Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  Consider, as an illustration, the state of American transportation. Automobiles and trucks are choking cities with pollution. Almost every physical and social amenity in cities is sacrificed to cars, expressways and parking, and the same facilities increasingly debase towns, shorelines and countrysides. Many families are burdened with the cost and upkeep of expensive equipment they can ill afford and yet cannot get along without. The burdens on hospitals and courts are fantastic; automobile travel is the most dangerous form of everyday transportation the world has ever known. And so on. The problems arising from the bloated production of automobiles and gasoline have been endlessly documented, explained and reported. The other form of transportation on which we depend too heavily, the airplane, is rapidly producing its own syndrome of problems and these too are building up to environmental crisis.

  Looking at this state of affairs, one might logically suppose that practicable ideas for transportation had been exhausted some sixty to seventy years ago, in the period when the automobile, the airplane and the subway were all radical innovations. But of course that is not true. America now has its own “Soviet encyclopedia,” figuratively speaking, of unused ideas for transportation.

  Earlier this year, for example, The New York Times reported that an embarrassment of inventions, some of them American, some foreign, confronts the city’s Transportation Authority, which is contemplating 115 different schemes for “people movers” to use on a crosstown subway link. Most of the schemes are already ten, twenty, even thirty years old. Presumably one of them is a system called Carveyor that was fully developed and successfully tested for the 42nd Street shuttle seventeen years ago. It was so rapid and so economical, required so little labor, that it was dropped. It was too upsetting to the status quo.

  I would not advise you to hold your breath while the authority makes up its mind which of the 115 possibilities to use and then does something about it, because this particular bureaucracy requires some two years of pondering and a study grant from the federal government to decide whether to ask for another grant to redecorate two subway stations.

  For ten years or so I have been reading about another invention, the staRRcar system of small, guided personal capsules into which one slips a fare and dials a destination.*2 Along express stretches of a route, the capsules link up into exceedingly swift trains, then peel off to their various destinations. Last year a major systems analysis of city transportation, for which the federal government paid, using Boston and Houston as study examples, came to the conclusion that it would cost less to install this system than to continue building expressways or subways, that it would provide more rapid and convenient transportation than either of those other methods, and that a city deciding to use it could develop it within about five years. The system requires rights-of-way no wider than a sidewalk to carry more people, more rapidly, than a six-lane expressway. In every environmental respect, from pollution to community destruction, it would afford great improvement. All this, of course, should surprise no one except those who believe that intelligence reached its climax in Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. Nevertheless, I would not advise anyone to hold his breath until some American city tries the staRRcar system, for it has already been available for a long time. It is too upsetting to a status quo that is predicated on inconvenient, deteriorating, obsolete public transit and a very large, reliable market for automobiles and gasoline.*3

  Let us look a moment into this question of maintaining the status quo. In the seventeen years since the officials responsible for the New York subway system chose not to disturb the status quo with the Carveyor, the system has not remained as it was. It has decayed, in service, equipment and maintenance of equipment, while costs have steadily risen. To maintain the status quo is impossible, in this or in most other things. In most activities, and certainly taking society as a whole, we must be creative or else resigned to decay. This is not simply an imperative of modern economies. It is an imperative of the human condition itself. A stagnant subsistence agriculture finally depletes the land of fertility, especially of trace elements. Economies much simpler than ours that have depended too long and too heavily upon wood for fuel have had disastrous effects on their environments.We must be creative or else resigned to decay. This is not simply an imperative of modern economies. It is an imperative of the human condition itself.

  What maintaining the status quo actually means, in practical terms, is maintaining well established interests, at the expense of a decaying environment. Here is how a pillar of the status quo, the Chairman of the American Petroleum Institute, was quoted, in 1961, in the magazine of Standard Oil of New Jersey:

  If every car traveled just another hundred miles, the consumption of gasoline would rise almost one per cent. This would mean only three or four more minutes behind the steering wheel each week for each driver, but it would add up to ten million more barrels of gasoline consumed in a year….I most heartily endorse the Institute’s new travel program as a stimulant to the greater consumption of gasoline and motor oil.

  The destruction of city communities for the sake of expressways and the destruction of beaches by oil slicks in the frantic endeavor to get ever more oil to market are directly linked. The fragile ecology of a city neighborhood and the fragile ecology of the Arctic stand or fall together. Because a mounting problem has gone unsolved in cities, in deference to the status quo, the outermost wilderness is finally threatened.

  I have been using transportation as an illustration of our stagnation, and of the ominously evasive response to stagnation supplied by the current powerful and well financed campaign for population control.*4 But stagnation in transportation, unfortunately, is only one among many instances of failure to solve problems. I am going to mention a few others, not for the purpose of listing a catalog of ills, but to indicate something about the nature of the widespread failure. The pattern I see is that people who are in closest touch with practical problems are rendered powerless to solve them. Decisions are imposed from the top. Development is not permitted to emerge from below, and thus precious little of any real value is emerging anywhere.

