Conscious Choice: Jane Jacobs: Defender of the Urban Neighborhood

May 2002 | Citizen at Large

Jane Jacobs: Defender of the Urban Neighborhood

by Jay Walljasper

In 1961, at the height of urban planners’ crusade to obliterate all the charming, lovable parts of American cities and replace them with sharp-angled monuments to modernist rationality, an unassuming New York writer defended the urban neighborhoods in a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs celebrated what nearly everyone else called slums and eyesores: the close-knit urban neighborhoods under assault by superhighways and high-rise housing projects. She was savagely attacked for it, not least because she had no formal training as an urban planner — just the knowledge she had accumulated in decades of living in Greenwich Village and as an editor for Architectural Forum magazine. But that attention to the nitty-gritty elements of urban living is precisely what makes her thinking so profound — she celebrates the seemingly small things that make a city work well for its residents: The presence of people on the street deters crime; a mix of shops and housing makes a neighborhood both convenient and lively. Urban planners tend to overlook these things as they pursue grand visions of architectural splendor without considering what it will be like to live in their masterpieces.

The Canadian newsmagazine MacLean’s, at the time of a 1997 conference exploring Jacobs’ work, noted that "the lessons from that one book — that cities are ecosystems that can be smothered by rigid, authoritarian planning; that busy, lively sidewalks help cities thrive as safe, healthy places; that good urban design mixes work, housing, and recreation — have influenced a generation of planners and architects."

Jacobs fell in love with the hubbub of city life upon moving to New York City from her hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. "The first time I walked out of the subway and saw Greenwich Village," she remembers, "I knew I had to live there. I liked its human scale, the mix of shops and housing, the little streets and many courtyards. The craft shops. The Italian food stores. It was so full of surprises." This was in the middle of the Depression, and Jacobs had a difficult time finding a job — experience she says that offered perspective on what urban life feels like to people scraping by.

With no college degree, she started a journalism career at a metals industry trade newspaper; soon she was contributing regularly to Vogue and other major publications. During World War II, she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs. He sparked her interest in architecture, which eventually led to a job as senior editor at Architectural Forum. Unlike most couples of the time, they stayed in the city to raise their three children, but the Vietnam War — which Jacobs fiercely opposed and did not want her two sons to fight in — ultimately drove them from New York, and from the United States altogether.

The family moved to Toronto, a city Jacobs feels has done an excellent job in maintaining its urban vitality. In the 1950s, when the United States was plowing billions into urban freeways, Toronto constructed a subway system. Freeways were eventually built on the edges of the city, not through its heart.

Jacobs was partly responsible for saving her adopted home from dissection. Upon arriving in town her family moved into a rented house on Spadina Road that was ground zero for a controversial expressway project. She wrote thundering articles in the local newspaper, accusing city planners of wanting to "Los Angelize" Toronto, and in her kitchen she organized an opposition movement, applying strategic lessons she had learned a decade earlier in a successful campaign to stop a highway from being built through the middle of Greenwich Village’s beloved Washington Square Park.

Today, Jacobs still lives in the area known as the Annex, now in a three-story brick house from whose open porch she can monitor activity in the neighborhood. She points out front yard gardens and discusses with a friend on the porch next door the comings and goings of a raccoon family. This middle-class neighborhood in many ways embodies the ideals of urban living celebrated in Jacobs’ books. The streets are lined with trees and parked cars, both of which encourage drivers to slow down. The one- and two-family homes are built close together, and alleys run though each block. A busy commercial street with a streetcar line is just around the corner, ensuring that anyone can shop or get around town without a car.

Her house is crowded with books and great stacks of magazines and newspapers, out of which she clips articles for her ongoing research, as well as jigsaw puzzles — a favorite pastime. In a way, her books come together like puzzles, as she doggedly studies the patterns into which elements of information fit. In The Economy of Cities, she examined how cities function as economic units, and in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she outlined how cities are the unrecognized secret of national economic prosperity. The latter book influenced University of Chicago economist Robert Lucas’ work on human capital — the economic dynamism created from the endless opportunities cities offer for the exchange of ideas — for which he won a 1995 Nobel Prize.

At 83, Jacobs puts in long days of thinking, writing, and observing the workings of the world through her perceptive gaze. She apologetically brought a recent interview to a close by saying, "You’ll have to excuse me, but I must get back to work."

Adapted from the book, Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life (New Society Publishers) available at your local bookstore or 800-880-UTNE.

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