Jane Jacobs died today at the age of 89.
Just yesterday, while preparing my "Small is still beautiful" post, I found myself groping for her two masterpieces, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities. I couldn't find them, because I had loaned them out -- I've been an ardent promoter of her works since I first discovered them more than ten years ago. My dog-eared copies of them have probably spent more time on the shelves of friends who I've foisted them on than my own.
May her death inspire a resurgence of interest in her work, particularly among greens. I hope over the next days to find time to write an appreciation of her.
Everyone who loves the chaos of a well-functioning city street -- and understands the vast environmental benefits of cities -- should bow east in the direction of her beloved Greenwich Village, and north toward her adopted home of Toronto.
Comments
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David Roberts Posted 7:59 am
25 Apr 2006
www.grist.org
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caniscandida Posted 7:42 am
26 Apr 2006
I would be interested to know what you think about something referred to in yesterday's NY Times piece on Jacobs, her interesting reversal of the priority of the city/farmland dynamic. I do not know exactly what she said, but maybe you do.
Greenwich Village is actually SSW from us on the Upper West Side. But anyway, yes indeed, Jacobs is a major New York hero. Thank God she and the community that she rallied were able to save Greenwich Village from the destruction that Robert Moses had planned for it. New Yorkers had already seen how the stretch of I-95 that runs across the George Washington Bridge and over northern Manhattan and the South Bronx is one of the most horribly ugly roads in the world, and the neighborhoods over which it is built are basically ruined.
In our cities, as in so many things in human life, we really require diversity. Conformity, uniformity, standardization might have their place here and there, but most of the time they are bad and destructive. Jacobs recognized that. And also, something that you appreciate, Tom, she knew that we are not at our best when we try to build, do, think, above a certain human scale.
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bookerly Posted 8:35 am
26 Apr 2006
Tom, thanks for the tribute. Jane Jacobs will be miseed. I deeply wish to have her openness and vision when I am her age (okay, a portion of it).
One reason for Americans to travel, would be to see some different visions of cities. There are many models in the world, not all bad. The Chinese model, for instance, includes building high, but with lots of open space around it. Which to me gives a less crowded feeling than New York, London or Hong Kong. (All of which are cities I deeply love).
Or look at places like Vancouver, which has one of the most wonderful downtowns of any cities I have ever seen (with real neighborhoods within easy walking distance). Jane Jacobs had a vision that is still remarkable, and will hopefully be influencing city planning and life far into the future.
patrick
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caniscandida Posted 7:54 pm
26 Apr 2006
From what I have seen in the media of East Asian cities, only two seem attractive to me: Hong Kong, which comes across as a thrilling mix of NYC, SF, Rio and Vancouver, only more exotic and more electric; and Kyoto, which I gather is kind of a Heiian theme park.
They say, Nagasaki used to be very pretty ...
I am not quite sure what Patrick means by building high. The huge constructions in Shanghai, Taipei and Kuala Lumpur all look pretty hideous. I might add in that connexion, what was probably discussed after 9/11/2001, that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were most certainly not well loved buildings in this city. They were useful for helping you orient yourself when you came up out of the subway at a downtown station. They were only truly beautiful in the late afternoon, to travelers returning to the city across the Meadowlands, when they spectacularly reflected the setting sun, in all those columns of golden glass. They were gorgeous angeloi, heralds, messengers, angels, of hi polis, the city: Be of good cheer, dear New Yorker, you are coming home. I shall always remember them.
Now, ugly buildings that they were, one cannot look at an image of the Manhattan skyline without thinking of them. "Oh look, there they are," one thinks, while watching the credits of Cher's masterpiece, "Moonstruck," made at a time when there was no interest whatsoever in bringing attention to them.
