by Jane Jacobs
There are other means than the tunnel of arriving at similar impasses in the name of the pedestrian. Among the most celebrated and unworkable were Le Corbusier’s mid-floor shops and roof playground in the Marseilles apartments.*2 Other means are to cut the whole city into series of unrelated islands. The Fort Worth scheme depended on the island approach, but excusably, because all of this settlement which operates at all like a city was contained in the one island. This is the approach much used in town-center schemes, but for cities of big size it is most unpromising and artificial. The most extreme subordinations of all other functions of the city to the gadgetry of traffic and precinct separation are probably the theoretical studies by Louis Kahn, which are enormously influential in U.S. schools of design today.*3
This drift from humanism to gimmickry reflects a difficulty that afflicts architectural design as a whole today: the decline of respect for function, and consequently lack of interest in it. Perhaps it is not surprising that urban design should share this serious flaw, for the two fields of architecture and urban design draw on the same reservoir of unconscious assumptions and conscious ideas, and often on the same practitioners.
Almost unnoticed, the word “function,” and the idea of function, have taken on a different sense from that understood in the formative years of modern architecture. Function, which form was to follow, then meant primarily the uses for which a building was needed. The structural methods and building materials were to abet and express these uses, free them in a sense, rather than warp or conceal them. Various building types were analyzed and understood in those terms, and some were revolutionized, such as the elementary school and the single-family house. Architecture is still living off this inheritance of analysis of function, but it is a very incomplete inheritance and, except in the case of hospital design, remarkably little has been added to it for a generation.*4Architecture with a capital A has become more and more interested in itself, and less and less interested in the world that uses it.
Instead, in the meantime, “function” has come to mean, not use of the building, but use of its structure and materials. It is possible now to write about form following function and confine oneself entirely to discussion of structure and materials; indeed it has been done. Architecture with a capital A has become more and more interested in itself, and less and less interested in the world that uses it. (Hence we get a term with connotations of functionalism, like “universal space,” meaning great undifferentiated areas that are an excuse for using dramatic trusses; such space, far from approaching universality of use, works out badly for almost any kind of use other than big auditoriums, and is less adaptable to a variety of needs than a row of old brownstone houses!*5) When architecture concentrates ever more narrowly on its own devices, and gets farther away from interest in the world that uses it, it becomes narcissistic and that shows. Like all things that get far from the truth, it has to begin saying sensational things—about itself, because it has nothing else to talk about.
In a very similar way, the more elaborate and ambitious pedestrian and town-center schemes inform us insistently about themselves and their own novelty and cleverness. But they do not inform us about the variety and vitality and intricacy and opportunity and adaptability of prospering cities. They ignore—and even warp and thwart—the means by which cities generate the diversity that we call urbanity. Insofar as most of these schemes do draw upon the world outside themselves, they depend heavily on assumptions drawn from two very limited themes: suburban shopping centers and parks. There is a great hollowness where there should be a rich store of understanding about the complex functioning of cities and their streets.
I suggest that the way out is, first, to admit that we are not yet ready for grandiose or very radical schemes for rescuing city pedestrians. We have not done our homework. To do it, and simultaneously accomplish something, we should start quite humbly. We should start simply by giving direct, very functional and obvious consideration to pedestrians. And this should be done in precisely the places where pedestrians already appear in large numbers in spite of the inconveniences they meet and the impositions to which they are subjected. Some of these humble improvements which immediately suggest themselves are: more frequent places to cross the streets; widened sidewalks (i.e., bigger share of the road bed); more sidewalk trees; niches for standing outside the line of foot-traffic. To be sure, all such immediate, direct, functional aids to city pedestrians compete with convenience for automobiles. This is one of many truths about cities which have been too long evaded, but it cannot be evaded. Nor is it so terrifying a truth, even from the point of view of the automobile, when we realize that automobiles themselves are victimized direly by their own redundancy and that this redundancy feeds on the very palliatives conventionally intended to accommodate and relieve it.The variety and intricacy of [the] real city is endless, and the means for clarifying and celebrating it are infinite.
As for visual help to the pedestrian, the most direct and sensible guidance of which I know comes from Gordon Cullen’s book, Townscape.*6 As Cullen demonstrates to the respectful mind, the most interesting visual ideas are suggested out of the unique reality that already exists, but needs pointing up. The Cullen approach is the very opposite of design narcissism, because the loved object is the place already existing and the purpose is to enhance its nature. The variety of visual observations and ideas in Cullen’s book is astounding, and yet even this is only a beginning of the possibilities, because the variety and intricacy of [the] real city is endless, and the means for clarifying and celebrating it are infinite. Conscious attempts at this could not possibly look like the tiresomely repeated shopping-mall cliché nor like scenery for The War of the Worlds. And wouldn’t that be a boon.
