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Mar. 9th, 2016 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Hilariously, I started reading this a day beforeghost_lingering posted Challenge Accepted! A Brief History of Cities, which carries explicit apologies to Jacobs for portraying cities in ways antithetical to Jacobs's vision of the purpose of cities.
It's a big book; I just finished it now.
I have a lot of thoughts about it. I thought a lot of Jacobs's arguments and theories are important, and I think she reframes ideas about city planning in useful ways that are still not being valued today. I think it's clear that a lot of the ideas about city planning she's arguing against are irrational ideas, and that she places sensible emphasis on empiricism. But ultimately I found myself arguing against Jacobs more than nodding along with her, because of several significant differences between Jacobs and myself in how we conceptualize cities, their purposes, and their relationship to people.
The largest difference, probably, is in our feelings about suburbs. I've spent most of my life in suburbs, and certainly there have been times when I have been frustrated by them, when I have longed for the cities, but I also see a lot more value in them than Jacobs does and I see them as an important part of a metropolitan ecosystem. I see a lot of her strategies for urbanization as being directly intended to weaken the connectivity between suburban and urban areas and I think that is a bad direction for cities to move in.
This is most obvious when it comes to her strategies for causing what she calls 'attrition of automobiles by cities'. Jacobs is a little ambivalent about motor vehicles. It seems to me like she hates them personally and would prefer they did not have any access to cities, but intellectually acknowledges that they are an important part of a city's infrastructure. Her accommodation to this tension is to propose to gradually steer cities toward denser development that is less dependent on motor vehicles, while simultaneously gradually steering road layouts in ways that discourage motor vehicles- narrower roads with more bottlenecks, less parking availability. By making cities less convenient to cars, she argues, less cars will use them. Of course, this also makes cities less convenient in general, and in particular it privileges people who live in the city over people who commute into the city. (To those who say that improved public transportation would make life easier for commuters, I don't disagree, but look at the doom scenarios being envisioned for next week if NJ Transit goes on strike. One of the costs of public transportation, even good public transportation, is a lack of independence in transport.)
More broadly, I snickered every time Jacobs writes of the 'Great Blight of Dullness' afflicting large parts of cities. Jacobs unconvincingly links her GBD to actual blight, but I don't think she makes her case very well. There are areas of cities that burst with eccentricity and it is fun to spend time in those areas, and commerce sometimes does well in those areas(but not always! Jacobs claims this is because those cities fail some other obscure criteria of her eccentric, almost Ptolemean theory of cities), but non-GBD areas, I can testify from experience, are often unpleasant places to live or spend time. They have continuous cyclic mixed use, something Jacobs calls a virtue, but I'd call it less of one if you're trying to sleep. They have continuous foot traffic, something Jacobs calls a virtue because she asserts it promotes safe streets, but that foot traffic means it's hard for an individual to make private use of outdoor spaces. (Jacobs actually claims this is possible in non-GBD areas because everyone knows the unspoken code of giving people privacy. I think this is laughable.) They have local street personalities, which Jacobs calls a virtue because they help with street safety and also perform services for the community, but local street personalities can be SUPER ANNOYING AND INTRUSIVE and there's nothing you can do about them if they are.
But I should talk about the important things Jacobs writes about that I do agree with. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a massive and eccentric polemic against a late 19th century community planning system that seems to have been based on Fabianism and other forms of 19th Century non-Marxist socialist utopianism and which somehow infiltrated urban planning Orthodoxy in the 20th century. This system, which Jacobs derisively calls Radiant City Beautiful planning as a mishmosh of several different but related planning theories she opposes, is centered on the idea of top-down social engineering of cities and of using this top down planning to segregate cities in ways that from a top down perspective appear orderly. Jacobs and I chiefly agree that this is bad because segregation is not a good design for cities. We disagree in that I generally believe that the free market and less regulation are better for cities and she thinks the problem isn't social engineering and government driven urban planning, the problem is just that the old-school social engineers were doing it wrong and that if she ran the zoo, things would be better.