Or else, on seeing a post-9/11 image, the opposite: "Oh. See. That is where the World Trade Center used to be. Many people were there that day ... "
OK, Jane Jacobs: I would very much like to have heard her reaction to another great Brooklyn movie, Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing." The neighborhood is in a way the central character of that fascinating, terrible story. And it is such a gorgeous, Jacobsy neighborhood. And the story is a true tragedy, precisely because the neighborhood was doing everything in its power, in its Jacobsy way, to prevent the violent climax from happening.
A final example, for now, of cities in movies: late 2nd-century CE Rome, in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator." As a classicist, a lover of Rome today (though it has its problems), and a lover of Italian urban vernacular architecture in general, I found his digitalized Rome not just totally inaccurate but also disgusting. Well, maybe it worked for the story he was telling; fiction-writers can do that. Still, it should be pointed out that Scott's super-enhanced Colosseum is quite fictitious. The Colosseum is indeed a large building, but it has never dominated the Roman skyline as the images in Scott's movie would suggest. And remember that huge symmetrical space filled with huge numbers of symmetrically organized subjects/fans/worshipers/guys with shields and spears, and Joaquin Phoenix at the top of a very high array of steps trying to deal with both politics and family matters? Well, the Emperor Commodus had a very messy life indeed, that much is true. But there was in ancient Rome no public space like that one, so Nazi, so Berlin Olympics, so like what one would see in the imagination of Albert Speer or Leni Riefenstahl. Das ist nicht echt romanisch: it ain't the way the Romans really did things.
Real Romans, and real Italians, have always preferred to live in Jacobsy communities. It is true that the 2nd century CE was the period in which what might be called the Roman Baroque flourished. The inexpressibly sublime Pantheon was built then, as well as the well-known-to-tourists ancestral constructions of the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. But there are lots of other ruins from around the Mediterranean from that period. The point is, for all the grand construction, these were humane places to live, to have gardens, to have arboretums, to meet different people, to discover oneself as both a citizen and a cosmopolitan.
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bookerly Posted 1:05 pm
27 Apr 2006
I am not an expert on them. And Hong Kong is more like New York than Beijing. I haven't been to Shanghai yet.
Beijing has a limited number of very wide roads (think three lanes each side separated by a fence, a small median which contains bus stops and trees, a double car lane which is for bicylists (now one is often taken by people parking) and taxis, pick ups and drop offs, then a side walk of eight feet or so (sometimes wider, once in a while smaller). Then imagine an open plaza of around 30 feet, then the building goes up twenty stories or more. But the next building is not right up against it, but forty or more feet away, and the area is surrounded by low rise buildings and open space.
This is NOT a great description, since the elements I am talking about vary from location to location (but all of them wide streets, lots of space in front of buildings, and space between buildings, pluse trees and grass all around) but are all present to a large extent.
The density works (for me, some people hate it) partially because it doesn't feel very dense. Newer construction typically consists of large buildings around a central plaza, again set back brom the street (though many of them now have walls or fences) with housing and retail mixed in. I went to a new complex and it had four restaurants, two markets, bars, tea houses, gym, library, dry cleaner, art shops, a florist and maybe other small shops on the ground floor, the second floor, and the basement.
There is much more to Beijing than this, but I am trying to give a flavor for how I think the height and density works. Is it attractive? Some hate it, some love it.
But you don't have to come to Asia. Look at Vancouver. They have done an admirable (in my opinion) job of merging downtown into the neighborhoods. Vancouver is very different from Hong Kong, which is a place into itself.
When I read Caniscandida's post, I was most struck by the sense of wanting that feeling of community. I feel it here, but I am not sure that everyone does.
One of the reasons I feel it in Beijing, is that many of the small restaurants I go to have owners present, and since they aren't always busy, we chat and get to know each other. There are so many small businesses that people in them cooperate a lot. This adds to my sense of community.
But does the architecture contribute to this? I am not sure. Perhaps wiser heads can explain it.
I like Caniscandida's description of a city "these were humane places to live, to have gardens, to have arboretums, to meet different people, to discover oneself as both a citizen and a cosmopolitan" Thanks.
patrick
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