exaggeration to say that contemporary urban thought is aseriesof footnotes to Jane Jacobs.
When she wrote "Death and Life," downtown renewal in American citiesconsisted largely of the destruction of two-story commercialstructures, their replacement by large office towers, and the creationof huge windswept plazas in which no one congregated.
Now, at the very least, most of us realize that empty plazas are nourban adornment. But the person who first taught us that was JaneJacobs, insisting that expert opinion was wrong: that successfulcities are built out of street life--people of all sorts, coming andgoing at all hours, working, playing and gossiping on the samesidewalks, forming the casual relationships upon which trust can grow.
"Life begets life," Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets.Empty streets are dangerous. That's no more than simple common sensenow. But it was heretical 40 years ago.
"Death and Life" was prescient in so many ways that one short columncouldn't possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for thereclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes."The waterfront itself," she argued, "is the first wasted assetcapable of drawing people at leisure."
She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-usedevelopment as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood.Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in theplanning department of virtually every big American city.
Perhaps even more important--and certainly less heeded--was Jacobs'corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding willnot restore a community whose social life has been depleted. "It isfashionable," Jacobs wrote, "to suppose that certain touchstones ofthe good life will create good neighborhoods--schools, parks, cleanhousing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!... Thereis no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good
behavior..." and "important as good schools are, they prove totallyundependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods." Billions of wasteddollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted bya public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.
Nobody is right about everything, though, and I would argue—althoughI doubt she would agree--that she was wrong about at least a coupleofthings. Based on her experiences as an activist in New York'sGreenwich Village, Jacobs felt that no organized urban neighborhood offewer than 75,000 people could be large enough to wield meaningfulclout in the political structure of a huge city. It seems to me thatthis was more true of New York in the 1960s than of cities in general.
Communities smaller than Jacobs' prescribed minimum have fought CityHall and won numerous times in the largest cities in the past 40years.
Moreover, she was utterly disdainful of metropolitan regionalism. Shedescribed a region as "an area safely larger than the last one towhose problems we found no solution." She thought that regionalalliances and consolidation of political power were no answer to thedifficulties either of cities or of the suburbs sprouting up aroundthem. It seems to me that if regionalism is a difficult and oftenunpalatable choice, it may be the only realistic one left for quite afew of the struggling metropolitan areas in this country. But if Jacobs was wrong about a couple of things, she was
breathtakingly right about so many--and she was able to express herinsights in a casual, ironic, unpretentious way that makes her as mucha pleasure to read now as she was in the 1960s, when I firstencountered her in college.
And that suggests one more crucial lesson about Jane Jacobs worthpaying some attention to: She was an amateur. Jacobs was by trainingneither a planner nor an architect nor an urban historian nor anythingelse that might suggest uncommon learning in her field. She was anewspaper reporter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who moved to New Yorkwith her husband and children in the early postwar years, settled intoa Greenwich Village apartment, took an interest in Village affairs,read the urban policy literature, traveled around the country to checkon other cities, and emerged with a fund of common sense that noformal degree or professional credential could possibly have givenher.
It is a silly question to ask who will be the Jane Jacobs of the 21stcentury. No one will be; she is as original and irreproducible asanyone who has ever written about cities and community. But it may bereasonable to observe that, when and if someone makes literate andpersuasive sense out of the next round of urban problems andchallenges, it won't be someone with a long series of titles anddegrees surrounding his name. It will be someone with the virtues ofan intelligent and curious amateur.
In the decade or so since New Urbanism exploded onto the local policyand planning scene, it has generated millions of words of analysisandprescription detailing how intelligent design can restore the sense ofcommunity and rootedness that city life has lost in the past halfcentury. Some of this literature is readable and useful; some of it isnot.
But none of it has seemed more sensible and appealing to me than "HowCities Work," Alex Marshall's new book of urban reporting andcommentary. Marshall shares with Jane Jacobs one characteristic: He isan amateur--a longtime Virginia newspaper reporter whose methodsconsist largely of watching, reading, traveling and thinking.
Marshall is both sympathetic to New Urbanism and critical of it. Hiscriticisms are simple and cogent ones. Essentially they boil down tothis: Transportation is destiny. Communities are creatures of thetransportation systems that grow up around them. American downtownsand Main Streets of the early 20th century were compact and vibrantbecause people walked there or came in on trains and moved in and outof stations twice a day. It's fine to be nostalgic for the physicalintimacy of the old-time small town or gritty city, but it'simpossible to have it in a society dependent for its mobility on theautomobile.
Therefore, Marshall argues, there is something inescapably falseabout New Urbanist efforts to re-create a small-town America of picketfences, front porches and sidewalk gossip in developments constructedas enclaves along freeways and virtually inaccessible except by car.
"Bringing back the street," he concludes, "is not possible unless webring back the forms of transportation that made it essential." Marshall would actually like to see those old urban forms return tolife. He likes the idea of compact downtowns friendly to pedestriansand fed by fast and efficient public transportation. He is merelymaking the point that if we are to create such a societal change inthe coming century, we will need to think through all the trade-offsand sacrifices it will entail. We will have to return to old ways ofgetting around. We will not be able to revive the neighborhoods of thepast simply by redesigning streets and houses.
Reading Alex Marshall and rereading Jane Jacobs in quick successionleaves a similarly bracing feeling: Their books amount to a cold bathof common sense whose implications an urban cheerleader might just assoon avoid, but whose logic is ultimately difficult to escape.
This is not to say that Alex Marshall is the next Jane Jacobs. Thatwould be unfair to both of them. It's merely a reminder of somethingwe might all stop and ponder. In urban policy, as in most otherfields, smart amateurs are worth paying attention to. They have a wayof keeping us all in touch with reality.
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