She makes a compelling case for why public housing projects are historic failures, carefully laying out all the features of these projects that combine to doom them to be eternal bastions of crime and misery. She points to the income requirements and the way this inadvertently creates an income segregation between housing areas that is detrimental in two major ways: First, in that it creates jealousy and suspicion between people on the basis of income, and second, that anyone who does become more successful and gains more income has to leave, destroying any chance for the area to build community. And she points to the geographically segregated nature of most projects, the result of massive land clearance that rooted out any integration between the projects and the rest of the city. She claims that if the projects were more integrated and economically diverse, the magic of her non-Great Blight of Dullness would work to make low income housing safer, and I'm skeptical of all of her claims about GBD, but I think it's clear that housing projects of the type Jacobs is arguing about do not build communities and that mixed use areas are, at minimum, a far more ethical and humane way to handle the problem of poverty than relegating those unable to afford housing to ghettos. What Jacobs wants, ultimately, is a way to subsidize housing that allows people to grow with their housing rather than abandoning it for better housing when they can, because she believes in neighborhoods as things that need time to develop. I think this makes an awful lot of sense, and I think depaternalizing a lot of processes involving government services for poor people will go a hell of a long way to making those processes work better. But I'm not sure I think that the Jacobs process is altogether likely to go as she predicts. My Republicanism and sorta haphazard libertarianism at work- I suspect that if the government's heavy hand goes out of the process, if the government stops trying to be a landlord and stops trying to decide that its solution is the best solution and instead lets people get what they actually want, things will go better, but things will also change, rapidly and unpredictably. I'm not sure that 'neighborhoods' of the sort Jacobs longs for will emerge.
And I agree with her that designing cities for enforced aesthetics is almost always a bad idea, that cities should be designed for function over beauty, though her own aesthetic counterproposals seem mostly pretty silly and idiosyncratic and personal to me rather than being functional. This is whereghost_lingering's vid comes in- by focusing on skylines almost exclusively, the vid plays with the popular imagination of cities rather than engaging with the actual process of building cities.
In general, it was a fascinating read full of great ideas, and I'm glad to have read it, but it was also somewhat less than I'd hoped it would be.
Hilariously, I started reading this a day before
ghost_lingering posted Challenge Accepted! A Brief History of Cities, which carries explicit apologies to Jacobs for portraying cities in ways antithetical to Jacobs's vision of the purpose of cities.It's a big book; I just finished it now.
I have a lot of thoughts about it. I thought a lot of Jacobs's arguments and theories are important, and I think she reframes ideas about city planning in useful ways that are still not being valued today. I think it's clear that a lot of the ideas about city planning she's arguing against are irrational ideas, and that she places sensible emphasis on empiricism. But ultimately I found myself arguing against Jacobs more than nodding along with her, because of several significant differences between Jacobs and myself in how we conceptualize cities, their purposes, and their relationship to people.
The largest difference, probably, is in our feelings about suburbs. I've spent most of my life in suburbs, and certainly there have been times when I have been frustrated by them, when I have longed for the cities, but I also see a lot more value in them than Jacobs does and I see them as an important part of a metropolitan ecosystem. I see a lot of her strategies for urbanization as being directly intended to weaken the connectivity between suburban and urban areas and I think that is a bad direction for cities to move in.
This is most obvious when it comes to her strategies for causing what she calls 'attrition of automobiles by cities'. Jacobs is a little ambivalent about motor vehicles. It seems to me like she hates them personally and would prefer they did not have any access to cities, but intellectually acknowledges that they are an important part of a city's infrastructure. Her accommodation to this tension is to propose to gradually steer cities toward denser development that is less dependent on motor vehicles, while simultaneously gradually steering road layouts in ways that discourage motor vehicles- narrower roads with more bottlenecks, less parking availability. By making cities less convenient to cars, she argues, less cars will use them. Of course, this also makes cities less convenient in general, and in particular it privileges people who live in the city over people who commute into the city. (To those who say that improved public transportation would make life easier for commuters, I don't disagree, but look at the doom scenarios being envisioned for next week if NJ Transit goes on strike. One of the costs of public transportation, even good public transportation, is a lack of independence in transport.)
