Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  The point, to repeat, is to work with the city. Bedraggled and abused as they are, our downtowns do work. They need help, not wholesale razing. Boston is an example of a downtown with excellent fundamentals of compactness, variety, contrast, surprise, character, good open spaces, and a mixture of basic activities. When Boston’s leaders get going on urban renewal, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh can show them how to organize, Fort Worth can suggest how to handle traffic, and Boston will have one of the finest downtowns extant.

  THE CITIZEN

  The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. So it should be in the future; planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his city, after all; his job is not merely to sell plans made by others, it is to get into the thick of the planning job himself.

  He does not have to be a planner or an architect, or arrogate their functions, to ask the right questions:

  • How can new buildings or projects capitalize on the city’s unique qualities? Does the city have a waterfront that could be exploited? An unusual topography?

  • How can the city tie in its old buildings with its new ones, so that each complements the other and reinforces the quality of continuity the city should have?

  • Can the new projects be tied into downtown streets? The best available sites may be outside downtown—but how far outside of downtown? Does the choice of site anticipate normal growth, or is the site so far away that it will gain no support from downtown, and give it none?

  • Does new building exploit the strong qualities of the street—or virtually obliterate the street?

  • Will the new project mix all kinds of activities together, or does it mistakenly segregate them?

  In short, will the city be any fun? The citizen can be the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk. He should walk not only the streets of his own city, but those of every city he visits.Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

  When he has the chance, he should insist on an hour’s walk in the loveliest park, the finest public square in town, and where there is a handy bench he should sit and watch the people for a while. He will understand his own city the better—and, perhaps, steal a few ideas.

  Let the citizens decide what end results they want, and they can adapt the rebuilding machinery to suit them. If new laws are needed, they can agitate to get them. The citizens of Fort Worth, for example, are doing this now; indeed, citizens in every big city planning hefty redevelopment have had to push for special legislation.

  What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely before has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that he likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem.

  Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

  * * *

  *1 György Kepes (1906–2001) and Kevin Lynch (1918–84) collaborated on a study of “urban aesthetics” that resulted in Lynch’s famous work The Image of the City (1960)—a huge influence on Jacobs for its attention to the way that city dwellers actually used and understood urban space. Their work, like that of Jacobs, was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s urban research initiative.

  *2 For a more in-depth analysis of Lincoln Center, see “A Living Network of Relationships” in this volume.

  *3 In a 2002 interview with Eleanor Wachtel on the CBC Radio program Writers & Company, Jacobs describes seeing the contrast between the planned promenades and the nearby streets in Philadelphia as a “moment of awakening,” regarding the bankruptcy of modern city planning and rebuilding. Ironically, she may have encountered this scene on a tour with city planner Edmund Bacon or Louis Kahn in 1955 while researching a favorable review of the city’s efforts. See “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” in this volume.

  *4 Jacobs here appropriates the “Venturi effect”—a principle of fluid dynamics named after the Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Venturi (1746–1822) in which a fluid flowing through a constriction point increases in velocity and decreases in pressure. Her “political Venturi” is a point of concentration where all the flowing people are likely to converge.

  *5 Later, in Death and Life, Jacobs would observe the ability of a functional street to attract numerous “shifts” of foot traffic, not just two. The complex interplay between the roles, entrances, and exits of these shifts prompted her to compare them to a ballet—as seen in one of her most famous phrases, “the ballet of the good city sidewalk” (p. 50).

  A Living Network of Relationships

  * * *

  SPEECH AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, NEW YORK, APRIL 20, 1958

  The program says we are to take a look into New York’s future. Back in high school I had to write the class prophecy. That experience finished me off as a prophet so I am not going to take any daring leaps across time tonight.*1 Instead I am going to assume that we are shaping the future right now, and that the best way to find out what New York is going to be in ten, twenty or more years is to take a hard look at what is happening in the city today. And perhaps if we look hard enough at this emerging New York of the future, and do not like what we see, the future will take on a different shape.

  Let us look at the city of the future which is taking shape from our official projects. I do not like it because it ignores the single greatest fact about our city: that New York consists of an intricate, living network of relationships—made up of an enormously rich variety of people and activities. Look at the 2,000 pages of the Manhattan Redbook for example, and consider what this alone tells us of the thousands upon thousands of pieces, most of them quite small, which make our city.*2 Consider the interdependence, the constant adjustment, and the mutual support of every kind which must work, and work well, in a city like ours.

