Humanities Core Course | Winter 2009

Week IX: Placemaking (and Making in Places)

9b: Legacies of Jane Jacobs

Julia Reinhard Lupton

jrlupton@uci.edu

It’s not too late! Send me your examples of making (or, something you think is “cool”) for The Last Lecture! Please note: Slide file is very large and may be hard to download. Please do not try to print it!

I. Parks (see lecture notes for Lecture 9a: “Illustrated Jane”).

II. Criticisms of Jane Jacobs

CRITICISMS 1961

Remember Robert Moses?

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 originally a supporter of JJ, but he didn’t like her book, and gave it a negative review in The New Yorker. 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: TODAY

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.

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

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

LA, SUBURBS, AND AUTOMOBILES: OR, LIFE OUTSIDE MANHATTAN

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.)

MIKE DAVIS ON LOS ANGELES:

Los Angeles’ public spaces are increasingly designed to segregate and sequester social classes and ethnic groups.

Davis shares Jacobs’ interest in public spaces that encourage diversity and contact.

Do you agree with Davis’s analysis of “Fortress LA”? Can you think of counter-examples (public spaces in Los Angeles that foster diversity and encourage social contact)? My example: Farmers’ Market in Hollywood. Other examples: Chinatown? Venice Beach? Bike kitchens?

EXAMPLE: ETHNOBURBS

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

Ethnoburb: a new phrase in urban studies to describe “new suburban Chinese (and other immigrant) settlements in North American cities.”

According to one scholar, ethnoburbs are “a space of flows” rather than an “ethnic enclave.”

Ethnoburb	Traditional “Chinatown”
Suburban	urban
Fuzzy boundaries	Clear boundaries
White collar	Blue collar
Young people	Older people
Multi-ethnic	Homogeneous
Globally linked	Self-sustaining enclave
Car-dominated	Pedestrian and public transportation

One scholar writes about Vietnamese ethnoburb in Virginia:

“In making places, Vietnamese Americans are enjoying and directing geographical change.”

Research question:

Could Jane Jacobs be used to analyze these new “ethnoburban” formations? How would these new formations modify her categories?

Placemaking: The Case of Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz is an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Studies at UC San Diego and runs an architectural firm (Estudio Teddy Cruz) in San Diego. He is an acute observer of the informal and “DIY” housing techniques of people living in and around Tijuana. People in this area often recycle materials from the packing and assembly industries of Tijuana as well as from construction sites in suburban San Diego. Cruz also studies how immigrant groups in suburban San Diego remake place through their forms of economic, cultural, and social activity. He then applies what he learns from the informal housing and ethnoburban practices of these different embedded communities in order to strengthen these communities and to develop new projects based on the practices of these residential groups.

“Informal housing” – dwellings built from waste materials – is a growing practice in the growing megacities of the world. Examples include the City of the Dead in Cairo, where squatters have reclaimed ancient tombs for living; and the favelas of Brazil.

Teddy Cruz is learning from the informal building practices of the world’s growing mega-cities in order to strengthen local communities in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Jane Jacobs’ insights into street culture, informal economies, and the ecology of neighborhoods give contemporary architects and planners a vocabulary for understanding and helping to shape these new forms of making.

Read more about Estudio Teddy Cruz:

http://www.world-architects.com/index.php?seite=ca_profile_architekten_detail_us&system_id=14396

Current Events Digression: Taking the “Slum” out of Slumdog”

From a recent OpEd piece in the New York Times, on the controversy in India surrounding the recent hit, Slumdog Millionare (notice the reference to Jane Jacobs):

“Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million ‘eyes on the street,’ to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.”

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, Op Ed piece for the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/opinion/21srivastava.html?_r=3

From Placemaking to Making in Places: Painting, Street Photography, Street Fashion

The art movement known as French Impressionism evolved in part as a response to the urban spaces of nineteenth-century Paris. Large boulevards had been cut through major sections of the city, allowing for more pedestrian action, more shops on the streets, busier thoroughfares, and the development of a café culture. The Paris boulevards produced a new social type, the flâneur: a stroller, idler, walker; someone who walks the streets shopping for sights rather than for goods.

Many Impressionist paintings capture the life of these new boulevards (and the vision of the viewpoint of the flâneur). Impressionism also reflects developments in the brand-new art of photography, which also “took to the streets” in pursuit of images of urban life. Technological issues included long exposure times for early cameras, the bulk of early cameras, and the difficulty of capturing “candid” images. American photographer Paul Strand built a special camera with a false front so that he could take images of urban dwellers without their knowledge. (See his famous photo, BLIND.)

American photographer Weegee took crime and accident photos, often capturing the emotional aftermath of scenes of violence, as well as the interest in by-standers in becoming part of the media record. (See his photo, Their First Murder.)

[See Slides for other examples.]

Contemporary street photography tends to be:

Young (young people taking photos of other young people)

Global (pictures from cities all over the world)

Mobile (digital cameras are small, instant, easy to carry; photography is a means of traveling)

Digital (digital images are easy to print, share, disseminate; geotagging and the phone-camera facilitate new connections between places and pictures)

Social (urban photographers share their work through social media sites like FLICKR and Facebook)

Suburban Ballet: Scenes of making from the outskirts of great cities.

See slides for examples of urban painting and urban photography.

Shown here: photo by Laura Migliorino, Hidden Suburbs series:

http://www.lauramigliorinoart.com/

CONCLUSION

THE SIDEWALK BALLET

The unscripted commotion of city streets offer many scenes for making: from architecture and environmental design to painting, photography, and fashion.

Meanwhile, a new generation of artists and architects is documenting forms of suburban life that Jane Jacobs never dreamed of.