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*1 The East Island project was proposed for what is now known as Roosevelt Island. Ultimately, Gruen’s project never came to fruition, and redevelopment followed a 1969 plan by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee.
*2 A reference to Le Corbusier’s first Unité d’Habitation building, the Cité Radieuse in Marseilles, France, built between 1947 and 1952. As Jacobs suggests here, Unité was intended as a “city within a city,” bringing together housing with many other daily uses into one self-sufficient, comprehensively planned whole.
*3 Jacobs learned about Kahn’s traffic philosophy while writing “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment,” which is included in this volume. In short, he based his theory of “the city traversable,” as Jacobs calls it, on the analogy of a city’s roads and parking as the rivers and docks of a water system. Jacobs would directly criticize such analogies in chapter 18 of Death and Life, “Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles,” pointing out that if planners remove a street in a city, traffic—unlike water—does not simply flow around the obstruction. It disappears. She discovered this phenomenon of urban complexity during Washington Square Park’s trial closure to traffic, which she advocates for in “Reason, Emotion, Pressure,” also included in this volume.
*4 As editor of schools and hospitals for Architectural Forum, Jacobs was intimately familiar with the functional innovations that modern architecture brought to elementary schools and hospitals, like classrooms reorganized to reflect the new thinking in teaching and learning of the day. Reports from her husband, Robert Jacobs, an architect of hospitals, may also have influenced her view that hospital design had successfully continued to stay up to date compared to other sub-fields of design.
*5 The philosophy of “universal space” was coined by the influential modern architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). An example of the philosophy in practice can be seen in his twenty low-lying buildings for the Illinois Institute of Technology, including the well-known Crown Hall (1956).
*6 Jacobs and her colleagues at Architectural Forum were influenced by the work of Gordon Cullen, J. H. Richards, and Ian Nairn at The Architectural Review, a British magazine that launched some of the earliest critiques of slum clearance, sprawl, and modern
architecture and planning in the 1950s. This relationship culminated in “Downtown Is for People,” included in this volume. Cullen contributed illustrations to the original piece in Fortune magazine.
A photo taken for use on posters to promote meetings of CO72, a group aiming to secure a reform city council in Toronto’s 1972 election. Jacobs, who endorsed a number of reform candidates, is believed to be holding the Y in “city.”
The Death and Life of Great American Cities set in motion a new chapter in the life of Jane Jacobs. Her observations of streets and parks had launched her into an “unexpected treasure hunt” that would structure the rest of her life’s work.1 “It became evident to me while I was doing Death and Life of Great American Cities that if the city’s economy declines, that’s the end of it,” she would later tell an interviewer. “It doesn’t matter what else cities have, what grand temples they have, what beautiful scenery, wonderful people, anything else—if their economy doesn’t work.”2 Looking to explain how city economies work, Jacobs left her decade-long post at Architectural Forum in 1962 to pursue a career as a full-time author, and started work on her second book, The Economy of Cities (1969).
On a certain level, even Death and Life was all about economics. While taking extension classes at Columbia University in the late 1930s Jacobs had become fascinated by an unsolved mystery: the sporadic and explosive growth pattern of cities. As she would later write in her unfinished economics primer, Uncovering the Economy (see Part Five), none of her professors seemed remotely interested in discussing or pursuing it. Over the years she would continue to collect evidence on the subject, eventually amassing a box full of leads. While working at Architectural Forum she had begun to believe that many modern planning practices were in fact flawed attempts to rein in the chaotic effects of this growth (a dilemma captured well by the title of the first anthology to publish Jacobs’s writing, The Exploding Metropolis). It overwhelmed infrastructure, drove up costs, attracted unexpected migrants, increased inequality, and made predicting the future near impossible. However, given what Jacobs had observed firsthand in her time at Architectural Forum, she suspected that this erratic self-generating growth of cities was part and parcel of prosperity, innovation, and even “the ballet of the sidewalk” she celebrated in Death and Life.
Other than her box of odds and ends, however, Jacobs had little to back up her suspicions, so one day in the early 1960s as she considered her second book, she sent her teenage son Jim on a scouting mission to the public library. Tasked with proving definitively whether this explosive pattern of city growth existed at all, he delved into census data from America’s metropolitan areas. Indeed, he found that while the national population tended to grow relatively steadily, individual cities grew in sporadic, unsynchronized bursts, suggesting corresponding bursts of economic activity. With this confirmation, Jacobs set out to discover what caused this growth and how the disciplines of city planning, economics, and governance could embrace it, instead of trying to control or smother it.
