Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  The Missing Link in City Redevelopment

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  ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, JUNE 1956

  Sometimes you learn more about a phenomenon when it isn’t there, like water when the well runs dry—or like the neighborhood stores which are not being built in our redeveloped city areas. In New York’s East Harlem, for instance, 1,110 stores have already vanished in the course of rehousing 50,000 people.

  Planners and architects are apt to think, in an orderly way, of stores as a straightforward matter of supplies and services. Commercial space.

  But stores in city neighborhoods are much more complicated creatures which have evolved a much more complicated function. Although they are mere holes in the wall, they help make an urban neighborhood a community instead of a mere dormitory.

  A store is also a storekeeper. One supermarket can replace 30 neighborhood delicatessens, fruit stands, groceries and butchers, as a Housing Authority planner explains. But it cannot replace 30 storekeepers or even one. The manager of a housing project in East Harlem says he spends three-fourths of his time on extraneous matters; he says: “I’m forced into trying to take the place of 40 storekeepers.” He is no better trained to handle this than a storekeeper and not as good at it because he does it grudgingly instead of out of pleasure of being a neighborhood hub and busybody. Also it happens that most of the tenants heartily dislike him, but he is the best they have in the way of a public character in that super-block and they try to make him do.

  The stores themselves are social centers—especially the bars, candy stores and diners.

  A store is also often an empty store front. Into these fronts go all manner of churches, clubs and mutual uplift societies. These storefront activities are enormously valuable. They are the institutions that people create, themselves. Sometimes they end up famous. Many real ornaments to the city have started this way. The little struggling ones are even more important in the aggregate.If you are a nobody, and you don’t know anybody who isn’t a nobody, the only way you can make yourself heard in a large city is through certain well defined channels.

  Most political clubs are in storefronts. When an old area is leveled, it is often a great joke that Wardheeler so-and-so has lost his organization. This is not really hilarious. If you are a nobody, and you don’t know anybody who isn’t a nobody, the only way you can make yourself heard in a large city is through certain well defined channels. These channels all begin in holes in the wall. They start in Mike’s barbershop or the hole-in-the-wall office of a man called Judge, and they go on to the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club where Councilman Favini holds court, and now you are started on up. It all takes an incredible number of confabs. The physical provisions for this kind of process cannot conceivably be formalized.

  When the holes in the wall disappear, several different things can happen. Stuyvesant Town in New York City clearly demonstrates one result. That development is now surrounded by an unplanned, chaotic, prosperous belt of stores, the camp followers around the Stuyvesant barracks. A good planner could handle that belt. Tucked in here are the hand-to-mouth cooperative nursery schools, the ballet classes, the do-it-yourself workshops, the little exotic stores which are among the great charms of a city. This same process happens whether the population is middle income like Stuyvesant Town or predominately low income like East Harlem.

  Do you see what this means? Some very important sides of city life, much of the charm, the creative social activity and the vitality shift over to the old vestigial areas because there is literally no place for them in the new scheme of things. This is a ludicrous situation, and it ought to give planners the shivers.*

  When rebuilding happens wholesale, sometimes there is almost no convenient vestigial area left. In one project, in this fix, in East Harlem, the people are very much at loose ends. There is a “community center” but it is a children’s center. Some settlement house workers fine-tooth-combed that development of 2,000 people to find where they could make easy-going contact with adults. Absolutely the only place that showed signs of working as an adult social area was the laundry. We wonder if the planner of that project had any idea its heart would be in the basement. And we wonder if the architect had any idea what he was designing when he did that laundry. We wonder if it occurred to either of them that this represents one kind of social poverty beyond anything the slums ever knew.

  Even in the projects a decade old the inhabitants do a lot of visiting in old neighborhoods but relatively few visitors come to the new. Nothing to do.

  There are degrees to which all this can be better or worse. Putting in shopping centers, defining neighborhood units in proper geographic and population scale, mixing income groups and types of housing, and being very sensitive about just where the bulldozers go are all basic. There is already thinking, if not much action, about these matters.

  Here are four added suggestions:

  • First, look at some lively old parts of the city. Notice the tenement with the stoop and sidewalk and how that stoop and sidewalk belong to the people there. A living room is not a substitute; this is a different facility. Notice the stores and the converted store fronts. Notice the taxpayers and up above, the bowling alley, the union local, the place where you learn the guitar. We do not suggest these units be copied, but that you think about these examples of the plaza, the market place and the forum, all very ugly and makeshift but very much belonging to the inhabitants, very intimate and informal.

  • Second, planners must become much more socially astute about the zoning of stores and the spotting of stores. Fortunately, in retail business economic and social astuteness can make fine allies if given a chance.

  • Third, architects must make the most out of such fortuitous social facilities as laundries, mailbox conglomerations and the adult hangouts at playgrounds. Much can be done to play up instead of play down the gregarious side of these seemingly trivial conveniences.

