by Jane Jacobs
Sulfur-dioxide pollution and noise pollution are only two among many, many types of pollution, all of which require effort and initiative, emerging from below. But in this country now, almost no capital is available to speak of for lowly enterprises, certainly not in the vast numbers and variety needed. Such capital has always been hard to come by, but the situation has gotten worse, not better.
Indeed, will lowly enterprises of the types required even be allowed to emerge? As things stand now, I doubt it. Last year, community delegates in a section of Harlem, in New York, tried to include in that vast web of futility called the Model Cities Program something genuinely hopeful and potentially creative: a new, community-run garbage and trash collecting and handling service.*7 But the proposal was instantly struck from the program by the city officials. I was told by a planner who participated in that decision, and who concurred in it, that the Sanitationmen’s Union would not stand for it, and the city could not afford a conflict with the union over a point so unimportant. It is in the interests of unions, just as much as it is in the interests of oil companies and housing bureaucracies, to maintain the status quo.
Personally, I can think of nothing more important than to encourage and fund, let alone permit, any neighborhood corporation or other enterprise which thinks it could handle wastes better than they are being handled. It would also be worth knowing how those Shanghai workers in touch with wastes managed to overcome higher-level ignorance and obstructionism; current American know-how does not seem to include that know-how.
Intelligence has been defined biologically as “the breakdown of the instinctive fixity, increasing the potential for recombination, both within the organism and the environment.”
To be sure, we are not clinging to an “instinctive fixity” because we human beings cannot return, even if we would, to fixed instinctual behavior. The barriers I have been describing, which we are not breaking down, do not serve as well as instinct and certainly not as well as intelligence. We are not breaking down, or breaking through, bureaucratic fixity. Increasingly, bureaucratic fixity has become an attribute of our institutions, private as well as public, labor unions as well as corporations.
Many kinds of bureaucratic fixity have been established as so good and so noble that they have now become almost impervious to assaults by intelligence, and this in spite of the fact that anyone can see that the results of these good and noble fixations are an utter mess. Land-use planning and the zoning that enforces it are illustrations. Anyone who questions land-use planning as a means of dealing with cities and new developments too is automatically supposed to be an enemy of good environment. Yet one need only observe results to know that something is terribly wrong.
To get at the nature of the trouble, let us notice the distinction between performance and land use. An example from the neighborhood where I live in Toronto will illustrate the distinction. In the neighborhood is a fine old house, much appreciated for its idiosyncrasy and attractiveness. A women’s club wished to buy it for its quarters. Far from being objectionable, this proposal was welcomed by people on the street, which is zoned for residential land use, and by people in the neighborhood generally, because it ensured the building and grounds would be preserved instead of being bought by a land speculator who would probably demolish the building and use the site for a parking lot or simply leave it vacant while he held it.
But a club is a land use. And a zoning variance granted for this use would automatically make the street vulnerable to variances for clubs no matter how noisy or garish they might be, nor how much automobile parking they might require. Making an exception for the one club would not likely stand up. All right-thinking people know spot-zoning is evil. If it were widely indulged, the very basis of land-use zoning would be destroyed. Land-use zoning must take categories of land use seriously, or it is nothing.
But the trouble, really, is not with exceptions. It goes deeper. The trouble is that the neighborhood is interested in performance, while the bureaucratic fixity is riveted on land use.
Under land-use planning and zoning, as serious problems of noise, fumes and so on, increased in cities, a way was found to evade them by zoning. It did not matter whether or not a facility overcame bad performance, because its performance was not at issue; its category was. This system has done nothing constructive to stimulate better performance. What is more, it does not even work on its own terms of protecting various land uses from harm by unsuitable neighbors. All sorts of truly harmful and destructive things leak through its shield, even without variances, and many a totally harmless and convenient use is gratuitously forbidden. In practice, the chief benefits of this good and noble system accrue mainly to land speculators who often reap fortunes by pushing through land use variances. A philosophy of planning that comes straight from laying out farms—put the orchard here, the feed lot and barn there, the corn fields yonder—and makes sense in agrarian terms, becomes nonsense when it is applied to a different sort of environment.
Go to almost any hearing concerning zoning matters. You will find the experts talking about land use, and the ordinary people talking about performance. To amuse myself the other day, I listed the kinds of performance I had heard ordinary people bring up in conflicts over zoning variances. Here they are, six of them, along with some brief comments of my own concerning relevant types of standards.
1. Noise. Standards could be set according to the number of decibels allowable penetrating from the building. Think what a stimulation this might be to those acoustics services we need.
2. Pollution. In the present stage of the technology, standards could govern the solid particulate matter and sulfur dioxide emitted.
