Jacobs crackers

Jane Jacobs is coming under a new form of attack – from those who claim her philosophy is so all-powerful that it needs to be challenged.

The reality is quite different. The principles she espoused are more important than ever, and arguably at greatest risk.

Many of you will be familiar with Jane Jacobs’ ideas. Her most celebrated work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was an explicit attack on the mid-twentieth century planning orthodoxy which allowed urban communities to be swept aside and replaced with tightly-zoned and overly-engineered ‘neighbourhoods’.

She proposed an alternative approach, one that promoted human interaction and bustle above all else. Nurturing communities, local businesses, and networks of neighbourliness in the nooks and crannies of the city was crucial. The four steps that created this ‘ballet of the sidewalk’ were: mixed uses; short blocks; a mixture of old and new buildings; and density.

Jacobs’ thinking has been influential over the fifty years since Death and Life was first published in 1961. In more recent decades, the rise of the ‘sustainable development’ agenda both drew on Jacobs’ work and gave it a new form of expression. Her commitment to nurturing and re-using existing assets fitted neatly with the notion that we should meet current needs without compromising the life quality and survival chances of future generations.

Take a closer look at the real world, however, and it’s clear that her fundamental message was often ignored by planners and policy-makers who set the overall planning framework.

Over the past fifty years, population and density levels in many cities across the US, UK and the rest of the developing world have fallen. Many places have been zoned into narrow and specific uses, with out-of-town malls and supermarkets leeching the vibrancy out of town and city centres. Levels of car use have generally increased, although there are signs that some cities are getting serious and radical about sustainable transport.

There have been examples of small-scale urban renewal of the kind promoted by Jacobs. But they’ve often been dwarfed in every sense by monstrosities like the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder programme; the kind of interventions her opponent Robert Moses would have recognised.

Yes, Jacobs has been influential, but her views are not universally accepted and very far from being implemented in most cities.

You wouldn’t get this impression from articles like this one for Governing magazine, with the ominous title ‘Is It Time to Retire Jane Jacobs’ Vision of the City? The ‘gospel’ of Jane Jacobs, we’re assured:

‘has become so ingrained in modern planning that it is essentially synonymous with what most people think of as a ‘good’ city. Since the publication of The Death and Life of Great   American Cities in 1961, politicians, urban planners and academics — virtually everyone who cares about cities, really — have seen cities through Jacobs’ eyes.’

The article goes on to be fairly balanced, but the starting point is quite wrong. The manifesto set out in Death and Life is far from being an orthodoxy in need of retirement or even reform: it’s still an insurgency, fighting to be realised in cities across the world. Jane Jacobs is still the agitator in the square.

In another recent piece, Sir Peter Hall recognised Jacobs’ importance as a campaigner and provocateur, but casts doubt on her legacy and even her ultimate intentions:

‘She single-handedly triumphed, stopping the urban bulldozers not only in her own city and country but across the world…the irony in such cities was that the newly-preserved neighbourhoods such as Islington and Lambeth became prime targets for gentrification and yuppification. The very qualities of social mixture, which Jacobs celebrated, were lost. Perhaps, though, that was the point: she was herself a middle-class housewife who found her voice.’

The last line seems to imply that Jacobs was a closet proponent of gentrification all along.

The common flaw in both articles is the assumption that modern cities are run on the principles laid out by Jacobs. So the urban problems of today can be traced back to the original sins of the ‘middle class housewife’. And a case can therefore be made to reform or ‘retire’ what she stood for.

This is to confuse rhetoric with reality. Everyone pays lip service to her ideas, but the decision makers in city after city still modify, or massage, or simply ignore their practical implications.

The question isn’t how to reform Jane Jacobs’ principles: it’s how to realise them.