Humanities Core Course | Winter 2008

Week IX: The Kind of Problem a City Is

9a: Illustrated Jane Jacobs

Dear Students: These final four lectures are image-driven. They will not make sense without the pdf slides (linked to the syllabus) and my lecture, as delivered in Crystal Cove auditorium. See you in the lecture hall!! – JRL

ABOUT JANE JACOBS

:: Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1916

:: Moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, 1928

:: Lots of course work and informal study, but no college degree

:: Associate editor of Architectural Forum, 1952

:: Death and Life of American Cities, 1961

:: Emigraton to Toronto, Canada, 1968

:: Died in Toronto, 2006 at the age of 89

WHY JANE JACOBS?

> MAKING concerns environments, not just objects of art or consumption.

> Jane Jacobs: THINKING and DOING, in response to a MADE WORLD.

> Jane Jacobs’ THINKING about built environments (MAKING) invites us to consider how streets, buildings, parks, and sidewalks affect human life and action (DOING).

> How can we use Jane Jacobs to pose our own questions about the built environments that surround us?

> I hope that reading Jane Jacobs will be helpful to some of you as you begin choosing a topic for your spring research paper.

PREVIEW: SPRING QUARTER RESEARCH PAPER

You’ll select a topic that interests you from one of these broad areas, with support and advice from your instructor:

:: art and action / music and movements

:: built environments as scenes for thinking and doing

:: publics and counter-publics

END OF QUARTER CHALLENGES

Following the model of Professor Moeller, I invite you to contribute to one of these final challenges. (Optional!!)

Thinking with Jane Jacobs

Take a photo of a public space and write a brief caption analyzing it using an idea, phrase or image from Jane Jacobs. Send to jrlupton@uci.edu.

or

Are you a maker?
Send me a JPG or a link to a favorite thing you’ve made (visual, verbal, musical, video, fashion, game, etc.), and tell me something about it. Please send me your links by the end of this week, as I would like to incorporate some examples of student making into my final lecture.

JANE JACOBS IN SIX WORDS

“She loves sidewalks and hates parks.”

(Comic detour: Check out “six word memoirs” at http://smithmag.net/sixwords/)

Here’s the same summary, a bit more refined:

“Jane Jacobs wants to understand the kinds of activity and relationships that streets and sidewalks support, while demonstrating how parks and open space depend on streets and sidewalks for their vitality, interest, and safety.”

THE RADIANT GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL;

Or, What Jane Jacobs Hates about Urban Planning

When Jacobs published this book in 1961, she was taking on the professional urban planning establishment, especially urban renewal projects that involved tearing down large sections of established city neighborhoods and replacing them with public housing projects, high rises, and other forms of modern development. She was also opposed to free ways that cut through traditional neighborhoods, affecting pedestrian patterns, and requiring the destruction of buildings and the dislocation of people. Since freeways wer designed to move traffic in and out of the city, they were a major feature of post World War II suburbanization, and she saw this new car culture as a major threat to the vitality and energy of “great cities.” Some of her contemporaries whose ideas or policies she is opposing include Lewis Mumford, an urban reformer and intellectual. Another is Robert Moses, the planner responsible for the modernization of New York. The modernist architect Le Corbusier was still alive when Death and Life appeared.

GARDEN CITY

Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City

Ebenezer Howard, 1850-1928

> Englishman

> traveled in America

> friend of Bruno Taut

> a reformer appalled by the living conditions of London’s poor

Ebenezer Howard developed this chart, “The Three Magnets,” to explain the benefits and drawbacks of city and country life, and the appeal of their synthesis in the new “Garden Cities” that he proposed as a solution to poor housing for the poor in big cities.

Several towns were built in England following Howard’s model, including Letchworth Garden City, north of London, the “first planned city” of modern times. Experiments in the United States included Chatham Village (Pittsburgh), Garden City, New York, and Baldwin Hills Village, Los Angeles (now called “The Village Green,” to evoke its English roots, I guess!). The “Garden City” idea is a major source for the tract housing that has come to characterize most suburban development in the U.S.

