Humanities Core Course | Winter 2009

Week IX: Placemaking (and Making in Places)

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 Biological Sciences III lecture hall. The slide files are very large; please view them with me in the lecture hall!!

n JRL

1. Introductory (Dates, places, placemaking)

“Placemaking” is a term used in architecture, urban planning, and urban studies to refer to the process of building or strengthening public spaces such as plazas, parks, streets, and promenades so that they are successful, memorable, attractive locales where people feel socially connected to each other and to a particular place. Architecture plays a role in place-making; so does landscaping, signage, lighting, seating, and commercial and cultural opportunities, as well as the many things that people actually choose to do – planned or unplanned -- in a particular public place. In the next two and half lectures on placemaking, we will look at an important text in the history of urban planning, Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. We will also look at specific instances of placemaking in urban and suburban spaces designed in the wake of Jane Jacobs’ book, and we will look at forms of making (including painting, street photography, and street fashion) that occur in urban and suburban places. What goes into the “making” of places, from both a design and a social point of view? And how do these processes get recorded and

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

:: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

:: Emigration to Toronto, Canada, 1968

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

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.”

Some dates in urban planning:

1934: National Housing Act establishes Federal Housing Administration; aims to improve housing conditions, but also zones for particular racial groups, especially African Americans.

1944: GI Bill makes housing available to veterans, fueling suburbanization, including the San Fernando Valley.

1949: Title One of the Housing Act of 1949 launches “urban renewal” in major US cities, replacing “slums” with new, largely high-rise housing.

1956: Federal-Aid Highway Act routes major roadways through traditional neighborhoods. African American and Latino neighborhoods disproportionately affected.

1961: Jane Jacobs publishes Death and Life of Great American Cities.

1974: Housing and Community Development Act encourages the redevelopment of existing neighborhoods rather than the building of urban high rise projects.

Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities during a period of massive transformation in the American cityscape, including high rise projects, freeway systems, and suburbanization.

Jane Jacobs urged planners to look at the fabric of city life in order to strengthen neighborhoods for everyone.

Her ideas did not solve the problems of poverty and segregation that continue to plague American cities.

Her ideas did lead to the development of more participatory design processes, ways of strengthening existing neighborhoods, and an appreciation and diversity as a value in public space and public life.

THE RADIANT GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL;

Or, What Jane Jacobs Hates about Urban Planning

Jane’s problem with parks:

Real parks: how parks and open spaces work and fail to work

Park as metaphor: the vision of the planner as a gardener bringing rational order to the wild urban spaces (the “concrete jungle”) of modern cities – a metaphor that she sees as deeply damaging to the actual life of cities.

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. Like the architects of the Bauhaus, 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.

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

Compare Le Corbusier’s Radiant City to the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Project, St. Louis Missouri, 1956. Both: rational grids of high-rises surrounded by open space. Pruitt-Igoe became one of the most notorious failures in public housing for the urban poor, and was demolished in 1972.

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)

Example: The Mall in Washington, D.C.

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 village 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

III. JANE JACOBS ON CITIES AND THEIR SIDEWALKS

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 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, as a means for people to walk from one place to another, and a place to see and be seen, to participate in the drama of urban life, whether it’s with your skateboard, or your dog, or your stroller, or your shopping bag.

Sidewalks improve city safety because they place “eyes upon the street” (the natural surveillance system of neighbors, shopkeepers, parents, and 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.

diversity = class, ethnic, gender, and age diversity; but also diversity of uses and users; diversity among the age of users (old and young).

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.” She also criticizes the lack of resident input into the planning of projects (see p. 15).

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).

Complex order = an order that emerges from below, from unplanned human action and interaction rather than from above, as an act of rational planning or “gardening.” It is a self-organizing order, improvisational rather than planned – and easily destroyed by removing some key element (such as a set of businesses or a group of users) from the mix.

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.

IV. 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 placemaking become more effective by working with rather than against human patterns of use and interaction?