Review in the NY Times today of “Becoming Jane Jacobs” by Sam Roberts that have two important insights into Jacobs – along with this beautiful picture:
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Jane Jacobs was so consumed in the late 1950s by the writing of her manifesto, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” that her hair turned from auburn to white. In “Becoming Jane Jacobs” (University of Pennsylvania Press, $34.95), Peter L. Laurence dispels the sexist and condescending contemporary view that her canonical book was a collection of home remedies from a housewife whose only credentials were as an amateur observer of the city’s sidewalk ballet.
Then this – an observation that I hope gets circulated in the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure in Victoria and in Motordom-biased transportation departments everywhere:
Her views evolved, too. Professor Laurence, director of graduate studies at Clemson University School of Architecture, recalls that she was even somewhat forgiving of Robert Moses. “It is understandable that men who were young in the 1920s were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City,” Ms. Jacobs wrote, “with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age.” She added, however:
“It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be ‘modern’ in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.”
As disheartening is to hear the notion, repeated by leaders like Peter Fassbender, that somehow we have to continue to build around the automobile today because we’re not sufficiently ‘European’ or advanced enough to depart from Motordom in order to shape growth around transit, even though that’s exactly what our plans call for and which, when we do it, we are so successful at.
On a recent beach vacation, I re-read Great American Cities after several years of increasing involvement in Urbanism and city planning. All along, I was wishing that I had more academic training in the science. Not because I doubted the wisdom of the work, but because I wanted the insight of a young planner out of a modern school to inform me of how things have or haven’t changed since 1961. So much of her writing seems prescient while being critical of “planners” as they existed in the 50s. Surely our planners have learned since then, or do we still suffer from too much Radiant City thinking?
When I see things like the plans for Collingwood, and read documents for a tower of such and such height here, and such and such different height here, all carefully planned down to the lot, I recall Jacobs admonishment of the urge to treat a city ‘like a large architectural problem’
Jacob’s last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” contained a chapter on the over-credentialization of education and the professional class. I realized later she was defending her own rejection of honourary degrees and post-graduate education in light of her excellent personal research abilities, most intelligent insights and great skill in articulating them on the page.
Jacobs didn’t need a string of letters behind her name and university tenure to earn worldwide respect.