THE DECENTRISTS

Lewis Mumford,1895-1990

:: Mumford was associated with the “Decentrists,” a group of planners who wanted to apply a regional model (city plus surrounding areas) to urban planning in order to distribute people and industry across larger areas.

:: Like Jacobs, Mumford was not an expert. Like Jacobs, he held no college degree, and he was a prolific writer and public intellectual on many topics, including cities. He was architectural critic for The New Yorker, a major news and culture magazine.

:: Mumford initially supported Jacobs’ work (he wrote her a letter of recommendation) but then wrote a negative review of her book in The New Yorker. (We’ll look at this review in my next lecture.)

THE RADIANT CITY

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was a Swiss-born architect, arguably the most influential modernist architect of the twentieth century. He supported standardization in architecture through the use of prefabricated concrete slabs and other modular elements, which led to clarity of line but also an oppressive uniformity, especially in his large housing high rises. Rational building principles were designed to bring order and cleanliness to the lives of workers, who would live in high rises surrounded by greenbelts. His designs for skyscrapers accommodated the car as a key feature of modern life. He published a book called The Radiant City in 1935. Although he was not a member of the Bauhaus (remember the Weimar modernist architects and designers?), his writings were read by them. Le Corbusier also designed furniture. Like his buildings, Le Corbusier’s distinctively modern chairs and couches wear their metal frames on the outside, rather than hiding beneath mounds of decorative upholstery, as was typical of Victorian furniture. Le Corbusier famously called the house “a machine for living,” and he believed that a rationally built house, filled with equally rational, would lead to cleaner, smarter, more efficient living for the urban masses of modernity

The following passage from Le Corbusier’s book The Radiant City is quoted by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life, p. 21:

“Suppose we are entering the city by way of the Great Park. Our fast car takes the special elevated motor track between the majestic sky scrapers; as we approach nearer, there is seen the repetition against the sky of the 24 skyscrapers; to our left and right on the outskirts of each particular area are the municipal and administrative buildings; and enclosing the space are the museums and university buildings. The whole city is a Park.”

Robert Moses, 1888-1981

:: worked for the City of New York

:: changed the skyline of New York by encouraging the building of skyscrapers and highrises

:: tore down poor neighborhoods and built large public housing projects

:: supported suburbanization by funding massive highways and tunnels linking Manhattan to Long Island and the outlying boroughs of New York

:: disliked public transportation and believed that the future of New York was tied to the car

CITY BEAUTIFUL: The World’s Fair Approach to Urban Planning

Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

Jacobs writes of the World’s Fair,

“One heavy, grandiose monument after another was arranged in the exposition park, like frosted pastries on a tray, in a sort of squat, decorative forecast of Le Corbusier’s later repetitive ranks of towers in a park.” (p. 14)

Jacobs reads Corbusier’s Radiant City as a vertical version of the Garden City. It was unusual, even counter-intuitive, to group the inventors of the modern suburbs (Ebenezer Howard and the Decentrists) with Le Corbusier, whose skyscraper vision of urban downtowns has come to dominate the skylines of modern cities from New York and Chicago to Tokyo, Shanghai, and Sao Paolo. It was even stranger still to link the stark industrial clarity of modernism with the decorative excesses of a “World’s Fair” or theme park approach to urban space. Nonetheless, Jacobs insisted that these different urban plans, despite their very different physical appearances, shared a common set of values and assumptions. On the Decentrists and Le Corbusier, she writes:

“The Decentrists ... were aghast at Le Corbusier’s city of towers in the park... And yet, ironically, the Radiant City comes directly out of the Garden City. Le Corbusier accepted the Garden City’s fundamental image, superficially at least, and worked to make it practical for high densities. The solution will be found in the ‘vertical garden city.’”

