I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, I grew up in Greenwich Village. My dad was a novelist, and my mom was a graphic designer and an artist. Lots of their friends were eccentric Village artists and intellectuals.
In that milieu, Jane Jacobs was an icon. She saved the Village from Robert Moses and also explained what made dense urban neighborhoods great. So I knew all about her and her work, but I never actually read any of it. After all, I knew what it said and I knew why she was amazing and I also knew why, from a modern YIMBY perspective, one would criticize her for being too enthusiastic about localism and historic preservation.
And then for the podcast I actually read her magnum opus, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and was surprised by how much I hated it.
Large swaths of the book are casual sociology of Greenwich Village that strike me as borderline fraudulent — she doesn’t so much as mention that it’s a center of gay life, which it very much was even back in the period she’s discussing. The bohemian character of the neighborhood isn’t even alluded to. When she mentions the low levels of street crime in Boston’s North End she doesn’t mention the mafia influence in midcentury Italian ethnic enclaves. The other two neighborhoods she discusses at length, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia and Back of the Yards in Chicago, I am much less familiar with. But the presence of these glaring errors really makes me wonder.
She also seems to have no idea how to distinguish cause from effect. She names some neighborhoods she likes and then attributes their good qualities to seemingly arbitrary aspects of the built environment. It’s true that the Village has very short blocks, for example. But is that really why it’s great? What about Eixample in Barcelona? She expresses a lot of confidence that Chelsea will never gentrify due to long blocks, but — oops!
Jerusalem, who like most Americans grew up in the suburbs, has a kinder estimate. To her, it matters that Jacobs unlocks urbanism and explains why even in the automobile age cities and great urban neighborhoods matter. And I have to admit that my take in “Against Urban Planning” aligns with a lot of Jacobs’s points. Jerusalem and I both enjoyed Jacobs’s skepticism about parks and her appreciation of a certain amount of urban crowding and happenstance. We also both agree that Jacobs’s grasp of economics is weak. She’s very down on boring office-cluster districts, which is fair on one level, but seems to yadda yadda past the reality that these are core pillars of the urban economy. The idea of agglomeration doesn’t appear in the book.
I’m ultimately a harsher critic. I think that in this urbanism without economics, Jacobs ends up repeating the exact hubris that she rightly pins on the Garden City, Radiant City, and City Beautiful movements. She appreciates the qualities of certain classic urban neighborhoods but has no real idea how you build more of them or what kinds of neighborhoods could be built under modern conditions. You can’t understand from this book how a contemporary city such as Austin or Singapore might happen or why Philadelphia continues to decline even though everyone who visits thinks it’s great.
Jerusalem and I get into all of it on this week’s episode. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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