Humanities Core Course | Winter 2008

Week IX: The Kind of Problem a City Is

9a: Walls, Chinks, and Moonshine: The Legacies of Jane Jacobs

Julia Reinhard Lupton

jrlupton@uci.edu

:: Death and Life of Great American Cities published by Random House, 1961

:: reprinted by the Modern Library in 1993.

:: Modern Library: “affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought,” including Aristotle, Austen and Shakespeare.

Taking my cue from Shakespeare’s Rude Mechanicals, this lecture is divided into three sections:

Walls: Criticisms and Limits of Jane Jacobs’ project

Chinks: Openings and Legacies (my focus will be on the contemporary building and planning movement called “The New Urbanism”):

Moonshine: Thinking with Jane Jacobs (I’ll show you how I used Jane Jacobs to do my own little research project on the history of the American porch).

WALLS: CRITICISMS AND LIMITS

CRITICISMS 1961

Remember Robert Moses? The guy who rebuilt New York on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City model?

Random House sent him a copy of Death and Life, and he took the time to type up a personal “No Thank You” note!! Here’s what he wrote:

“Dear Bennett:

I am returning the book you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate and inaccurate, it is also libelous. I call your attention, for example, to page 131.Sell this junk to someone else.

Cordially,

Robert Moses”

What did she say on p. 131 anyway? You can look it up yourself, but here’s the short version:

“Robert Moses ... has made an art of using control of public money to get his way with those whom the voters elect and depend on to represent their frequently opposing interests. .... Seduction or subversion of the elected is easiest when the electorate is fragmented into ineffective units of power.” (p. 131)

In an evaluative essay written by Nicolai Ouroussouff for the New York Times right after Jacobs died in 2006, Ouroussouff writes:

“Mr. Moses, tellingly, once dismissed her and her ilk as ‘nobody but a bunch of mothers.’”

She was a mother, and, although her work is not directly feminist (“about” women’s rights or gender relations), her insistence on the kinds of knowledge and forms of thinking possessed by ordinary citizens, including female ones, has implications for feminism (and can be a resource for feminism and for women today).

Remember Lewis Mumford? He was a contributor to the “Decentrists,” the U.S. planners who applied Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City” idea to regional planning in America, with an eye to spreading the density of cities out over larger geographical areas. He heard Jane Jacobs give a lecture at an important design conference at Harvard in 1956, where she first aired her criticisms of urban planning. He was impressed by her ideas, and wrote a letter of recommendation for a grant at the Rockefeller Foundation, money that allowed her to write the book. When the book came out, however, he was appalled to find that she lumped together Le Corbusier’s Radiant City with his own Garden City and Decentrist ideas. He wrote an extremely negative review of Death and Life in the New Yorker. (If you’re interested – I was! – you can read the whole thing in The Lewis Mumford Reader.) Here are some excerpts:

“Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean of all habitations, she bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century and every competing idea, without even a pretense of critical evaluation. .The Death and Life of American Cities is a mingling of sense and sensibility, of mature judgments and school girl howlers.”

In other words:

:: too polemical

:: impressionistic and anecdotal

:: romantic and sentimental

:: “female” and amateurish (a “mother,” “school girl howlers,” “sense and sensibility”)

How would YOU answer these criticisms?

CRITICISMS: 2006

Nicolai Ouroussoff for the New York Times: “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York” (April 30, 2006)

“Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation’s dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. .. She never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.”

:: In other words, Jacobs doesn’t “get” suburbs, or cars, or the West Coast. (Before going to the NY Times, Ouroussoff had been architecture critic for the LA Times.)

DENISE SCOTT BROWN: architect and writer

:: the un-Jane Jacobs?

:: has helped promote mixed use development; is a source for “the New Urbanism”

:: also a critic of Corbusier-style modernism

:: at Yale University, 1967-1970, she designed studio classes in architecture with her husband Robert Venturi called “Learning from Las Vegas” and “Learning from Levittown”

:: the “learning from” model echoes Jane Jacobs’ methods of up-close observation and on-the-ground research, but Brown applies it to very different urban and suburban forms of life.

[I would love to read a research paper: comparing the thinking of Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown!!.]

“Ethnoburbs”: suburbs are no longer enclaves of white people fleeing from the cities. An increasing number of African Americans and immigrant communities are living in suburbs.

WHAT ABOUT RACE?

Jacobs mentions ethnicity as a form of urban diversity, but she doesn’t use race as an analytic category.

For example, Jacobs provides no analysis of the Great Migration, when thousands of African-Americans (remember Sportin’ Life?) left the agricultural south for the “great cities” of the Industrial North. It’s this migration that placed huge numbers of African-Americans in the urban settings that Jacobs analyses in Death and Life.

Research question: what role, if any, did urban planning play in the race riots of the 1960s, or the 1990s?

**See slides for a time line of events that relate race relations to urban renewal in the United States.

** YouTube clip: African American author James Baldwin calls “urban renewal” “Negro removal.”

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cJusbALMMKI

For Jacobs, “diversity” includes ethnic and racial diversity. The projects she visits are largely African American, she is interested in the Puerto Rican presence in New York, and she talks about moments of integration (and its failure) on America’s sidewalks and in America’s parks.

She doesn’t, however, develop race as an analytic category. She has no account of the demographic or political patterns that led African Americans into northern cities, or to the role played by segregationist policies in urban renewal, or to the impact that drugs would have on America’s inner cities. The lack of attention to race limits the effectiveness of her analysis and may even imply an unwillingness to ask certain questions -- questions that were beginning to be asked when she was writing her book.

