Student of Cities
When one studies modern city planning today, it would be incredible naïve not to talk about the outstanding contributions of Jane Jacobs. She, single-handedly, is the most influential voice on how we plan our cities today. She was not a city planner nor an architect but simply someone that cared about her community. She lacked a college degree or any urban planning training but solely by studying cities and how people interact inside them she was able to write one of the most distinguished books about urban planning of all time. Robert Kanigel, in his book Eyes on the Street, writes that “Jacobs wrote seven books, but is remembered most for one of them, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, continuously in print ever since, and heralded as the book that, more than any other single influence, has reshaped how people see cities and what they expect of them” (4).
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a criticism 20th century urban planning. Jacobs starts her book by explaining that it is “an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 3). She begins by comparing city planning to bloodletting. Bloodletting was a medical procedure used in the early 19th century that consisted of the removal of blood from the patients to cure illness and disease. The practice became popular around the world and especially in the United States in the 19th century even thought it was quite obvious that it did not work. The practice did not stop, Jacobs claims, until the physician William Turner criticized the practice calling it “contrary to common sense” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 13). Jacobs believes that both bloodletting and city planning are pseudo sciences that “have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. Bloodletting could heal only by accident [and] city planning and city design […] have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 13). Jacobs continues the introduction of her book by explaining how modern city planning has gotten to the point that it has and why we should start considering alternatives.
Modern urban planning can be seen as a concept that evolved from the combination of different ideas. Jacobs points out that the first of these ideas came from Ebenezer Howard, “an English court reported for whom planning was an avocation”. By seeing how the poor lived in London in the late-nineteenth-century, Howard developed a hate towards cities. He believed that London should “halt [its] growth and repopulate the countryside” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 17). He came up with the Garden City, a new type of town that consisted of creating new spaces outside cities to house the lower class surrounded by nature. The density of cities was the main concern of Howard’s, so by creating towns in nature, they could have unlimited open space. Jacobs believes that the crowdedness of cities brings benefits like “the way great cities police themselves, exchange ideas, operate politically, or invent new economic arrangements” but Howard was uninterested on these aspects. Jacob claims that he “simply wrote off the intricate, many-faceted, cultural life of the metropolis” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 19).
The next idea that expanded the bigger city planning concept came from Sir Patrick Geddes, a Scottish “biologist and philosopher” (Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 19). Geddes came up with term conurbation which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an aggregation of urban areas”. Jacobs explains that, “[Geddes] thought of the planning of cities in terms of the planning of whole regions. He saw the Garden City idea not as a fortuitous way to absorb population growth […], but as the starting point of a much grander and more encompassing pattern.” He believed that the solution to modern cities was to create, not one but, multiple garden cities around a metropolis in a way they can all work together in perfect harmony. Howard and Geddes combined ideas became the basis of modern town planning and it spread throughout the globe.
Their ideas were brought to America by a group of urban planners that called themselves the “Decentrists.” Jacobs illustrates that this name, created by Catherine Bauer, was made to demonstrate their goals. They saw that the “primary result of reginal planning,” Geddes ideas, “would be to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their enterprises and populations into smaller, separated cities.” The population growth had declined and the need to plan cities for future growth was no longer there, they just had to handle the “redistribution of a static population” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 20). The group came up with new ideas of their own to add to the bigger concept. Jacobs list these ideas that “are now taken for granted in orthodox planning:
The street is bad as an environment for humans; houses should be turned away from inward, toward sheltered greens. Frequent streets are wasteful, of advantage only to real estate speculators who measure value by the front foot. The basic unit of city design is not the street, but the block and more particularly the super-block. Commerce should be segregated from residence and greens. The presence of many other people is, at best, a necessary evil, and good city planning must aim for at least an illusion of isolation and suburbany privacy.”
The Decentrists also pounded in Howard’s premises that the planned community must be “islanded off as a self-contained unit, that it must resist future change, and that every significant detail must be controlled by the planners from the start and then stuck to.” Jacobs criticizes them as they “hammered away at the bad old cities” to show the need of a “new order of things” but focused only on the “failures” of cities and not the “successes” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 20). They didn’t want to understand cities or foster them, they wanted to discard them completely. Their ideas influenced American city planning a great deal in the 20th century. Cities all around the country started to plan with their ideas in mind. The group didn’t influence the public but rather, as Jacobs states, they influenced “legislation affecting housing and housing finance.” Multiple garden cities were built in the US as a result of this influence like Sunnyside Garden in Queens.