  Consider, in this light, our long and expensive failures with city housing. One part of the problem, the only one I am going to deal with here, is how to add new dwellings into already built-up cities. Solutions imposed from the top down have the defect of sacrificing much good and reclaimable housing along with bad. This is true whether the new construction is done by private developers or by public agencies or by a combination of both.

  The economic effect of both policies of destruction has been wretched. The inexorable result is a net loss of the kind of housing that is most needed and is already in shortest supply—moderate and low cost housing. Often there is an absolute net loss. The result, in other words, is simply to inflate the costs of city housing. Were more money spent on these programs, under these policies, the problem would only be intensified.

  To neglect new construction within the built-up parts of cities and to concentrate instead—not just also but instead—on large vacant sites at city outskirts or in satellite suburbs is not an answer. The fact is, built-up parts of cities do need new construction. Old buildings wear out. Fires happen. Vacant lots better not left vacant do exist. And so on. In short, normal attrition of these and many other kinds requires new construction. Furthermore, out there on the outskirts or in the satellite suburbs or New Towns, the same difficulties are only being postponed. The new does not stay new forever; its turn for attrition comes too.

  Down on the city streets, the gaps where housing might be inserted without destroying anything useful are very real. They are so real that naturally the thought has occurred in hundreds of neighborhoods, “Fill the gaps.” It seems to anyone taking this worm’s eye view that it is sane to stretch resources as far as possible by making all new housing construction a net increase in the supply of habitable housing.

  I first heard this request for gap-filling about fourteen years ago in a poor black n
eighborhood in Philadelphia, and I have heard it in many other cities since. Yet as far as I know, only one neighborhood in the whole of this country has a gap-filling scheme under way. The neighborhood is in New York and I know it well; it is the neighborhood where I used to live.

  In this case, all the usual objections were made. At first the scheme was condemned outright by the housing and planning bureaucracy. They said it was not economic. This was a curious response, since the cost of the neighborhood plan was less than a third as much as a plan originally proposed by that same bureaucracy, while the net increase in housing was almost twice as great as that resulting from the expensive bureaucratic plan. To be sure, the scheme from the top called for large-scale clearance under the rationale that a new, instant, synthetic community would be better than the one that grew organically, so the enormous difference in cost is not surprising. However—and this is more significant—the bureaucracy proposed as an alternative what it called vest-pocket construction. This consisted of buildings which destroyed only such housing and business as was deemed necessary to fill out sites of proper sizes and shapes for economical construction. The neighborhood’s gap-filling scheme, which did not destroy anything, also proved more economical than the destructive scheme whose only rationale was its economy.

  The neighborhood was very fortunate in the architects it had chosen to work out a solution. The architects did not waste time telling the people they had an insoluble problem and an impractical policy. Instead, they used their brains and made a new departure. They designed a small basic building in three slightly varying proportions. Singly or in combinations, the basic buildings could make use of every fortuitous available site in the neighborhood, on the site’s own given terms. In short, advantages of custom building were achieved without its economic disadvantages, along with the advantages of mass production building without its disadvantages.

  The buildings are designed to allow extremely flexible use, and easy convertibility from residential to commercial use and vice versa because the neighborhood was looking ahead to the kinds of changes that might well be wanted in the next generation.*5

  Eventually the bureaucracy cooperated handsomely with the neighborhood, but I would not be honest if I suggested that there is much hope in this story, apart from this one neighborhood’s success. Almost simultaneously with the approval that was finally accorded the scheme, a new provision was added to the city’s building code, the effect of which is to make it impossible for any other neighborhood to adapt the scheme or copy the policy.

  Meanwhile, in other cities too, people who request gap-filling policies are still being told they are infeasible. In Washington, the elaborate and expensive experimental housing programs sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development are not even posing the right questions.

  Why is there such effective resistance to development in a field that so desperately needs it? Perhaps it is too upsetting to the status quo. As one housing commissioner said, seven years ago when the scheme was first worked out, “If we let this neighborhood plan for itself, every neighborhood will want to plan for itself.” I think he was seeing the same thing I can see. That gap-filling city housing policies would make most of the vast federal, state and city housing bureaucracies obsolete. Architects could work directly with the people. Maybe the very idea of a radically new approach emerging from below seems, in and of itself, as frightening as a People’s Park or as the slogan Power to the People.

  Whatever the reason for the suppression of gap-filling, it is too bad because it demands and suggests radically new thinking. The New York scheme is by no means the last word on what could be done. Some architects in Toronto of whom I think highly because of their creativity have told me that, in their view, a basic city gap-filling unit could be as small as 22 feet square, making its multiples, either horizontally or vertically, even more adaptable to fortuitous sites, and that it could be even more flexible than the New York solution in its interior planning and future convertibility and in its exterior cladding and fenestration. Historically, new approaches undertaken for one reason have often provided solutions to quite different problems as well.

