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Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs,
OC ,
O.Ont (born on
May 4,
1916) is 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 U.S.A.
Life
Jane Butzner was born in
Scranton, Pennsylvania to a
Jewish family in that otherwise
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
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 Robert Hyde
Jacobs with whom she subsequently
had two sons.
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 is a common theme 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 still
lives. 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 is an advocate of a
Province of Toronto to
separate the city proper from
Ontario. Jacobs says, "Cities to
thrive in the 21st century, must
separate themselves politically
from their surrounding areas."
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."
[1]
Jacobs has 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).
Both strongly endorsed the
Province of Toronto movement
in its infancy.
Works
Jane Jacobs has spent her life
studying cities. Her books
include:
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.
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 argue that
public transit has proven to
be as expensive as urban freeways
and less effective. Such claims,
however, can be easily disproved
when all latent costs are 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.
However, this appears only the
situation in the very few cities
that have actually maintained a
large core population, which are
few and far between in the United
States.
In the 1970s, many businesses
disliked the implementation of
Jacob's new urban-reform measures
which they saw as opposed to
business development. They began
to migrate towards
Peel Region and
York Region where taxes were
lower and where they perceived
fewer restrictions and less
opposition to growth. In addition
to successfully attracting
development, Peel and York Regions
have stayed mostly debt free while
Toronto, which has followed
Jacobs' policies to a greater
extent, has slowly fallen into
debt. This, however, is due to the
natural lag in time before actual
costs of sprawl catch up to
suburban communities. It is also
necessary when implementing such
policies to implement them to an
entire metropolitan region, and
not merely the central
municipality.
See also
External links
Wikiquote has a collection
of quotations related to:
Interviews
Audio and video
Websites
Footnotes
- 1 Ideas that
Matter: The Worlds of Jane
Jacobs, published by The
Ginger Press, Inc. Edited by Max
Allen
- 2 Ibid. p. 170
- 3 Ibid. p. 170
