by Jane Jacobs
MORE EARLY PRAISE FOR
Vital Little Plans
“This might be the very best of Jane Jacobs’s books. The articles and speeches collected here are terrific summaries of her thoughts about the marvelous complexities of cities and how we might respond to city challenges to our best advantage.”
—JOHN SEWELL, former mayor of Toronto
“It’s one thing to bring important ideas to the world, quite another to do it with such wit and subtlety. This volume reminds us what a sheer, crackling great writer Jane Jacobs was.”
—JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER, author of The Geography of Nowhere
“Vital Little Plans lays out Jane Jacobs’s evolution as an intellectual, from her early reportage on the sidewalks of New York to her wide-ranging theories on cities and human economies. Her eye for details, for the small things that matter, was always there. It takes an anthology like this to capture the breadth of her work. Jacobs had no time for orthodoxy and wasn’t afraid to change her views, many of which will surprise her fans, her critics, and all those who think they know what Jane Jacobs thought and what she would have done.”
—SHAWN MICALLEF, author, columnist, editor of Spacing
“Vital Little Plans is a generously annotated and beautifully curated celebration of Jane Jacobs’s life and work. Readers will find both shining jewels and marvelous curiosities here. Most important, they’ll find new evidence of Jacobs’s depth, integrity, and indomitable spirit. A must-read for anyone interested in cities, systems, and societies.”
—COLIN ELLARD, author of Places of the Heart and You Are Here
“This remarkable compendium of Jane Jacobs’s writing covers a period that begins long before the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and ends long after. We see how, piece by piece, she expanded her range into the next ring of connected ideas, periodically consolidating them in a book or an article, edging ever closer to a kind of unified theory linking ecology, economy, ethics, and social mores and their manifestations in real places. Like her fundamental observation about the city itself, her work was never finished.”
—KEN GREENBERG, urban designer and author of Walking Home
“Reading Jane Jacobs’s short works again tells us what a visionary and creative thinker she was. Her words are as fresh today as when she wrote them and speak to us by telling compelling stories. There is, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, ‘no virtue in meek conformity.’ This collection is a treasure for us all.”
—JANICE GROSS STEIN, professor, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
“Vital Little Plans is an immensely important retrospective of Jane Jacobs’s articles and speeches. Her belief in the power of residents to make cities economically, environmentally, and socially successful shines through, as does her disdain for those who would build cities for cars, not people.”
—DAVID MILLER, president and CEO of WWF-Canada and former mayor of Toronto
“This indispensable anthology is a delight. Through older works and new writings, the urgency of Jane Jacobs’s message continues to ring clear. This book further exposes us to Jacobs’s unconventional, process-oriented thinking, and positions us to take action to transform our cities. There is a better world around us, if we are willing to see it. Vital Little Plans is simply superb.”
—JENNIFER KEESMAAT, chief planner, City of Toronto
“A book to get your blood running and ideas soaring!”
—MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE, author of Urban Alchemy
“We seem to be facing a perfect storm. The population of cities will double to 7 billion in just thirty-five years, while we endure climate change, traffic congestion, a public health crisis, and an aging population. These are challenges, but we can also see them as opportunities. The world clearly needs more Jane Jacobs. In Vital Little Plans, she provides vision and action to create cities for people, especially those most vulnerable: children, older adults, and the poor.”
—GUILLERMO (GIL) PEÑALOSA, founder and chair of 8 80 Cities and chair of World Urban Parks
“We know Jane Jacobs wrote brilliant books, and it would a crime to let her equally brilliant smaller writings, speeches, and interviews be lost. This collection is more than the sum of its parts, and is a great book to have at your fingertips.”
—BRENT TODERIAN, city planner and urbanist, TODERIAN UrbanWORKS, and former chief planner of Vancouver
“Don’t cheat yourself of the pleasure that lies between these covers.”
—JEFF SPECK, author of Walkable City
“An essential read for those wanting to understand the contradiction and chaos of a woman whose legacy is that we must all think for ourselves. The editors have brilliantly selected and sequenced Jacobs’s writing so that we can plainly see how she wrestles with, and problem-solves around, messy and complex systems. Many of us have only scratched the surface with Jacobs, ending our love affair with her work at a time when she’d just begun to connect the dots. Reading through the entire pilgrimage makes the calls to action more vivid and more urgent than ever before.”
—DENISE PINTO, executive director, Jane’s Walk
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2016 by The Estate of Jane Jacobs
Introduction and part introductions copyright © 2016 by Samuel Zipp & Nathan Storring
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Most of the essays in this work have been previously published. Original publication information is included with each essay. Credits and permissions are on this page.
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006
[Works. Selections]
Vital little plans : the short works of Jane Jacobs / edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-345-81200-1
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81202-5
1. Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006. 2. City planning—United States. 3. City planning.
