HCC Winter 2008: Week 9
Julia Reinhard Lupton
jrlupton@uci.edu
As you read this
book, keep in mind that it was first published in 1961. What in your mind
remains relevant, accurate, or provocative in Jacobs’ book? What in her writing
feels dated, limited, or off target? How
might her way of posing questions (and answering them) be useful to you in
posing (and answering) your own questions? What sorts of questions might Jacobs
help you ask?
introduction (pp. 3-25)
1. At what group of professionals is Jane Jacobs taking aim in this book? (p. 3)
2. What do “towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities” have in common, and how are they different from “great cities”? (pp. 6-7)
(What’s a sanitorium anyway? http://www.lung.ca/tb/tbhistory/sanatoriums/type.html)
3. What is the “one principle” that emerges from Jacobs’ “adventuring in the real world” of American cities? (pp. 13-14)
4. Why don’t the inhabitants of the
5. Distinguish the following types of modern city:
> “Garden City” (pp. 17-19)
> the towns of the Decentrists (pp. 19-20)
> the “
> “the City Beautiful” (pp. 24-25)
The end results of these different cities may look very different. According to JJ, what do they all have in common?
chapter two: the uses of sidewalks:
safety (pp. 29-34; 50-54)
6. According to JJ, what is the essential difference between a city and a town? (p. 30)
7. Why does life in housing projects (both low and middle-income) resemble the story of the three little pigs? (p. 31)
8. How is
9. How does JJ use the image of the “intricate sidewalk ballet” to organize
her account of a typical day on
chapter three: the uses of sidewalks:
contact (pp. 58-65)
10. What is the difference between “privacy” and “togetherness”? Why is one an attribute of city life, and the other not?
chapter four: the uses of sidewalks: assimilating children (pp. 84-88 )
11. What is the attitude of “recreation experts” towards children who play on sidewalks? What is the judgment of JJ?
chapter five: the uses of
neighborhood parks (pp. 89-111)
12. What conventional idea about parks does JJ want to “turn around” in this chapter? (p. 89)
13. Explain JJ’s statement, “Parks are not automatically anything.” (p. 92)
14. What exactly is “blight” anyway? (p. 97)
15. What does JJ mean when she says that you can “neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it”? What would be an example of lying to a park? What would be an example of reasoning with a park? (p. 101)
16. What is JJ’s attitude towards Skid Row parks? (pp. 99-100)
17 What according to JJ are the four features of good park design? Is good design enough to make a park successful? (p. 103-106)
chapter twenty-two: the kind of
problem a city is (pp. 429-34)
18. What, according to JJ, are the three kinds of problems identified by the history of modern science? (pp. 429-32) What kind of problem is a city? (p. 433-34)
discussion questions
1) Explain the title of the book.
2) Describe a (or the) neighborhood where you grew up. Does it more closely resemble what Jacobs calls a “great city,” a “garden city,” a “radiant city,” a “city beautiful,” or something else entirely? To what extent is Jacobs’ analysis helpful to you in understanding the ideas behind this environment? To what extent is her account not helpful? Why?
2) sidewalk inventories: Make a list of all the sidewalks that you use in the course of a day. To what extent does each of these sidewalks support safety? Contact? The life of children?
OR
Describe the role that sidewalks played in your childhood. What kinds of activities were you likely to do on sidewalks? Which ones? At what age? Did you play out front? Walk to school? Hang out on sidewalks? Skateboard? Compare the role of parks and sidewalks during your childhood.
3) Analyze Aldrich Park using Jane Jacob’s chapter on parks as a guide. Is
4) making connections: Jacobs
and Aristotle
a) Compare Aristotle’s account of the four causes (aetia) and Jacobs’ account of organized complexity. Can you explain
the success of an urban park using the four causes?
or
b) Compare Aristotle’s account of nature as “everything that changes”
and Jacob’s insistence that cities are examples of organized complexity.What
habits of thought do these two very different thinkers share?
5) making connections: Jacobs
and the Bauhaus
What would Jacobs think about Bruno Taut’s Horse Shoe Estate? Gropius and
Hannes Meyer’s Törten Working-Class Housing Estate?
Review Törten at:
(http://www.humanities.uci.edu/%7Ermoeller/HCC_Lectures/Toerten_Gallery.html)
Review Taut at:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/%7Ermoeller/HCC_Lectures/RGM_Lecture3.html\
5) In “What Kind of a Problem a City Is,” JJ suggests that cities, like biological organisms, are examples of “organized complexity.” Using her account of organized complexity, suggest some other problems that might be addressed using JJ’s modes of analysis. Can you imagine any of these topics as a research paper?
Examples:
What kind of a problem a mall
is.
What kind of a problem a suburb is.
What kind of a problem a campus is.
What kind of a problem a dormitory is.
What kind of a problem a health club is.
What kind of a problem the internet is.
Week IX Challenge: Thinking with Jane
Jacobs
Photograph a street scene (at UCI, in
Illustrated Jane: some links
Virtual Tours of NYC parks (cleaned up and pretty)
Greenwich Village (Jane’s neighborhood)
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Historic photos of Washington Square
Contemporary urban photography
http://www.linkism.com/photography/photographers/street-urban.htm