The “anti-city planning,” as Jacobs calls, kept growing—architects and city planners started to use these ideas in cities all around the world. The final, and probably most influential, architect to modify modern city planning was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, commonly known as Le Corbusier. He, more than anyone else, revolutionized the modern movement. He designed multiple buildings in various countries and his ideas were crucial for what is now known as modern city planning. His most popular plan, and the plan that Jacobs mentions in her book, is the Radiant City. The Radiant City used the ideas of the Garden City but instead of “low buildings beloved of the Decentrists,” it consisted of “skyscrapers within a park” (Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 21).” He took the Garden City and modernized it with skyscrapers and highways. Le Corbusier explains that the plan would consist of “twenty-four [identical] skyscrapers” inside a park with “elevated motor tracks,” “municipal and administrative buildings on the outskirts” and “[enclosed] by museums and university buildings” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 21). Even though it was never built, it did influence similar projects. Jacobs claims that the Decentrists were against Le Corbusier’s plan, but “most of their disciples have […] made peace with it” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 22-23). The public was also in favor of his vision—living in modern skyscrapers inside a park was the best of both worlds. Le Corbusier’s plan with integrated streets, and the raising popularity of automobiles, made it even more popular. The unique modernist style of his buildings was also praised by everyone. His plan was “hailed deliriously by architects, a has gradually been embodied in scores of projects,” Jacobs wrote. “This vision and its bold symbolism have been all but irresistible to planners, housers, designers, and to developers, lenders and mayors too” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 23).
Jane Jacobs also talks briefly about another movement that has shaped modern planning in a less meaningful way. The City Beautiful movement began after the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The exposition was mainly designed by Daniel Burnham and consisted of monumental buildings with Renaissance influence to show what he thought cities should look like. Burnham became the leader of the City Beautiful and design important buildings in the county like the Flatiron in New York. The movement, as its name suggests, consisted of building beautiful buildings to have as monuments to show the world what the US is capable of. Jacobs discusses that the movement brought the “Center Monumental,” an idea to have important and beautiful city centers “sorted out of the rest of the city” and “assembled into the grandest effect thought possible.” She also discloses that, “people were proud of them, but the centers were not a success […] as people stayed away from them to a remarkable degree.” This lead to the halt of “City Beautiful centers,” but the ideas from the City Beautiful “has never had more force than it does today” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 24-25).
All the ideas previously discussed makes up the whole concept of modern city planning. Jacobs claims that all “the conceptions have harmoniously merged […] into a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, in which a monumental City Beautiful cultural center is one among a series of adjoining Radiant City and Radiant Garden City housing, shopping and campus centers” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 25). Architects and city planners use all of this ideas for their designs and it the biggest influence on how cities are planned. However, Jacobs is remarkably against this kind of movement that has been formed and uses her book to express her contradictory ideas. She ends the introduction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by saying, “from beginning to end, from Howard and Burnham to the last amendment on urban-renewal law, the concoction is irrelevant to the workings of cities. Unstudied, unrespected, cities have served as sacrificial victims” (25). This is her main argument and critic—planners do not genuinely study the cities and think on how to fix them, but rather they want to discard them and build new, utopic places instead.
After explaining orthodox city planning, or “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” as she calls it, Jacobs continues her book by explaining how she believes cities should be planed. Jacobs doesn’t spend much of the book critiquing the specific design features of modern planning. As she mentions in the first page of her book, she wants to criticize “the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 3). She opposes the lack of research that goes on when designing new cities. All Radiant Garden City Beautiful planners focus on the obvious flaws like density, traffic, and unemployment and create perfect solutions disregarding any benefits current cities might have.