(JJ, 22)

Values shared by the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” include:

> dislike of traditional urban density and diversity

> desire to sort out urban functions

> transfer of park and town model to city living

> well-intentioned reformers and intellectuals

On Le Corbusier
http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Le_Corbusier.html

On Robert Moses
http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/past/466.html
On Lewis Mumford

http://www.nd.edu/~ehalton/mumfordbio.html

JANE JACOBS ON GREAT CITIES

Her goal:

> to counter the myth of the city (city as garden)

> with the reality of cities (“how cities work in real life,” p. 4)

Jacobs identifies the “one principle” that organizes her observations of city life:

“One principle emerges ubiquitously... This ubiquitous principle is the need of cities for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially... Unsuccessful city areas are areas which lack this kind of intricate mutual support.” (p. 14)

A recurrent theme of the book – and now a commonplace of contemporary urban theory – is the importance of many forms of diversity in successful cities. This includes economic diversity among inhabitants; different heights, sizes, and ages among buildings; and the concentration of different types of activity within a small area (housing, shops, light industry, recreation, culture). Although race is not an active category in the book (a topic for possible discussion), she certainly means something like ethnic and racial diversity as well, and occasionally refers to it.

THE USES OF SIDEWALKS

JJ devotes three full chapters to sidewalks and the way they support healthy neighborhoods.

Ch. 3: Sidewalks and Safety

Ch. 4: Contact (the social life of sidewalks as people pass each other in the street on the way to eat, work, play, or hang out)

Ch. 5: Assimilating Children (the role of sidewalk play in the development of children from early childhood into the teen years)

Jane Jacobs on the use of sidewalks:

“A sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it.” (p. 29)

Notice Jacobs’ attention here to patterns, contexts, and systems of use and meaning. A sidewalk only becomes significant when it is part of an urban pattern of use. A sidewalk exists as a means of relating buildings to the street, and as a means for people to walk from one place to another. A sidewalk is a pedestrian element, not a decorative edge or add-on.

Sidewalks improve city safety because they place “eyes upon the street” (the natural surveillance system of neighbors, shopkeepers, parents, passers-by). There are only “eyes upon the street,” however, if the sidewalk is in use “fairly continuously.” (p. 35).
”Continuous use” is encouraged by diversity in functions and businesses: cafes that open early, bars that stay open late, residences mixed with places of employment. In post-Jacobs urban planning, this is now referred to as “mixed use development” or “mixed use zoning.” It is the opposite of the sorting out of functions emphasized in the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” models dominate when Jacobs wrote her book.

THE PROBLEM WITH PROJECTS

Big urban housing projects – whether for the poor or for middle and upper income residents -- are turned inward onto courtyards, away from streets and sidewalks. There is no commerce or street life to keep “eyes on the street.”

The lack of sidewalks leads to “Turf”:

Ø gang territory for the poor
> fortressing by the wealthy, whether it’s gated luxury high rises or fortress-like universities in the middle of urban neighborhoods.

SIDEWALK BALLET

The most famous, often quoted or anthologized, passage from Jacobs’ book is her narration of a day on Houston Street, where she lives, as a “sidewalk ballet.”

“It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing to it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance ...” (50-54).

This section on the sidewalk ballet ends the chapter on Sidewalks and Safety, but forms a transition to the chapters on Contact and Children. Look for these themes in these pages.

The image of the sidewalk ballet can be taken as an invitation to various forms of creative interaction with urban and neighborhood spaces, including writing, photography, painting, and dance.

THE USES OF PARKS

Jane Jacobs writes at the beginning of her park chapter:

“Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.”

