There is a video on youtube about Jane Jacobs not being perfect. She was a NIMBY herself at times in her life. A lot of urbanist heroes of the 1950s are not going to be seen as heroes today. Back in the era of urban renewal, a few blighted properties in a neighborhood could make it the target of slum clearance. Neighborhoods in the crosshairs fought back with, you guessed it, Home Owner's Associations. And the reality is that many of today's villainized HOAs started off as the good guys.
It isn't that the planners who quote Jane Jacobs are not willing to uproot the system Jacobs riled against. Jane Jacobs couldn't uproot the system either, and she even did her share in edifying the status quo.
And even if they might be persuaded to nod their heads at Death and Life, they forget that one of her later books was all about cities as economic engines, powered by people and ideas being in contact with eachother, and mature ideas being farmed out to rural areas and factory towns.
Building a city as an exercise in interconnectivity leads to a very different approach than putting bad aids on decades of poor land use and road building.
How will this change? One suggestion I read recently was to completely revamp the education system for urban planning and civil engineering. Beyond that, evolving the way municipal government works must be a factor.
The two things that really stuck in my craw about Death and Life.
First was she referred to the students living in Greenwich as not belonging, they weren't a part of the community the way the others were. She never interrogated *why* they didn't feel welcome or interact, and took an attitude of students being invaders and fetishized "real residents."
Second was Greenwich hasn't really changed since her time and now is one of the most exclusive, expensive neighborhoods. If development drives up rent why isnt it one of the cheapest?
IMO, the mainstream lesson learned from Jane Jacobs is not that cities need the flexibility to breathe and adapt and embrace complexity, but that planners need to place resident feedback as a top priority (because Moses could have cared less about the public). The fact that Jacobs was so much of a regular person suggests to the profession not that her _ideas_ were right, but that planners should have listened to her because she was a regular resident.
This now causes them to be hesitant to propose what they know will improve a town, because they only want to make these improvements after residents are asking for them, out of fear they will repeat a Moses-like indifference to residents’ needs. Ironically though, they have so enshrined this ethos in processology that the real lesson of Moses vs Jacobs of top-down imposition versus embracing emergence has been lost. By trying to save the perceived Jacobs lesson (resident opinion), they have immortalized the anti-Jacobs moral: embracing emergence even when it means allowing things that are messy.
I think of planning and transport engineering as a bit like parenting. If I ask my kids what they want for dinner they'll probably say sugar and ice cream. That may be serving demand identified by consultation but it is not in their long-term interests. Like any road widening is a temporary sugar hit/crash. Land use planning and transport should be like the eat the rainbow diet, mixed use and multi-modal.
There is a video on youtube about Jane Jacobs not being perfect. She was a NIMBY herself at times in her life. A lot of urbanist heroes of the 1950s are not going to be seen as heroes today. Back in the era of urban renewal, a few blighted properties in a neighborhood could make it the target of slum clearance. Neighborhoods in the crosshairs fought back with, you guessed it, Home Owner's Associations. And the reality is that many of today's villainized HOAs started off as the good guys.
It isn't that the planners who quote Jane Jacobs are not willing to uproot the system Jacobs riled against. Jane Jacobs couldn't uproot the system either, and she even did her share in edifying the status quo.
And even if they might be persuaded to nod their heads at Death and Life, they forget that one of her later books was all about cities as economic engines, powered by people and ideas being in contact with eachother, and mature ideas being farmed out to rural areas and factory towns.
Building a city as an exercise in interconnectivity leads to a very different approach than putting bad aids on decades of poor land use and road building.
NIMBYism drives everything you discuss in the article.
How will this change? One suggestion I read recently was to completely revamp the education system for urban planning and civil engineering. Beyond that, evolving the way municipal government works must be a factor.
The two things that really stuck in my craw about Death and Life.
First was she referred to the students living in Greenwich as not belonging, they weren't a part of the community the way the others were. She never interrogated *why* they didn't feel welcome or interact, and took an attitude of students being invaders and fetishized "real residents."
Second was Greenwich hasn't really changed since her time and now is one of the most exclusive, expensive neighborhoods. If development drives up rent why isnt it one of the cheapest?
IMO, the mainstream lesson learned from Jane Jacobs is not that cities need the flexibility to breathe and adapt and embrace complexity, but that planners need to place resident feedback as a top priority (because Moses could have cared less about the public). The fact that Jacobs was so much of a regular person suggests to the profession not that her _ideas_ were right, but that planners should have listened to her because she was a regular resident.
This now causes them to be hesitant to propose what they know will improve a town, because they only want to make these improvements after residents are asking for them, out of fear they will repeat a Moses-like indifference to residents’ needs. Ironically though, they have so enshrined this ethos in processology that the real lesson of Moses vs Jacobs of top-down imposition versus embracing emergence has been lost. By trying to save the perceived Jacobs lesson (resident opinion), they have immortalized the anti-Jacobs moral: embracing emergence even when it means allowing things that are messy.
I think of planning and transport engineering as a bit like parenting. If I ask my kids what they want for dinner they'll probably say sugar and ice cream. That may be serving demand identified by consultation but it is not in their long-term interests. Like any road widening is a temporary sugar hit/crash. Land use planning and transport should be like the eat the rainbow diet, mixed use and multi-modal.
The dissonance between discourse and action in local planning departments is wild.