4. Sociology, Urban—United States. 5. Sociology, Urban. 6. Urban policy—United States.
7. Urban policy. I. Zipp, Samuel, editor II. Storring, Nathan, editor III. Title.
HT167.J32 2016 307.1'2160973 C2016-903789-4
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral
Title-page portrait by Ruth Orkin
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Timeline
Part One: A City Naturalist, 1934–1952
While Arranging Verses for a Book
Diamonds in the Tough
Flowers Come to Town
Caution, Men Working
30,000 Unemployed and 7,000 Empty Houses in Scranton, Neglected City
Islands the Boats Pass By
No Virtue in Meek Conformity
Part Two: City Building, 1952–1965
Philadelphia
’s Redevelopment: A Progress Report
Pavement Pounders and Olympians
The Missing Link in City Redevelopment
Our “Surplus” Land
Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There Is No Other Recipe
Metropolitan Government
Downtown Is for People
A Living Network of Relationships
A Great Unbalance
The Decline of Function
Part Three: How New Work Begins, 1965–1984
The Self-Generating Growth of Cities
On Civil Disobedience
Strategies for Helping Cities
A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug
The Real Problem of Cities
Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?
Part Four: The Ecology of Cities, 1984–2000
The Responsibilities of Cities
Pedaling Together
Foreword to the Death and Life of Great American Cities
Two Ways to Live
First Letter to the Consumer Policy Institute
Women as Natural Entrepreneurs
Market Nurturing Run Amok
Against Amalgamation
Part Five: Some Patterns of Future Development, 2000–2006
Time and Change as Neighborhood Allies
Canada’s Hub Cities
Efficiency and the Commons
The Sparrow Principle
Uncovering the Economy: A New Hypothesis
The End of the Plantation Age
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Image and Text Credits
By Jane Jacobs
About the Author
About the Editors
Jane Jacobs lost in thought as she reads The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the living room of her house at 555 Hudson Street, New York City, circa 1956.
Introduction
* * *
Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring
“More Jane Jacobs, less Marc Jacobs” reads the boldfaced sign peering out from behind age-rippled glass along a side street in New York’s Greenwich Village. This minor protest, which popped up several years ago in the windows of the neighborhood’s few remaining unprimped townhouses and non-chain stores, pits urbanist icon against fashion designer in a proxy war between locality and luxury. A small, clever note trilling in a familiar sorrow song, it’s a discordant flutter disturbing an otherwise triumphant era of urban symphony. We live in a golden age for city life, we’re told again and again these days. In the rich parts of the world, despite deepening inequality (probably because of it, the sorrow song objects) the streets are teeming with cyclists and new condos and artisans and pop-up parklets. But cities, it seems, are somehow also dying. Or, at the very least, a certain idea of the city is under threat. Some cherished sense of what it means to be urban feels as if it might be losing its footing, staggering, and going down.
Most city lovers have an intimate sense of what this loss might entail, even if they don’t know exactly how to describe what they are losing. The sign’s maker, Mike Joyce, said that most people got the point even if they didn’t quite follow the joke. Anyone could see that there was suddenly a surplus of Marc Jacobs–like chain boutiques popping up around the neighborhood. But who, they often asked, is this Jane Jacobs? It’s a tragic irony: Marc Jacobs, a self-described native son and lover of New York, unwittingly drives out the urban virtues that Jane Jacobs taught the world to see, even as her name begins to fade from popular memory.1
What is at stake here, it seems, is the “intricate sidewalk ballet” that Jane Jacobs famously witnessed on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and described in her most celebrated book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). The performance Jacobs recounted, with its daily circulation of motley players—schoolkids and shopkeepers, longshoremen and office workers, slaughterhouse hands and beatniks on motor scooters, drunks with hats unapproved by the “Hat Council,” and “beautiful girls” getting out of snappy British sports cars—is increasingly imperiled for all but the latterday descendants of those beautiful girls. In the very neighborhood where Jacobs discovered the self-organizing drama of healthy urban order, the chance for just anyone to play a part in the city dance, to enjoy the perennial promise of a local life lived close to the grain of the streets, stoops, and stores, seems to be slipping away or already departed.
So what else is new? “The Village” was lost as soon as it was found. Gentrification panic is perennial, too, going back years before Jacobs made her name there in the 1950s and ’60s. People still flock to Greenwich Village to shop and eat, to stroll around and gawk at everyone else shopping and eating and strolling around. People still go just to be there—these pleasures are part of the dance, too. So the Village endures, but as a bright and blurry clone of a past self. With astronomic rents came chain stores, fashion boutiques, luxury condo conversions in glass and steel. They have crowded out hardware stores, bodegas, diners, bookstores, small manufacturing shops, the unpredictable and the odd. Real estate speculation, long a New York obsession, has finally chased out most everything else but rarefied shopping and eating and looking. The diverse mixture of people with plans both humble and grand that Jacobs celebrated can find little purchase in this meager city soil.
