Before discussing Jane Jacobs, let’s look at the problem. Consider Raleigh, North Carolina.
Like many cities, Raleigh has been planning, subsidizing, and revising its downtown for decades. In 1977 it turned a downtown thoroughfare, Fayetteville Street, into a pedestrian mall. That didn’t work out—in 2006 Fayetteville became a street again. Raleigh supported a gourmet restaurant (the Mint) with $1 million. It failed. In 2008 taxpayers paid for a downtown convention center and wooed a name-brand hotel with $21 million.
This wasn’t good, either. “The only way the RCC [the convention center] attracts users is by offering deep discounts on rooms and services and even paying large subsidies to attract conventions and meetings,” wrote two policy analysts in 2008.[1] Now the government is planning another convention center at an estimated price of $387 million.
I could go on . . . but if you live in an American city, you probably have seen (and paid for) something similar—public efforts to bring people downtown.
What Planners Wanted
My late husband and I had a running debate over which force mattered the most: downtown landowners who wanted to keep up rents (Rick’s view) or urban planners (my view). Rick, the economist, may well have been right—especially about the devastation of Boston that goes back to the 1950s—but planners are at fault, too. That’s the subject of this post.
In 1961, Jane Jacobs, a brilliant self-taught woman who helped defeat a highway that would have cut through Greenwich Village, wrote The Life and Death of Great American Cities. “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” was her first sentence.[2]
Jacobs was reacting to urban design movements dating as far back as the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its “City Beautiful” theme. Urban planners wanted massive downtown monuments surrounded by clean, wide-open spaces, low population density (to emphasize their magnificence), and “grass, grass, grass,” says Jacobs.[3]
Along with this desire for civic beauty, the planners abhorred the messy and crowded parts of the city they viewed as over-dense “slums” and “blight.”
Thus we had urban “renewal” (demolition), along with more centers and parks—and, as Jacobs wrote, “vacuity,” since nobody wanted to be in the new empty places.[4]
Why were the planners wrong? To Jacobs, cities need neighborhoods, not cities beautiful. Specifically, she said, city neighborhoods need mixed uses, short blocks, buildings of different ages, and population density—she devoted a chapter to each one. (Mixed-age buildings enable small businesses, especially retail, to afford to locate there.)
These four factors make neighborhoods lively, she said, but planners didn’t perceive the liveliness and wanted to destroy what they saw as chaotic and ugly.
So What Was Jacobs’ Impact?
Today, urban planners are well aware of Jane Jacobs. “Part of her near-mythic status comes from the fact that, at a historical peak of institutional power guarded by men, she was a woman who dared to make people trust their own eyes,” wrote Lev Beshanko in 2016.[5]
And planners have indeed changed their views on density and mixed use.
That doesn’t mean they like Jacobs’ ideas, however, or that they even understand them. Amsterdam University professor Stefano Moroni credits Jacobs with the change in favor of density but warns that many planners fail to see that “density itself is not an asset on its own; . . . density is something to be encouraged and nurtured, not directly determined by planning.”[5]
To Andrew Garvin, author of the massive textbook The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t?, Jacobs’ impact is not all that great. ”Four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars later her criticisms still ring true. Most cities continue to lack housing, civic and commercial centers, places to congregate and promenade, and traffic arteries.”[6]
Lacking civic and commercial centers? Traffic arteries? So we need more of these? It’s not clear that Garvin understands Jacobs, either. He uses her writing as a foil, but her name does not appear in the index to his 622-page volume.
And Lev Bratishenko, quoted above, thinks it’s time to forget about her. His article was titled: “Jane Jacobs’s Tunnel Vision: Why Our Cities Need Less Jane Jacobs.” He went on to say that “Saint Jane has become shorthand for whatever is nice about living in cities. On the left, she is celebrated for saving neighbourhoods, and on the right for her hands-off approach.”[7]
Thus, she has not been welcomed by the planning profession, although they can’t ignore her.
