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Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, OC , O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times. "Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations," wrote Canadian critic Robert Fulford. "She was an unlikely intellectual warrior, a theorist who opposed most theories, a teacher with no teaching job and no university degree, a writer who wrote well but infrequently." [citation needed]

Life

Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family in that overwhelmingly ethnic Catholic city, the daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, she took an unpaid position as the assistant to the women's page editor at the Scranton Tribune. A year later, in the middle of the Great Depression, she left Scranton for New York City.

During her first several years in the city she held a variety of jobs, working mainly as a stenographer and freelance writer, often writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she claims, "...gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like." While working for the Office of War Information she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs.

She studied at Columbia University in the School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to study her wide-ranging interests, she has stated:

For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.[1]

Her first job was for a trade magazine, first as a secretary, then as an editor. She also sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune. She then became a feature writer for the Office of War Information. In 1944, she married architect Robert Hyde Jacobs with whom she subsequently had two sons and a daughter.

On March 25, 1952, Jacobs responded to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer she stated:

... The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe...[2]

Opposing expressways and supporting neighborhoods were common themes in her life. In 1962, she was chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, when the downtown expressway plan was killed. She was again involved in stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and was arrested during a demonstration on April 10, 1968. Jacobs opposed Robert Moses, who had already forced through the Cross-Bronx Expressway and other motorways against neighborhood opposition. A PBS documentary series on New York's history devoted a full hour of its fourteen-hour length strictly to the battle between Moses and Jacobs.

In 1969, she moved to Toronto, where she lived until her death. She decided to leave the United States in part out of her objection to the Vietnam War and due to worry about the fate of her two draft-age sons. She chose Toronto as she found it a pleasant city and its rapid growth meant plenty of work for her architect husband. She quickly became a leading figure in her new city and was involved in stopping the Spadina Expressway. A common theme of her work has been to question whether we are building cities for people or for cars. She has been arrested twice during demonstrations.[3] She also had considerable influence on the regeneration of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a housing project that is regarded as a great success. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974, and she later told James Howard Kunstler that dual citizenship was not possible at the time, implying that her US citizenship was lost.

Jacobs was an advocate of a Province of Toronto to separate the city proper from Ontario. Jacobs said, "Cities to thrive in the 21st century, must separate themselves politically from their surrounding areas."

She was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1996 for her seminal writings and thought-provoking commentaries on urban development.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference titled "Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter", which led to a book by the same name. At the end of the conference, The Jane Jacobs Prize was created. It includes an annual stipend of $5,000 for three years to be given to "celebrate Toronto's original, unsung heroes — by seeking out citizens who are engaged in activities that contribute to the city's vitality." [4]

Jacobs never shied away from expressing her political support for specific candidates. She backed the late Tooker Gomberg in Toronto's 2000 mayoralty race (he lost) and David Miller in 2003 (he won).

She died in Toronto at the age of 89, apparently of a stroke at Toronto Western Hospital. She is survived by a brother, James Butzner; two sons, James and Ned, and a daughter, Burgin Jacobs; by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Upon her death her family's statement noted: "What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life’s work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas". [5]

Works

Jane Jacobs spent her life studying cities. Her books include:

  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) New York: Random House. ISBN 0679600477
  • The Economy of Cities (1969) ISBN 039470584X
  • The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Separation (1980) ISBN 0394509811
  • Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) ISBN 0394729110
  • Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992) ISBN 0679748164
  • The Nature of Economies (2000) New York: Random House, The Modern Library. ISBN 0679603409
  • Dark Age Ahead (2004) ISBN 1400062322

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Main article: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her single most influential book, and quite possibly the most influential American book on urban planning. Widely read by both planning professionals and the general public, the book is a strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s which, she claimed, destroyed communities and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces. Jacobs advocated dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and frequently cited New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community.

Robert Caro has cited it as the strongest influence on The Power Broker, his legendary biography of Robert Moses.

Beyond the practical lessons in city design and planning that "Death and Life" offers, the theoretical underpinnings of the work profoundly challenge the entire modern mindset. Jane Jacobs rigorously adheres to inductive, nearly scientific, reasoning. Moreover, she is open to anecdotal evidence coming to bear on what has been induced from harder data. The paradigm that she embodies and represents is one of common sense, practical realism, and above all induction from fact. This paradigm is new, refreshing and empowering.

The Economy of Cities

The book asserts two revolutionary ideas, one in the field of archaeology, the other in economics. Traditional archaeologists had always presumed that a city could only appear where there was enough food for a great number of inhabitants not producing food exclusively to exist. Hence, agriculture logically preceded the city. Jacobs argues that the opposite is true. It is through trade in wild animals and grains that people in cities discovered agriculture and then exported it (like our modern factory towns) to the outskirts of the city itself.