So it goes in Toronto, too, Jane Jacobs’s second home. In the Annex, the neighborhood where she lived until her death in 2006, the commercial vitality she often celebrated feels under threat. Rents are on the rise, neighborhood businesses fold and are replaced by replicas of the most profitable uses on the street, mostly high-traffic restaurants, college bars, and bank branches. Even a Bloor Street icon like Honest Ed’s isn’t safe. A vast neon-fronted discount emporium where generations of immigrants, working-class shoppers, bargain lovers, and in-the-know ironists foraged among the shelves is soon to be leveled and replaced with a cluster of glassy condos and retail boxes. Everywhere like this, the familiar lament goes, in London, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, and other urban magnets across the Global North where money and people cluster, the city is turning on itself, its very success becoming its undoing.2
There’s no doubt, then, that this is just the right time for “more Jane Jacobs.” Whether it’s a Golden Age or a Dark Age, it is just the right time for more of her incomparable writings about cities and the worlds they create, just the right time to retrieve her bracing, obstinate voice for readers who’ve forgotten it or never knew it in the first place. And yet one of the chief reasons to return to Jacobs now, and to this collection of shorter works spanning her entire career as a writer, is to help us reimagine Jacobs herself as something more than a symbol of urban sorrow or urban triumph. Always idiosyncratic and unorthodox, often surprising, often willing to risk being wrong if it means reorienting stale conventional wisdom, she pushes beyond the familiar alarms to see urban transformation as a source of radical possibility and opportunity, not nostalgia and loss. More than a tribune of the ideal neighborhood, Jacobs was perhaps our greatest theorist of the city not as a modern machine for living but as a living human system, geared for solving its own problems.
Learn to look as Jacobs did at cities, as well as the other themes she considered over the course of her long writing life—economies, morality, politics, and history—and things may come to seem more complex and interconnected than we first expect, and even perhaps less dire. Cities are not only quaint stage sets imperiled by gentrification but also the medium of our collective public and economic life, the forum in which we can learn to harness change to resolve our shared problems and to produce shared opportunity. Even in an era in which our society seems ever more stagnant, marked by both the fattening of the rich and the multiplying of the poor, reading Jacobs anew suggests that the way out lies not only in rearguard actions to protect what we cherish but in reinvigorating the creative, chaotic, improvisational economies of cities.
This book offers readers a chance to see Jane Jacobs whole fo
r the first time. Over the years she has been called many things: an urban visionary, an anti-planner, an amateur economist, a geographer, a community activist, and a radical centrist. Each label captures some facet of her work, but in hemming her in with one category or another, each fails to encompass the range, variety, and provocative power of her ideas and pursuits, not to mention the way she was able to cross and blur the lines between disciplines, often outflanking one school of thought with another. The essays, speeches, interviews, and one long-forgotten poem collected here show her first and foremost as she herself hoped to be understood: as a thinker and writer with one of the most distinctive literary voices of the last century.
Vital Little Plans is organized chronologically, following the long arc of Jacobs’s writing career. But even as she added new work to her old work (as she might have put it) she returned to older ideas with fresh insights. Each part of the book builds on the last as she embellishes her lifelong interest in cities, economies, and morality. Whenever possible we have presented her words unaltered and unabridged. We have also included notes to identify unfamiliar references and to point out some useful connections among the ecology of her ideas.
The selections begin with her first pieces of magazine and newspaper reportage from Depression-era New York and culminate with the big ideas about humanity’s past and future that she wrestled with at the end of her life. Parts One and Two, “A City Naturalist” and “City Building,” follow her first thirty years in New York, from the 1930s to the 1960s, as she learns the journalism trade and discovers the city. Many readers will be most familiar with Part Two, where we find Jacobs rehearsing the critique of city planning for which she would become famous in Death and Life. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the pieces collected here show us that early on in her career, as she rose to become an editor at Architectural Forum and an expert on contemporary architecture, she was a supporter of modern city planning and rebuilding. They reveal how she turned on those orthodoxies as she discovered that the new highways, slum clearance projects, and “tower-in-the-park” complexes were uprooting old neighborhoods, scattering community life, deepening racial segregation, and trampling the rough and ready city she had come to love. Her famed showdowns with New York’s urban renewal bureaucracy and her jousts with the “master builder” Robert Moses are here, as are her celebrations of the pleasures and necessities of everyday city life, the very “chaos” that modern planning looked to weed out of the cityscape.3