The Role of Anti-Sprawl
Other forces borrowed some of Jacobs’ views, however. In the 1950s, “garden cities” proliferated outside major metropolises, connected by a growing national highway system. The new planners became alarmed by suburbs and their highways, burdened by cars, ugly strip malls, Walmarts, and gas stations. Combatting sprawl became a big issue in the 1990s.
Whether it was called “Smart Growth,” “the New Urbanism,” or the “compact city,” the answer was more density, not less—a complete reversal from previous planning goals.
Raleigh’s determination to get people downtown was part of a nationwide phenomenon (Helena, Montana, tried a pedestrian mall). Affluent places like Portland, Nantucket Island, and Santa Monica adopted urban growth boundaries, development controls, and subsidies to mass transit in order to keep people in town.
However, as Robert Bruegmann notes, in these places a ” battery of legal mechanisms like design review, preservation, conservation, and environmental regulations” were needed to make it possible.” Such controls are anathema to most Americans, he added.[8] So it’s not clear that New Urbanists understand Jacobs, either, or why density or diversity matters.
Jane Jacobs’ claims about cities remain gospel to some, but the practical result has been depressing. Density and diversity have become all about getting people downtown or keeping them in. Those were not Jacobs’ goals.
Jacobs wanted to make existing cities better by recognizing the vitality that they could have if planners left them alone. Understandably, planners don’t like that.
Image of downtown Raleigh taken by Jim Willamor, licensed under Creative Commons BY SA-2.0.
Notes (Comments follow the notes.)
[1] Michael Sanera and Clint Atkins, “The New Raleigh Convention Center: A Taxpayer-funded Money Pit,” John Locke Foundation Research Brief, September 4, 2008.
[2] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 3.
[3] Jacobs, 22.
[4] Jacobs, 111.
[5] Lev Bratishenko, “Jane Jacobs’s Tunnel Vision: Why Our Cities Need Less Jane Jacobs,” Literary Review of Canada (October 2016), https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/10/jane-jacobss-tunnel-vision/.
[6] Stefano Moroni, “Urban Density after Jane Jacobs: The Crucial Role of Diversity and Emergence. City Territory Architecture 3, no 13 (2016), 3, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-016-0041-1.
[6] Andrew Garvin, The American City: What Works and What Doesn’t, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2013).
[7] Bratishenko, op. cit.
[8] Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl : A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)., ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncsu/detail.action?docID=408469.
It’s always great to see a resurrection of Jane Jacobs. I was lucky to have met her and interviewed her several times as a journalist working for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the early 2000s. She was actually a superior, self-taught journalist who looked at cities in their natural, pre-planned state. She studied cities from the sidewalks up — how and why they worked, didn’t work, thrived and didn’t thrive. As a true libertarian, I hated city planners long before I read “Death & Life” — as you can detect if you read this Q&A I did with her for Reason magazine in 2001. https://clips.substack.com/p/q-and-a-jane-jacobs-how-cities-work?utm_source=publication-search. Everyone likes to claim Jacobs as their own — especially the car-haters, the suburb-haters and the mass-transit-lovers. But she didn’t hate cars or suburbs. She did hate zoning, which is what created our sprawling and fragmented suburbs. I don’t pretend to know how the Urban Planning Industrial Complex thinks about her now. But I know that her criticisms of the often racist, politically connected planners who were merrily clear-cutting the innards of dozens of U.S. cities’ with their bulldozers in the 1950s-60s were brave, correct and brutal. It’s too bad that though she shamed the planners, who thought they could successfully micro-design crowded, chaotic, un-regulated cities, the descendants of those planners still haven’t got her point: You can’t plan complicated things like cities or large chunks of them from the top-down in cahoots with the local political and corporate power brokers. By the way, she didn’t consider herself a Hayekian but she understood that cities were organic and spontaneous and complex human entities, not Monopoly boards or SimCity4.
Thanks so much for sharing these thoughts. And the Reason interview is great. I envy you for having interviewed her! Even the term “urban design,” widely used these days, indicates that planners have hubris. Jacobs did not.