  • Fourth, we need far more care with outdoor space. It is not enough that it lets in light and air. It is not enough that unallocated space serve as a sort of easel against which to display the fine art of the buildings. In most urban development plans, the unbuilt space is a giant bore. The Gratiot plan for Detroit by Stonorov, Gruen and Yamasaki, which is not to be built, the Southwest Washington plan by I. M. Pei and some of the Philadelphia work such as Louis Kahn’s Mill Creek, are unusual exceptions. The outdoor space should be at least as vital as the slum sidewalk.

  There is the problem of what to do with activities that go into empty stores and basements. True, nobody planned for these among the old tenements and brownstones, but physically there were places to insinuate them. There is no such flexibility in rebuilt neighborhoods. The answer is not in providing multipurpose public rooms for them. They will die on the vine. The essence of these enterprises is that they have a place indisputably their own. Unless and until some solution for them can be found, the least we can do is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.

  We are greatly misled by talk about bringing the suburb into the city. The city has its own peculiar virtues and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the noncity. The starting point must be study of whatever is workable, whatever has charm, in city life, and these are the first qualities that must find a place in the architecture of the rebuilt city.

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  * Jacobs claimed that some architects had latched on to her observations in this speech very superficially as a dogmatic slogan: “We must leave room for the corner grocery store!” In Death and Life, she writes, “At first I thought this must be a figure of speech, the part standing for the whole. But soon I began to receive in the mail plans and drawings for projects and renewal areas in which, literally, room had been left here and there at great intervals for a corner grocery store. These schemes were accompanied by letters that said, ‘See, we have taken to heart what you
said.’ This corner-grocery gimmick is a thin, patronizing conception of city diversity, possibly suited to a village of the last century, but hardly to a vital city district of today” (p. 191). Jacobs despised dogma in all its forms, including when her own ideas came back at her in unthinking regurgitations.

  Our “Surplus” Land

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  ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, MARCH 1957

  Every so often, things “everybody knows” need to be reexamined. For instance everybody, including City Hall, knows the place to look for plentiful building land is not in the asphalt and brick burdened city. Everybody knows the place to look for land is out in the country.

  Is that so?

  About five years from now, when we look back at the good old fifties, one of the things that may look good about them is the troublesome crop surpluses. It seems unbelievable (after all, the 1958 budget sets a record for farm subsidies), but at the rate construction is now gobbling countryside, population and tillable land will come into delicate balance in the early sixties. From that point on, the problem will be to hold on to enough farmland to feed an ever-growing population, and eventually the problem may be how to increase farmland at the expense of buildings and pavement. It is not farfetched to imagine today’s school children struggling in their maturity with legislation, subsidies and bids on rural development, so they can eat.*1

  If this calendar for change sounds abrupt, remember the Sioux who only 85 years ago plucked their dinners at will from horizon-filling herds of buffalo “innumerable as the stars of the heavens”—then saw the herds reduced to virtual extinction in less than a decade, thanks to the railroad. Things can change fast in this country, especially, it seems, when wheels carry the change.

  The scale at which open land is now vanishing, thanks to the automobile, compares in scale with the vast buffalo slaughter of the 1870s. Each year 1.1 million acres by present estimates go out of crop use and into suburbs, industrial sites, airports, highways and the like. The bite promises to grow bigger year by year, not smaller. For instance, the new federal highway program alone will put pavement over 1 million acres in the next decade. Representative Clair Engel of California—a state where the unequal contest between the artichoke and the bulldozer is especially vivid—has delved into the landholdings of the military and come up with the report that its present holdings would constitute a strip fourteen and a half miles wide from San Francisco to New York. “If they got everything they are asking for now,” he says, “that strip would be increased to eighteen and a half miles wide.”

  Everybody is using land and more land, as if the reservoir of open land were inexhaustible. When the day of reckoning with our stomachs arrives, we shall have to cast about for some new reservoir of building sites. It is already waiting, in the place where it is “self evident” that land is the one thing in short supply—in the cities.*2Even in inner city cores, supposedly the most intensively used areas on the map, pools of surplus and underused land abound.

  Very few cities have made inventory of their land reservoirs. The few that have demonstrate that the slums are a drop in the bucket, for much of the urban land reservoir is not residential at all. Much is cast off and semi-abandoned industrial; much is underused commercial; much is interstitial land which never was developed or which now stands derelict and empty. Even in inner city cores, supposedly the most intensively used areas on the map, pools of surplus and underused land abound. In replacing the one-square-mile downtown of Fort Worth, architect Victor Gruen found the underused or derelict reservoir was large enough to provide space for a belt highway, parking garages for 60,000 cars, green belts, a 300 percent increase in retail area, 60 percent increase in office space, 80 percent in hotel space, and new civic, cultural and convention centers. Fort Worth is not a special case. Architects Garber, Tweddell & Wheeler, as consultants to the Cincinnati City Planning Commission, have surveyed Cincinnati’s core, and left its underused or derelict portions blank on the map above. This is not a map of downtown outskirts; this is downtown.

