Jane Jacobs

Pamuk's notes on Jane Jacobs's contributions (4/1/96)
Jane Jacobs was born in Scranton, in a stagnant anthracite coal supply region in Northeastern PA, as she describes it. Even when she was a child in the 1920s people in search of jobs were beginning to leave for New York and its region. Perhaps her intellectual curiosity later in her career in explaining the growth, stagnation, and decline of cities and regions lies in her own personal experience of having lived in cities as diverse as Scranton, New York, and Toronto.
While professionally trained in none, her writings cover at least four distinct fields of inquiry: urban design, urban history, regional economics, morality of the economy and ethics. Her writings have introduced a large audience to the debates in these academic fields. She is unique also in her ability to articulate urban issues at different scales: the neighborhood, the city, the region, and the nation.
Her seminal book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, published 35 years ago, in 1961, is one of the most influential books in the history of city planning. It vividly discusses all that was wrong about the urban renewal and the garden-city movements at the time of her writing forcing urban planners to rethink their practice in the first half century of their young profession. She was critical of a planning style that destroyed communities, separated land uses, and rebuilt sterile areas. She argued and fought for an alternative view in which planners aimed to protect neighborhoods, mixed land uses, and paid attention to design details that matter to people.
The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972, an award winning 1955 project in St. Louis, in particular, symbolized the failure of urban renewal and the Le-Corbusier style high-rise housing projects. While opposing to realizing high urban density with high-rise projects and those proposed by Moses in her backyard in New York in the urban renewal era, Jacobs, celebrated high urban densities in inner city neighborhoods, such as New York's Brooklyn Heights or San Francisco's North Beach.
In addition to high urban density that makes neighborhoods vital and diverse, she argued for mixed-used development, short blocks, and aged buildings. Such principles are articulated in her book based on simple observations of use of space by people in her neighborhood, Greenwich Village in New York. Her insights had a profound impact on urban design curricula and the current professional practice of many architects and urban planners.
Her civic engagement and activism in Greenwich Village against urban renewal in the 1960s also had a profound impact on how urban planners approach residents of existing neighborhoods that may stand along the path of a major infrastructure investments today. As a result, citizen participation in vision-making and comprehensive planning became a standard component of urban planners' work since the late 1960s.
Her writings following her first popular book The Life and Death of Great American Cities focused on the economy of cities and regions. "Economy of Cities", published in 1969, turned conventional wisdom on its head about early cities. In this work, she argued that first cities arose because of trade, rather than intensive farming according to prevailing theories.
Her next book Question of Seperatism, published in 1980, offered an argument for the independence of Quebec.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, published in 1984, she reversed the taken-for granted relationship of cities to nations. She argued that strong urban economies are the backbone and motor of the wealth of nations and not vice versa. Her argument for regions as engines of nations' growth resonates powerfully today where global linkages between regions are much more powerful than those among nations. It calls for creating globally competitive regions and city economies that nourish innovative, entrepreneurial, trade-oriented, versatile, diverse and improvisational activities.
Her most recent book Systems of Survival, published in 1992, discusses fundamental moral differences between those involved in commercial enterprise and those in formal institutions (e.g. government). She compares and contrasts these two dominant domains in our contemporary society: commerce and government which are governed by what she calls the "commercial syndrome" and the "guardian syndrome." This is an insightful work discussing the relationship between politics and markets in shaping cities.
While she has no formal professional training in either architecture or city planning, her ideas resonates powerfully in both professions. It is rare to find such powerful writers who are able to synthesize information from such diverse frameworks as urban design, urban history, regional economics, morality of the economy and ethics. If, as we believe, innovative work towards solving our contemporary urban problems lies in interdisciplinary analysis, her work certainly makes a strong case for it. 3