(p. 88)

One of the truisms of orthodox planning that JJ takes on in this book is the idea that parks and open space are in and of themselves healthy, positive additions to urban and suburban life – genuine and inarguable improvements over the asphalt and concrete of urban streets and sidewalks. She “turns this idea around” by suggesting that it is cities (their activity, their density, the interest that they bring in the form of foot traffic, the enclosure they provide by way of buildings and streets) that make parks successful. The lack of sufficient city life renders parks both dull and dangerous. It is not quite fair to say that “Jane Jacobs loves sidewalks and hates parks,” but it’s a good place to start, since one can read her project as an attempt to restore dignity to streets and sidewalks by understanding the kinds of activity they support, while reevaluating the salutary role of parks and open space – especially their dependence on streets and sidewalks if they are to succeed in pulling neighborhoods together.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

Her main case study in her study of parks is Philadelphia. William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, used the new city as a laboratory to explore early forms of city planning. His model for Philadelphia was the country estate, not the big cities of Europe, which grew organically out of medieval settlements. (Read about Penn and urban planning at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/PENN/pnplan.html). His grid of streets was evenly punctuated by four squares. Each of the four squares was designed to provide a common park for a different neighborhood of the city. Their design is almost identical. Yet Jacobs argues that the success of these four parks is wildly different, based on the patterns of use. that developed around them. Her larger argument: simply including a park in a new development or urban renewal project does not guarantee the success of the new neighborhood. Indeed, parks can attract crime and uncivil behavior as well as communal leisure, liveliness, and cooperation.

Rittenhouse Square is the most successful of the four Philadelphia parks, because it is in the center of a busy, diversified neighborhood whose many businesses and organizations provide steady traffic throughout the day. As a designed space, we can see the four features of good park design (intricacy, centering, enclosure, and sun), at work in this successful neighborhood park, but these features alone are not enough to ensure its success.

The other parks that Jacobs examines have been less successful. When she wrote her book, Franklin Square had become an outpost for the homeless – what she calls a Skidrow park. Such parks were (and still are) typically seen as examples of “urban blight” by urban planners. JJ certainly does not see Skid Row parks as urban amenities, but she does see them as serving important functions for the homeless (not a term in use when she wrote the book), and she is a close observer of the forms of social life that takes place in the Skid Row park. She also distinguishes Skid Row parks (parks for the homeless) from crime parks.

Jacobs labels Washington Square, a third Philadelphia park, as a former “pervert park” that was then shut down and reborn in an attempt at urban renewal. When she writes her book, the square has become a largely empty park that serves some office buildings at lunch time. The phrase “pervert park” refers to a park used by homosexuals for cruising. Unlike the Skid Row park, which she treats with quite a bit of respect and anthropological interest, J.J. shows no interest at all in the social functions and subculture supported by parks used by homosexuals.

Her point:

>Four parks
>One design
>Very different destinies, depending on the vitality of the neighborhoods and the kinds of traffic patterns that they support

OTHER PARKS
Jacobs ends her park chapter by talking about other models for parks, including those that are seen but not actually entered by the majority of the city’s inhabitants. Examples include Grammery Park in New York:

“Gramercy Park in New York .... happens to be a private fenced yard in a public place; the property goes with the residential buildings across the surrounding streets. It must be entered with a key. Since it is blessed with splendid trees, excellent maintenance, and an air of glamor, it successfully provides for the passing public a place to please the eye.” (p. 107)

And tiny micro parks in San Francisco, bits of green in this dense, stacked city:

“A tiny triangular street intersection leftover ... in San Francisco is a fenced miniature world of its own, a deep cool world of water and exotic forest, populated by the birds that have been attracted. You cannot go in yourself. You do not need to, because your eyes go in and take you farther into this world than feet could ever go.” (p. 107)

Can you think of similar parks – micro-parks or gated parks that serve for visual relief only – in your contemporary landscape?

CONCLUSION

A thesis is born: Jane Jacobs on Making

Jane Jacobs is not a maker. In fact, she is concerned with the limits of making -- the limits and dangers of the modern drive to engineer environments in order to shape human behavior.

She is not, however, telling us to abandon all attempts at making. Rather, she leaves us with the following challenge:

How can our acts of making become more effective by working with rather than against human patterns of use and interaction?