More broadly, I snickered every time Jacobs writes of the 'Great Blight of Dullness' afflicting large parts of cities. Jacobs unconvincingly links her GBD to actual blight, but I don't think she makes her case very well. There are areas of cities that burst with eccentricity and it is fun to spend time in those areas, and commerce sometimes does well in those areas(but not always! Jacobs claims this is because those cities fail some other obscure criteria of her eccentric, almost Ptolemean theory of cities), but non-GBD areas, I can testify from experience, are often unpleasant places to live or spend time. They have continuous cyclic mixed use, something Jacobs calls a virtue, but I'd call it less of one if you're trying to sleep. They have continuous foot traffic, something Jacobs calls a virtue because she asserts it promotes safe streets, but that foot traffic means it's hard for an individual to make private use of outdoor spaces. (Jacobs actually claims this is possible in non-GBD areas because everyone knows the unspoken code of giving people privacy. I think this is laughable.) They have local street personalities, which Jacobs calls a virtue because they help with street safety and also perform services for the community, but local street personalities can be SUPER ANNOYING AND INTRUSIVE and there's nothing you can do about them if they are.
But I should talk about the important things Jacobs writes about that I do agree with. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a massive and eccentric polemic against a late 19th century community planning system that seems to have been based on Fabianism and other forms of 19th Century non-Marxist socialist utopianism and which somehow infiltrated urban planning Orthodoxy in the 20th century. This system, which Jacobs derisively calls Radiant City Beautiful planning as a mishmosh of several different but related planning theories she opposes, is centered on the idea of top-down social engineering of cities and of using this top down planning to segregate cities in ways that from a top down perspective appear orderly. Jacobs and I chiefly agree that this is bad because segregation is not a good design for cities. We disagree in that I generally believe that the free market and less regulation are better for cities and she thinks the problem isn't social engineering and government driven urban planning, the problem is just that the old-school social engineers were doing it wrong and that if she ran the zoo, things would be better.
She makes a compelling case for why public housing projects are historic failures, carefully laying out all the features of these projects that combine to doom them to be eternal bastions of crime and misery. She points to the income requirements and the way this inadvertently creates an income segregation between housing areas that is detrimental in two major ways: First, in that it creates jealousy and suspicion between people on the basis of income, and second, that anyone who does become more successful and gains more income has to leave, destroying any chance for the area to build community. And she points to the geographically segregated nature of most projects, the result of massive land clearance that rooted out any integration between the projects and the rest of the city. She claims that if the projects were more integrated and economically diverse, the magic of her non-Great Blight of Dullness would work to make low income housing safer, and I'm skeptical of all of her claims about GBD, but I think it's clear that housing projects of the type Jacobs is arguing about do not build communities and that mixed use areas are, at minimum, a far more ethical and humane way to handle the problem of poverty than relegating those unable to afford housing to ghettos. What Jacobs wants, ultimately, is a way to subsidize housing that allows people to grow with their housing rather than abandoning it for better housing when they can, because she believes in neighborhoods as things that need time to develop. I think this makes an awful lot of sense, and I think depaternalizing a lot of processes involving government services for poor people will go a hell of a long way to making those processes work better. But I'm not sure I think that the Jacobs process is altogether likely to go as she predicts. My Republicanism and sorta haphazard libertarianism at work- I suspect that if the government's heavy hand goes out of the process, if the government stops trying to be a landlord and stops trying to decide that its solution is the best solution and instead lets people get what they actually want, things will go better, but things will also change, rapidly and unpredictably. I'm not sure that 'neighborhoods' of the sort Jacobs longs for will emerge.
And I agree with her that designing cities for enforced aesthetics is almost always a bad idea, that cities should be designed for function over beauty, though her own aesthetic counterproposals seem mostly pretty silly and idiosyncratic and personal to me rather than being functional. This is where
ghost_lingering's vid comes in- by focusing on skylines almost exclusively, the vid plays with the popular imagination of cities rather than engaging with the actual process of building cities.In general, it was a fascinating read full of great ideas, and I'm glad to have read it, but it was also somewhat less than I'd hoped it would be.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-09 05:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-09 07:11 pm (UTC)[for what it's worth: I know I don't share my thoughts all that often, but I'm remarkably well fed by your reviews. my reading list is much improved, and definitely more diverse as a result.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-11 03:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-10 03:45 am (UTC)I'm a fan of public transportation, but I think people are best encouraged to use it by improving it, not by making the lives of drivers harder. IME it's easier to park in Manhattan than in Boston, but a larger percentage of Bostonians own cars because the alternatives aren't as good.
I think government regulation can do things about that noise you mention. It is my delight in New York to hear much less honking than in Boston, thanks I think to those anti-honking ordinances. It is my displeasure to hear midnight garbage pickup here, because GDI Brooklyn that's why.