In this work Jacobs also tackles the question of economic booms. Great cities with flourishing economies have had one of these economic booms. She asserts that it is through import replacement that cities have such economic growth. She also asserts that cities are at the root of all economic growth (agricultural, manufacturing, technology, information, etc) and therefore import replacement is the cause to all economic growth. In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason Magazine (06/01), Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations

Beginning with a concise treatment of classical economics, this books challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of the greatest economists. Classical (and Neo-classical) economists consider the nation-state to be the main player in macro economics. Jacobs makes a forceful argument that it is not the nation-state, rather it is the city which is true player of this world wide game. She restates the idea of import replacement from her earlier book The Economy of Cities, while speculating on the further ramifications of considering the city first and the nation second, or not at all.

Systems of Survival

Systems of Survival: Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics moves outside of the city, studying the moral underpinnings of work. As with her other work, she used an observational approach. This book is written as a Platonic dialogue. It appears that she (as described by characters in her book) took newspaper clippings of moral judgements related to work, collected and sorted them to find that they fit two patterns of moral behaviour that were mutually exclusive. She calls these two patterns "Moral Syndrome A", or commercial moral syndrome and "Moral Syndrome B" or guardian moral syndrome. She claims that the commercial moral syndrome is applicable to business owners, scientists, farmers, and traders. Similarly, she claims that the guardian moral syndrome is applicable to government, charities, hunter-gatherers, and religious institutions. She also claims that these Moral Syndromes are fixed, and do not fluctuate over time.

It is important to stress that Jane Jacobs is providing a theory about the morality of work, and not all moral ideas. Moral ideas that are not included in her syndrome are applicable to both syndromes.

Jane Jacobs goes on to describe what happens when these two moral syndromes are mixed, showing the work underpinnings of the Mafia and communism, and what happens when New York Subway Police are paid bonuses here — reinterpreted slightly as a part of the larger analysis.

The Nature of Economies

The Nature of Economies, also in Platonic dialogue form, and based on the premise that "human beings exist wholly within nature as part of the natural order in every respect" (p ix), argues that the same principles underlie both ecosystems and economies: "development and co-development through differentiations and their combinations; expansion through diverse, multiple uses of energy; and self-maintenance through self-refueling" (p82).

Jacobs' characters then discuss the four methods by which "dynamically stable systems" may evade collapse: "bifurcations; positive-feedback loops; negative-feedback controls; and emergency adaptations" (p86). Their conversations also cover the "double nature of fitness for survival" (traits to avoid destroying one's own habitat as well as success in competition to feed and breed, p119), and unpredictability including the butterfly effect characterized in terms of multiplicity of variables as well as disproportionality of response to cause, and self-organization where "a system can be making itself up as it goes along" (p137).

Criticism of Jane Jacobs

One of the recurring criticisms of Jacobs is that her work is impractical and does not reflect the reality of urban politics, which are often totally controlled by real estate developers and suburban politicians. A response to such critics is to point to the history of cities like New York City and Detroit, which were devastated in the 1960s and 1970s as suburban populations grew, took control of the politics of the surrounding region, and voted to starve cities to feed suburban sprawl, leaving burned-out city cores in deep debt. This fed the vicious cycle of more departures to the suburbs (see white flight).

Toronto traffic planners often fault Jacobs for preventing them from considering expressways to meet growing demand from suburban growth and automobile traffic, since the Spadina Expressway cancellation heralded the end of new Municipal expressways in Toronto. They cite figures[citation needed] showing that public transit has proven to be as expensive as urban freeways and less effective.

One criticism levelled at Jacobs is the idea that businesses disliked Jacobs' influence on Toronto city planning and have moved away to areas outside Toronto deemed more business friendly. This has resulted in the '905' areas surrounding Toronto to become relatively free of debt whereas Toronto's debt is growing. In reality this trend has more to do with inequalities in provincial tax policy than Jacobs' perceived threat to business growth. Businesses in Toronto pay more taxes towards education than anywhere else in the province. The latest estimate calculates a $120 million/year net outflow of businesses taxes from Toronto. This is the real reason for the flight of businesses from Toronto [6].

Supporters of Jacobs point that latent costs have not been taken into consideration. Measures promoted by Jacobs such as urban living and cycling have been argued to be impractical due to skyrocketing downtown land value, although proponents counter that this is the case in the very few cities that have actually maintained a large core population, which are few and far between in the United States. Jacobs' supporters also claim that there is a lag in time before actual costs of sprawl catch up to suburban communities. They feel it is necessary when implementing such policies to implement them to an entire metropolitan region, and not merely the central municipality.

See also

References

  • ^ Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs, published by The Ginger Press, Inc. Edited by Max Allen
  • ^ Ibid. p. 170
  • ^ Ibid. p. 170
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