  This criss-cross of supporting relationships means, for instance, that a Russian tearoom and last year’s minks and a place to rent English sports cars bloom well near Carnegie Hall, or that on the same block the Advanced Metaphysicians and the Dynamic Speakers and the Associates of Camp Moonbeam have all discovered they can fit sympathetically into the studios that do well for music too. It means that the Puerto Rican Orientation Club of East Harlem finds a place it can actually afford in a beat-up tenement basement—an unprepossessing place but a place of its own, beholden to no one, and thus it can flourish. This criss-cross network means that the textile companies of Worth Street move uptown from a quiet, uncrowded place into the maelstrom of the garment district because they see a higher logic in being closer to their customers. It means that tourists and the transients who stay in the city four or five years can continue enjoying the flighty bohemia of Greenwich Village, but only because the Village still has enough solid, rooted Italian families and sober-sided middle-class parents to battle year, after year, after year Mr. Moses’s schemes for making it like everywhere else.*3All that we have in New York of magnetism, of opportunities to earn a living, of leadership, of the arts, of glamor, of convenience, of power to fulfill and assimilate our immigrants, of ability to repair our wounds and right our evils, depends on our great and wonderful criss-cross of relationships.

  All that we have in New York of magnetism, of opportunities to earn a living, of leadership, of the arts, of glamor, of convenience, of power to fulfill and assimilate our immigrants, of ability to repair our wounds and right our evils, depends on our great and wonderful criss-cross of relationships. In fact, so primitive a matter as whether our very lives are safe from each other depends on maintaining intricate community networks, for no quantity of policemen can enforce civilization where the informal means of community self-policing fall to pieces.

 
; This is all so obvious it should be unnecessary to mention. But it is necessary, for our slum clearers, housing officials, highway planners and semi-public developers have been treating the city as if it were only a bunch of physical raw materials—land, space, roads, utilities. They are destroying New York’s variety and disorganizing its economic and social relationships just as swiftly and efficiently as rebuilding money can destroy them.

  The most direct destruction is, of course, associated with clearance, and this is a painful aspect of slum elimination of which we are all becoming aware. It was described well by Harrison Salisbury, in his New York Times series on delinquency.*4 “When slum clearance enters an area,” says Salisbury, “it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local businessman. It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair.”

  Salisbury says “beyond repair” and he is right, and this is much the most serious part of the problem. Our rebuilders have no idea what they are destroying, and they have no idea of repairing the damage—or making it possible for anyone else to do so. The entire theory of urban rebuilding rests on the premise that subsidized improvements will catalyze further spontaneous improvement. It is not working that way in New York. Living communities, portions of living commercial districts, are so ruthlessly and haphazardly amputated that the remnants, far from improving, get galloping gangrene.

  Furthermore, the newly built projects themselves stifle the growth of relationships. We are now conscious that this is true of the huge public housing projects. What we may not be so aware of is that this stifling of variety and of economic and social relationships is inherent in the massive project approach itself, whether public or private housing or anything else.

  Take the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for example. It is planned entirely on the assumption that the logical neighbor of a hall is another hall. Nonsense. Who goes straight from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic concert and thence to the ballet? The logical neighbors of a hall are bars, florist shops, non-institutionalized restaurants, studios, all the kind of thing you find on West Fifty-seventh Street or along Times Square or generated by the off-Broadway theaters down here in the Village. True, halls and theatres are desirable to each other as nearby neighbors to the extent that their joint support is needed to generate this kind of urbanity and variety. But Lincoln Center is so planned and so bounded that there is no possible place for variety, convenience and urbanity to work itself in or alongside. The city’s unique stock-in-trade is destroyed for these halls in advance, and for keeps, so long as the Center lives. It is a piece of built-in rigor mortis.

  This project will also be harmful to Midtown, because it segregates and removes from the working and shopping areas a whole group of activities which generate evening and weekend use. When you get daytime and evening, workaday and leisure activities mixed intimately together in a city, you get a wonderful generating capacity for restaurants and every sort of unique, big-city variety. The city’s magnetism depends on this sort of thing. There are parts of Midtown which need this help.*5

  In the past many cities have made the mistake of segregating and buffering culture; Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit and Philadelphia for example. Every one of them has an impressive, dull center with no urbanizing to it, just as Lincoln Center will be, and in every one of those cities the downtown suffers demonstrably because of what has been removed. It is a very old-fashioned mistake.

  Lincoln Center shows a brutal disregard for still another type of urban relationship. It will have a catastrophic effect on Amsterdam Houses, a ten-year-old, 800-family public housing project. Amsterdam Houses is now bordered by factories, railroad tracks, garages and institutions except on its eastern side. On that one side, fortunately, it faces, across the street, forty-eight lively neighborhood stores, part of a non-project, ordinary community. The stores and the non-project community will be cleared out to make way for Lincoln Center. The tenants of Amsterdam Houses will therefore no longer have neighborhood stores or any contact with non-project community life, which they desperately need. Instead they will have the Metropolitan Opera. This project will be utterly shut off to itself and isolated. I should think its people would explode. What kind of irresponsibility is this that deliberately, and at great expense, makes intimate neighbors of public housing and the Opera, depriving each of the neighbors it needs?