By studying and understanding how cities work, Jacobs realized that this “flaws” that planner are trying to fix are actually the things that make cities work. One of her most important contributions of city planning is the idea of “Eyes on the Street” or “Sidewalk ballet,” currently known as natural surveillance (The Death and Life of Great 35, 50). Jacobs discovered that having people constantly walk in the streets from place to place increases the safety of them. This is quite obvious, as people are less likely to commit a crime if there is a possibility of other people watching them. Orthodox planners failed to see this and wanted to hide the streets, decrease the density, and separate the uses. In the other hand, Jacobs wanted cities to have dense, small blocks filled with a mix of restaurants, shops, apartment buildings and other uses to bring more life to cities. She came up with this evident plan solely by actually studying how cities work—realizing that, “streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 29). One of the multiple books about Jane Jacobs is called “Genius of Common Sense” and this title makes perfect sense.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities besides being a critic of orthodox planning, is mainly a study of cities. In a letter Jacobs wrote to New York City’s former mayor, Michel Bloomberg, she describes herself as “a student of cities.” Throughout the whole book, Jacobs talks about her examination of different cities and explains their strengths and not their problems. She examines how people actually use the cities to think of better ways to plan future in the future.
The main goal of Jacobs’ book and past work was not planning or designing the perfect city, but rather to change how the planning process works. In “Downtown is for the People,” an article she wrote prior to her book, she dwells that “that the best way to plan for [cities] is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them.” She also believes that there is not a single way cities work—people are the ones that make them, and plans should fit them, “not buildings” (“Downtown is for the People”). Jacobs is also known for the things she did when she wasn’t writing. Robert Kanigel affirms that “many of her acolytes knew her not through her books, but through her work as an urban activist” (8). She fought, in multiple occasions, with developers and city planners on plans she believed would ruin the city. Most of her fights as an activist happened in New York City, her home town, against Robert Moses. Moses was a city official known as the “master builder”. He had plans to change the city of New York in multiple ways, but by having Jacobs was his ultimate adversary, a lot of his plans were not approved. The most famous of their fights happened for the Lower Manhattan Expressway—a proposed highway that would run right through the lower part of Manhattan. By “speaking at public meetings,” “organizing protests” and “writing angry letters,” Jacobs was able to “defeat his Lower Manhattan Expressway” (Kanigel 8-9). She knew that the plan would damage the community, so she did not stop fighting until December 12, 1962, when the “city’s board […] rejected the latest plan for the expressway” (Kanigel 265). This was a huge step, but the battle was not over. On another, “crucial hearing” on the project in April 10, 1968, Jacobs stood up to state her arguments against the project and “was arrested after the disturbance” she created (Kanigel 268). In an article from Curbed, James Nevius claim that “Jacobs’s arrest made the papers, shedding light on the battle over the expressway in a way that protests and public hearings and letters to the editor never could. After this, “John Lindsay, [NYC mayor at the time,] withdrew his support for the project in 1969.” The battle of “David vs Goliath,” as Kanigel calls it, was finally over—Jacobs defeated the proposal and the highway was never built. (9).
Besides her book, this was her greatest legacy. I have only lived in New York for only two years now, but it has become my favorite city already. By Studying Jane Jacobs, I realized that she is the one that made New York City what it is today—she, with the help of her followers, prevented unstudied plans to affect the New York City and other cities in the world. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is 57 years old now, but I still believe that it should be a great, if not the greatest, inspiration when designing our cities today. Planners need to take a significant part of the planning process to study the city and understand how the people use it. They need to talk to the residents and evaluate their opinions on future plans. As Jacobs said, “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (The Death and Life of Great American Cities 238). Planners as well as us, Urban Design students, should study her ideas and become “students of cities” just like the brilliant Jane Jacobs.
Works Cited
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 2002.
Jacobs, Jane. “Down Town Is for the People.” Fortune Magazine, Apr. 1958. Fortune Magazine Archive, fortune.com/2011/09/18/downtown-is-for-people-fortune-classic-1958/.
Jacobs, Jane. Received by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Canada, 15 Apr. 2005, Toronto, Ontario.
Kanigel, Robert. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2016.
Kemp, Simon. “Digital in 2018: World's Internet Users Pass The 4 Billion Mark.” We Are Social, 30 Jan. 2018, wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018.
Nevius, James. “How Jane Jacobs Won Her Last, and Most Famous, Fight in New York.” Curbed, Vox Media, 4 May 2016, www.curbed.com/2016/5/4/11505214/jane-jacobs-robert-moses-lomex.