As she reported in The Economy of Cities and in an essay included here, “The Self-Generating Growth of Cities,” Jacobs discovered that the source of these explosive growth episodes was the new kinds of work vital urban economies produce as people strive to solve everyday problems. However, that new work also threatens established economic and political interests, which use their considerable powers to nip incipient interests in the bud. Given the barriers such resistance poses to solving difficult social and environmental problems, Jacobs dedicated most of her speech at the inaugural Earth Week teach-in, “The Real Problem of Cities,” to this subject.
Because of this conflict, Jacobs saw an important role for government in the market: a “third force” protecting new work from old.3 Though as she explains in “Strategies for Helping Cities,” included in this section, prevailing government strategies tended to have the opposite effect, preventing investment in diverse, young, and unusual enterprises and plowing benefits to incumbent interests. Only a better understanding of the dynamics of new work and its urban habitat, she argues, will clarify government’s potential role in helping cities and the economy at large.
Meanwhile, interruptions to Jacobs’s writing arrived in the form of “absurd” threats to her neighborhood, to her sons, and to her way of life.4 By 1965, her biggest wins as a community organizer were behind her. Instead, she increasingly faced fights that seemed intractable, like the troubled construction of the community-driven West Village Houses she describes in “The Real Problem of Cities.” Similarly, in late 1964, New York revived the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which Jacobs had helped defeat only two years earlier. The scheme failed again in 1965, only to return for a third time as a tunnel in 1968. Eventually the expressway would be killed for good in 1969 and the West Village Houses would open their doors in 1975, but Jacobs never got to see these victories in her time as a New Yorker.
The final straw for Jacobs turned out to be the Vietnam War. She and her family demonstrated against the war in New York and at the famous March on the Pentagon in October 1967, when gas-masked soldiers and U.S. marshals roughed up largely peaceful demonstrators. Vietnam compounded the dismay brought on by her interminable battles back in New York and prompted the bitter disgust with immoral authority recorded in “On Civil Disobedience” in this volume. It also uprooted her life in America for good. When her two draft-age sons told their parents that they would sooner go to jail than go to war, the Jacobs family decided to leave New York—the city to which she had dedicated Death and Life only seven years earlier—for the safety of Canada. Once, Jacobs would have considered herself patriotic. But after being marched on by her nation’s own soldiers, she told a reporter in 1993, “I fell out of love with my country. It sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t feel a part of America anymore.”5
In her new home of Toronto, however, she found “the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.” In sharp contrast to the United States, Canada in 1968 was brimming with optimism. The nation had adopted a new national flag in 1965; hosted a record-setting World’s Fair, Expo 67 in Montreal; and elected the irreverent and eloquent Pierre Trudeau as prime minister in April 1968.
It didn’t take long for Jacobs to become the unofficial bard of Toronto’s beauties and battles, much as she had been in New York. She lent her forceful voice and her experience fighting LOMEX to a campaign against the proposed Spadina Expressway, which would have bisected downtown Toronto and run right over her family’s first apartment in the city (see “A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug”). But she also took pride in the efforts of the city’s reform city council, which swept to power under Mayor David Crombie in 1972. Appreciation for Toronto’s innovative, sensitive approaches to planning, urban renewal, and governance—which were often inspired by Jacobs’s own ideas from Death and Life—peppers the final two speeches in Part Three and continues to pop up for the rest of her career.
Jacobs struggled with her next major book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). It took her years to sort out its focus: a study of how the urban economies she had explored in The Economy of Cities shape the economies of nations and drive macroeconomics in general. What first appeared to be another distraction from writing—a series of short radio lectures on Canada’s fraught relationship with the province of Quebec, published as The Question of Separatism in 1980—became an inspiration. Although she was already thinking about the complex relationships connecting nations, regions, and cities, Quebec’s burgeoning sovereignty movement helped her see how empires must alternately placate and suppress their colonies in order to hold themselves together. The conflict also alerted Jacobs to the difficulties that national currencies had in reflecting the varied local economic conditions of sprawling countries cobbled together through imperial expansion. Cities and the Wealth of Nations combined these still-disparate observations with her prior theories of urban economics into an ambitious synthesis that reveals cities—not nations—
as the natural units of economic study and the rightful heirs to political power, long monopolized by nations.
NOTES
1. See “Foreword to the Modern Library Edition” of Death and Life, in this volume.
2. See Roberta Brandes Gratz, “Jacobs Tape,” Jacobs Papers, 22:5.
3. For more on the role of government as a “third force,” see The Economy of Cities, 249.
4. When asked whether she would ever return to New York City in an interview with Clark Whelton (“Won’t You Come Home Jane Jacobs?” The Village Voice, July 6, 1972), Jacobs responded in the negative, explaining, “It’s absurd to make your life absurd in response to absurd governments.”
5. See Mark Feeney, “City Sage,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1993.
The Self-Generating Growth of Cities
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SPEECH AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF BRITISH ARCHITECTS, LONDON, FEBRUARY 7, 1967