Jane Jacobs’s Street Smarts
What the urbanist and writer got so right about cities—and what she got wrong.
Link to entire review by Adam Gopnik >> The New Yorker
Now, in the year of Jane Jacobs’s centenary, with the biography out there, along with a new collection of her uncollected writings, “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs” (Random House), and an anthology of conversations between her and various friends, “Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House), it seems fair to pay her the compliment of taking her seriously—to ask what exactly she argued for, and what exactly we should think about those arguments now.
We can love the self-organizing street and believe in low-cost public housing, but it is an illusion to think that the street will naturally create affordable public housing, or that cheap public housing will guarantee a vibrantly self-emerging street.
That’s where planning matters and politics counts. Jacobs seldom gives a good account of the place of politics in city-making. Politics for her is Robert Moses telling moms where the expressway should run. Politics is the planners, and exists as an afterthought to the natural order of cities. And it’s true: politics isn’t a self-organizing system. It’s not a ballet. It’s a battle. But it remains essential to reconcile goods, like free streets and fair housing, that will never reconcile themselves.
Link to entire review by Adam Gopnik >> The New Yorker
Now, in the year of Jane Jacobs’s centenary, with the biography out there, along with a new collection of her uncollected writings, “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs” (Random House), and an anthology of conversations between her and various friends, “Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations” (Melville House), it seems fair to pay her the compliment of taking her seriously—to ask what exactly she argued for, and what exactly we should think about those arguments now.
We can love the self-organizing street and believe in low-cost public housing, but it is an illusion to think that the street will naturally create affordable public housing, or that cheap public housing will guarantee a vibrantly self-emerging street.
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