PLANET OF SLUMS

One quarter of the world’s urban population now lives in “slums.” These great sprawls of the extremely poor go by different names in different parts of the world, and have their own distinct patterns of development depending on region. They are called favelas in Brazil, deskotas in Indonesia and China, and gegekondus in Turkey. Geographers and sociologists call them “megacities,” “edge cities,” or simply “slums,” returning to the urban vocabulary of the nineteenth century. Whereas in the U.S., the inner cities have tended to become concentrated with the urban poor, in cities elsewhere across the globe, it is more standard that the inner city – its downtown, its historic core – remains a high-income business center, while the outlying regions become magnets for poor people leaving the countryside, but without substantial new opportunities in the cities to which they migrate. These edgecities are characterized by limited infrastructure, substandard, often “self-built” houses, and a polluted, often garbage-filled environment

In Cairo, poor residents are keeping house in the cities of the dead – ancient cemeteries outside the city. In these makeshift cities, "cenotaphs and gravemarkers are used as desks, headboards, tables, and shelves. String is hung between gravestones to set laundry to dry." (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, 33).

(See slide presentation for images and statistics about specific megacities worldwide.)

In the planet of slums, we might say that the “planning” is so chaotic that there are neither sidewalks nor parks, at least not in Jacob’s sense.There are parks of garbage where families hunt for food or recyclable goods. There are warrens of congested paths for foot traffic. There is plenty of “contact,” and millions of children are being “assimilated” into the community by living largely outdoors. Sidewalks like these, however, bear little resemblance to the urban romanticism of Jacobs’ “sidewalk ballet.”

Lupton’s take:

The global crisis in urbanization does not prove Jacobs wrong. Indeed, some of her insights into street culture, informal economies, and the ecology of neighborhoods can illuminate the “organized complexity” of the world’s new megacities. The rapidity and catastrophe of contemporary urbanization does, however, force us to reframe and re-evaluate Jacobs’ work. To what extent does the “American” frame of reference limit the applicability of her study when we move forward into the present, and outward into a global context?

CHINKS: Legacies and openings

Case: The New Urbanism

The “new urbanism” is a contemporary movement in urban planning that often takes Jane Jacobs’ book as its starting point. New Urbanism supports the following principles:

:: Walkability (grouping houses, work, and services close together; encouraging alternative transportation; designing “pedestrian-friendly” streets, including porches, wide sidewalks, and hidden or recessed parking.)

:: Connectivity (good-bye cul de sacs; return to steet grids that disperse traffic and encourage walking)

:: Mixed-use and diversity (mix of shops, offices, apartments, and houses within neighborhoods, blocks, and buildings; diversity of people in terms of income, ages, races, cultures)

(from http://NewUrbanism.org)

***For examples, see slide presentation.

NEW URBANISM [Lupton’s take]

:: At its best, the New Urbanism can revitalize forgotten downtowns and provide attractive lower- and middle-income housing for city residents.

(real Jane)

:: Too often, however, New Urbanist projects enrich developers and benefit higher-income residents. They may look like cities, sound like cities, and feel like cities ... but they are really the Radiant Garden City Beautiful dressed up as Jane Jacobs urbanism.

(theme park Jane)

MOONSHINE: Thinking with Jane Jacobs

At the end of her book, Jane Jacobs writes a more theoretical conclusion that addresses the question, “What Kind of a Problem A City Is.” Borrowing from a report written by scientist Warren Weaver for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1958, Jacobs writes:

“Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity. They present ‘situations in which a half dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.’” (p. 433)

Think back to our discussions of the network of causes in Aristotle’s theory of nature last fall. From Professor Schwab’s last lecture:

“Ecology as a discipline tries to gain knowledge of dynamic equilibria in complex relations between climate, the earth, and living beings. This looks to me like the attitude towards knowledge I [ARISTOTLE] have been advocating: gaining insight into the orders of the world. Not, in my ethical view, with the purpose of becoming tyrants in the realm of the earth, but with a view of integrating ourselves and our interests into these orders.”

Jacobs takes a similar approach to the city, seeing it as an example of interrelated causes and systems, subject to constant change. She writes, “City dwellings – whether existing or potential – are specific and particularized buildings always involved in differing, specific processes, such as unslumming, slumming, generation of diversity, self-destruction of diversity” (p. 440). In my next lecture, we’ll talk a little more about Warren Weaver and the way in which “complexity theory” brings together problems in biology, computing, and urbanism. What I’d like to do today is demonstrate how we can take Jacobs’ approach to the city and use it to think about other aspects of the built environment. In order to focus in on something vivid and manageable, I decided to do some research on PORCHES, a topic that has emerged in the “New Urbanism” as a way to revive the sidewalk culture that Jane Jacobs loved so much.

*** Please see slide presentation for pictures and commentary on porches, historic and contemporary. Sources of the American porch include: Greek stoa, Roman portico, Italian loggia, Indian verandah, and African village architecture. The porch became a standard feature of American houses from the second half of the nineteenth century through World War II. The porch went into decline as the result of car culture, air conditioning, and television. The porch has returned as a symbol of the New Urbanism. But are these neo-porches really restoring the sidewalk culture so dear to Jane Jacobs? You be the judge.

BACK TO JANE JACOBS

“The sidewalk is not an abstraction.”

Neither is a porch ....

“A park is not automatically anything.”

Neither is a porch ...

Can you think about other topics using the model provided by Jane Jacobs?

What kind of a problem is: a campus; a dorm; a slum; or the Internet? (This last problem will be the topic of the next lecture.)