  All over the city public and semi-public projects are going forward with just as cruel a disregard of people’s needs and of the city’s unique assets. Subsidies are being used to escape not only the pressure of economics, but the pressure of ordinary common sense.

  Notice the advertisements for our rebuilt city. One currently appearing, for example, is for Park West Village, the former Manhattantown, one of the many middle-income clearance projects which have turned high-income along the way. The Park West advertisement depicts three apartment towers set upon a vast meadow. The scene is more rural than anything within twenty miles of New York, let alone Ninety-seventh Street and Amsterdam Avenue. “Your own world in the heart of Manhattan,” says the ad. This advertisement, objectively a lie, is unfortunately subjectively true. It is an honest picture of the fundamental rejection of the city which is part and parcel of New York’s slum clearance and rebuilding program.

  None of us can have our own world in the heart of Manhattan. What happens for good or evil to the relationships on those streets which the artist has so blandly airbrushed away, what happens in Central Park—which is no exurbanite meadow—is going to affect Park West Village. It is going to affect us all.

  If Lincoln Center, and Corlears Hook and Morningside Gardens and Park West Village and Washington Square Village and Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town and Fort Greene Houses and Red Hook Houses and Taft Houses and Grant Houses and Washington Houses and Jefferson Houses and Madison Houses and Franklin Houses and Carver Houses and Kingsview Houses and Bellevue Houses and Typographers Houses and Meatcutters Houses and Amalgamated Houses and their like are, in truth, the forecast of New York of the future, you do not need to be a prophet to see what we are going to have.*6 We are going to have an urban monster that never was—a pseudo-city composed of economically segregated islands, with dreadful and endless social consequences; composed of large, repetitive, separated, monotonous buildings, with dreadful economic consequences. For the New York of the future will have less and less capacity to accommodate change, less and less room for initiative by anybody but officially anointed builder barons, less and less relationship of anything to anything outside itself.

  But will the whole city of the future have to undergo the clearance treatment? Yes, almost all of it, for our rebuilders are going about their work of economic destruction and social disintegration with greater efficiency than you might suppose. There are ways of softening up areas so that clearance must finally follow. One way is to designate the area for future slum clearance; this automatically discourages private and public maintenance and improvement, and even though the area was not a slum insures that it will become so.

  Another way is to disorganize or blight the very heart of the community, a mortally vulnerable spot if you know how to get at it. Look at Greenwich Village for example, since we are in it. Its mortally vulnerable core is the Washington Square area. If this core is to be drastically changed for the worse, the repercussions will be felt throughout all the Village.

  Now Greenwich Village, although it has its serious problems, is probably the most successful community within New York, and certainly the most popular and attractive to visitors. It even has the power of spontaneously expanding and upgrading its edges, a power which is becoming almost unique in our city. Planners who respected the city and its potentialities would not only attempt to learn from the Village—and there is much to learn from it—but they would certainly protect such an asset to the city from needle
ss blight.

  But instead we find that Mr. Moses the Commissioner of Parks, Mr. Moses the Slum Clearance Chairman, Mr. Moses the City Coordinator of Construction, and Mr. Wiley the Commissioner of Traffic are all four in cahoots, determined that the heart of this community, Washington Square Park, shall be made a parkway so it can carry an arterial stream of through traffic between widened West Broadway and, ultimately and inevitably, through a widened lower Fifth Avenue. They have made no traffic study to determine what useful purpose this will serve or what alternatives make better sense. The scheme is just as haphazard and whimsical as the juxtaposition of the Metropolitan Opera with public housing. It is oblivious to all values—even traffic and transportation values. The one thing it will surely do is blight a successful community. The classic misuse of raw material is the attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Our builders are more remarkable. They are determined to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.

  Because Greenwich Village is still an effective, functioning community, we are going to defeat this attempt at vandalism and get Washington Square Park closed to all but emergency traffic. We have to. For this is a chips-down test of the whole question of whether human values and indeed urban values, can survive in this city.

  For you see, the bulldozer is not the only portent of our future. Something else is shaping the future of our city too, something which is even more important than the form of the monotonous, inhuman pseudo-city which is visibly emerging. This other shaper of the future is invisible; it is what is going on in people’s heads. Judgment, sense of values and ideas are real things too, that forecast the future, and because this is true I think the ruthless, raw-material approach to New York will soon be obsolete.