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
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
“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
“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
:: 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
** 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
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
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
In
(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.)