  Map by Garber, Tweddell & Wheeler of downtown Cincinnati, revealing the abundance of unbuilt space.

  Hints of the relative plentifulness of city land can already be read in prices and in ratio of land costs to total costs. Land costs are now running less than 17 percent of total cost for building on the most coveted sites in midtown New York—compared with an average of 20 percent for suburban residential building.

  City Halls which have been thinking of renewal problems and opportunities only in terms of slum clearance and residential development should wake up to the fact that they have unrealized quantities of a most basic commodity which is inexorably going to be in short supply elsewhere, and they should begin to do some hard and creative thinking about it.

  The half-trillion dollars which will be spent on construction in the next ten years needs land, and as much of it as possible must be land which will do our future food supplies and recreational possibilities least harm. The first step is to realize that unlimited land is not where we think it is, but that a wealth of it lies almost unnoticed where we think it isn’t.

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  *1 Population and total farmland did not come into delicate balance in the 1960s. Total amounts of actively used farmland have, in fact, dipped from 1.2 million acres in 1949 to 0.9 million in 2002, especially in metropolitan areas. However, consolidation, specialization, and industrialization of farms have simultaneously made every acre more productive (and more environmentally destructive).

  *2 Increasingly, many places have embraced the idea that every inch of the city has to work hard, often performing a double duty, to justify the high cost of building and living. In Boston, Massachusetts, capping sunken highways and rails has provided space for new buildings. In New York City, a recent green infrastructure program addresses stormwater management while creating new recreational opportunities by adding natural spaces to the cityscape. In 2015, the City of Toronto even announced a new park under the elevated Gardiner Expressway. As Marc Ryan, the architect of the latter project, told The Globe and Mail, “We realize we’re not going to find new public realm in the conventional places….There are no more Central Parks to be built.” See Alex Bozikovic, “$25-Million Project Reimagines Area Under Gardiner with Paths, Cultural Spaces,” The Globe and Mail, November 16, 2015.

  Reason, Emotion, Pressure: There Is No Other Recipe

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  THE VILLAGE VOICE, MAY 22, 1957

  I would like to remind you of a story you have probably all heard—the one about the man who caught a bad cold in February weather and went to his doctor in hopes of a cure. “We can’t do much for you,” said the doctor. “It has to run its course.” “But I want to be cured,” said the patient.

  “All right,” the doctor told him. “Go home, put up the window, lie down with your pajamas open, and let the wind run through.” “But doctor,” said the man, “I might get pneumonia!” “Exactly,” said the doctor, glancing at his aureomycin: “We know how to cure that!”

  This is very much like the case of Greenwich Village. Here is the Village, conferring with Drs. Wiley and Moses. “I tell you what,” says Dr. Wiley, “Go home, lay down your park, open it up and let the traffic rush through.” “But doctor,” says the Village, “I might get Blight!” “Exactly,” chimes in Dr. Moses, glancing at his bulldozer: “We know how to cure that!”*1

  LIKE A CANCER

  Medical analogies were first introduced at meetings back in March, when Mr. Brooks of the Committee for Slum Clearance very kindly explained to us that a slum is like a cancer. In the traffic for Washington Square, we see how neatly a cancer can be planted. Unfortunately, these doctors seem to be confusing their guinea pigs with their patients.

  The outrageous plan for Washington Square is a vital issue in itself. But it is important for another reason. It shows us so clearly something we must understand and face: This city either is not interested, or does not know how, to preserve and improve healthy neighborhoods. />
  This is a curious situation. On the one hand, the city fathers worry because formerly stable neighborhoods deteriorate, because middle-income families move out, because Manhattan is rapidly becoming a place of only the very rich, the very poor, and the transient. Their solution is redevelopment.

  LESSER EVIL

  The best you can say for redevelopment is that, in certain cases, it is the lesser evil. As practiced in New York, it is very painful. It causes catastrophic dislocation and hardship to tens of thousands of citizens. There is growing evidence that it shoots up juvenile-delinquency figures and spreads or intensifies slums in the areas taking the dislocation impact. It destroys, more surely than floods or tornados, immense numbers of small businesses. It is expensive to the taxpayers, federal and local. It is not fulfilling the hope that it would boost the city’s tax returns. Quite the contrary.

  Furthermore, the results of all this expense and travail look dull and are dull. The great virtue of the city, the thing that helps make up for all its disadvantages, is that it is interesting. It isn’t easy to make a chunk of New York boring, but redevelopment does it.

  ALL BY ITSELF

  On the other hand, here is the Village—an area of the city with power to attract and hold a real cross-section of the population, including a lot of middle-income families. An area with a demonstrated potential for extending and upgrading its fringes. An area that pays more in taxes than it gets back in services. An area that grows theaters all by itself, without arguments between Mr. Moses and Mr. Albert Cole.*2 All this without benefit of bulldozers, wholesale write downs of land cost, or tax exemptions.