  But in a stagnated economy, the webs of suppression become wonderfully interlocked and pervasive. Wherever one turns, existing arrangements of some kind seem to stand in the way of change. Loose ends become harder and harder to yank out of the web, and when somebody finds one, it is quickly knit back again.In a stagnated economy, the webs of suppression become wonderfully interlocked and pervasive. Wherever one turns, existing arrangements of some kind seem to stand in the way of change.

  National programs, particularly those with grants attached, are useless in combating stagnation simply because the programs are directed to matters which have already become glaring problems. To be sure, additional theoretical reasons may be given, apart from the existence of mounting problems. For instance, it is sometimes urged that housing is a responsibility of the federal government because housing is a necessity. Clothing is a necessity too. Nobody urges national clothing programs on that account. If the clothing industries performed as badly as the building industries, we might have such programs. No, there is no getting around the fact that national programs with grants attached are associated with problem activities such as housing, transportation, pollution prevention, health care, and so on. And this means the programs are automatically directed to activities that require many new approaches and much development work, not premature prescriptions and standardization.

  National programs ensure standardized and premature prescriptions, from the very fact that a problem is being centrally defined. For instance, if a program to combat sewage pollution defines the problem as need for sewage treatment plants, then we may be sure resources are going to be spent on sewage plants. But there may well be other and better ways to combat sewage.

  Once a problem has been centrally defined, much standardization of goods and services in its cause then automatically follows. What all this means, in sum, is that each city participating in a given program must respond with goods, services and methods, whether locally produced or imported from other cities, very similar to those of all others participating. The very possibility of creation, and innovation, deliberate or accidental, is being stifled under an impenetrable web of existing arrangements. The surest way to arrange that the status quo is not going to be disturbed, that development is not going to occur, that a problem with us now is going to be with us indefinitely, is to centralize responsibility for defining it and for administering funds directed to its solutions. The very strategy itself is fatally at odds with a goal of problem-solving.

  Indeed, in the case of many current problems there is simply no effective way to get at them from the top, in any event. Development has to emerge from below. An example of this situation is waste recycling, one of the major keys to overcoming pollution of many kinds.

  According to a recent report from China summarized in The New York Times, some enterprises in Shanghai are turning out building materials from slag, while others are turning out some fifty chemicals, not formerly produced there, from wastes. The policy is described as “reusing wastes instead of allowing them to pile up as garbage or to foul the city’s air and water.” The report says that waste-recycling work was not handed down from above. It was initiated by workers who handled the wastes. The report then goes on to make a big point of the higher-level ignorance and obstructionism that had to be overcome by the workers. Perhaps this is a flourish of ideology, but the fact is that the point about the importance of workers in direct touch with the wastes checks with much experience in North America.

  Many of the rather few advances in waste-recycling here—for instance, conversion of fly ash to cinderblock, return of waste paper to mills for reprocessing, conversion of garbage into light-weight, dehydrated compost, or the now very prosperous industries that reclaim secondhand machinery—were contrived and carried out by people in very lowly positions, people handling wastes.<
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  Back in the early 1960s, a coal-burning electric power plant in Pennsylvania, in cooperation with a large chemical corporation, developed and successfully tested equipment for capturing sulfur dioxide in fuel burning stacks and converting it to sulfuric acid. But left at that stage, which is where it now stands, it is rather like those sewing machines and telephones invented by the nineteenth-century Russians.

  To get the idea into effective everyday use is quite beyond the power of the great chemical corporation or the electric company that created the method. Rather, somebody much lowlier—probably a great many somebodies—will have to take the initiative of enlisting customers, installing equipment, servicing it, picking up the acid and channeling it back to wholesalers or re-users. And they will have to find capital for doing this.Somebody has to develop the work, and in the course of doing so there will be many failures. There always are when new work is developed.

  Without those people doing that work all the concern in the country about sulfur-dioxide in the air, all the money spent on setting wistful air-quality standards, writing and enacting legislation or paying speakers like me, for that matter, is quite useless. Somebody has to develop the work, and in the course of doing so there will be many failures. There always are when new work is developed.*6

  It seems very little understood in this country now, bemused as it is by corporate bigness and by government attempts at big, sweeping solutions, how useless research work by large corporations can be if there are not small and lowly organizations to apply the work. Some years ago, the president of DuPont, reminiscing to a Fortune magazine editor about moisture-proof Cellophane, recalled that the product would have failed except for the fact of many very small customers who were willing to take a chance, try out the product in varying ways, and get it to market. Large users adopted it subsequently when they saw how it proved out, but they were neither interested in experimenting with it like the small customers, nor, more significantly, were they even equipped to do this. Their scale of operations, in itself, was wrong for that purpose. I was reminded of this by a Scientific American article last year, written by two DuPont researchers, describing materials for overcoming various types of mechanical noise. DuPont makes the materials, but the researchers pointed out that, in a sense, this is the least of the work. The use of the material, as an everyday fact of economic life, helping to cut down noise pollution, depends upon the formation and the work of many, many servicing organizations—I would suppose hundreds and more likely thousands—to prescribe, design and install the materials.