3. Scale. Many streets, especially those intimately scaled, are disintegrated visually by an out-of-scale building. This has little or nothing to do with land use. A street with identical or very similar uses can be rendered visually chaotic by nothing more than incongruities of scale; conversely a street can assimilate an astonishing diversity of building designs and of uses and yet be attractive and harmonious because of the harmonious scale. In practice, disintegration is almost always caused by a building too large, which does not necessarily mean too high. A big one-story building can be disastrous on an intimately scaled street. The relevant standard would be the length of street frontage allowed a building; a small-scale frontage automatically takes care of height in most cases. Differences of one or two stories in height, among buildings of similar width, are not what disintegrate street scale as one can easily see by looking at intimately scaled city streets. Not all streets need to be intimately scaled, but a city lacking such streets is a horrible and inhuman place.
4. Signs. Standards could apply to sizes, beginning with discreet plaques, and to illumination.
5. Traffic generation. Standards could designate the number of parking places permitted. When people seek protection against traffic generators, they seek protection against automobile and truck traffic, not against pedestrians. As it is now, retail uses that go into the same land planning and zoning categories differ enormously in the kind of traffic they draw: automotive or foot.
6. Destruction. As everybody down on the street knows, what is removed to make way for something is a vital aspect of performance. Standards could designate what cannot be destroyed, and these could include not only the buildings of historic value which occasionally—very occasionally—get such protection now, but whatever the neighborhood considers valuable: say trees over a certain girth, for instance. In times and places of housing shortage, protection could cover all habitable housing.
Under performance zoning, far greater freedom of land use could be permitted than is now the case, with superior results for the environment.*8 But it is hopeless to suppose that any such radical change in planning and zoning philosophy is going to be initiated by the bureaucracies who have these matters in hand. After all, planners know no more about a kind of zoning code that does not now exist than you do or I do.
Why wo
uld a city neighborhood whose people are interested in performance instead of categories of land use not be allowed, if its people wish, to hammer out performance standards, commission an intelligent lawyer to write a performance zoning code, and then be allowed to apply it? No doubt the first homemade codes would have bugs in them, but the present system is all bugs.
If this approach could be used by local neighborhoods within cities that wanted to use it, we might expect that the results would eventually have an effect on new development too. Today land-use planning and its accompanying zoning are forcing look-alike, unfunctional, inhuman sprawls around all our cities—the visible evidence, as one critic has put it, of “a society petrified by the accountants who have seized high position.” The developers blame the public officials: “They made us do it like this.” The public officials blame the developers: “They did it.”
Some fifty years ago, the land planning movement called regional planning put forth a line of reasoning purporting to show that cities had become obsolete. The idea was that electric power—which incidentally had arisen in cities of course—made concentrations of industry no longer necessary because electric grids could lace the whole land, and therefore city concentrations of people were no longer necessary. Essentially the same argument has been extended by those today who consider cities obsolete; they add to the original argument the dispersal made possible by air and automotive travel and modern communication.
This line of reasoning has always rested on the unspoken assumption that the salient question is how to locate existing forms of production. In some cases, although not nearly so many as the regional planners and their successors have supposed, it is possible to disperse production out of cities. Indeed, many a company town whose proprietors left cities to find cheaper labor, attests to that fact.Our trouble is not that our cities, per se, are obsolete, but that they are no longer creative. This is the real problem of cities: to remain creative.
But the argument ignores the question of how new forms of work arise, where they come from, and how. They arise in cities, by a process of adding new kinds of work logically to older kinds. Any settlement in which this happens vigorously becomes a city by virtue of the process itself. To imagine cities have become obsolete is to assume that society can get along well enough with the goods, services, methods and institutions it already has, and the unsolved problems will somehow be solved by dispersal. Of course this is not true. The British, who have put an enormous share of their resources available for development work into New Towns, have solved nothing at all by this means. The winter air over Cumbernauld, out in the country, has exactly the same acrid reek of pollution as the air over Glasgow.*9 Dispersing populations, instead of solving problems, just disperses problems.
Our trouble is not that our cities, per se, are obsolete, but that they are no longer creative. This is the real problem of cities: to remain creative. When they creatively solve practical problems for themselves and each other, the solutions can then be used in small settlements too. Indeed they are often applied to the countryside or to wilderness directly or indirectly. As an instance of the latter, consider city-contrived plastics. Creative cities prevent the same natural resources from being exploited too heavily and too long. It is stagnant economies that become ruinous to the natural world, as ours is becoming.
My argument is that our mounting problems are owing to undone and undeveloped work, which in turn is owing to the fact that the potential creativity to be found in our cities is being stifled, frustrated, and wasted, and that this is fatal.The good of the city district or neighborhood corresponds with the good of the whole. The whole, in fact, turns out not to be an abstraction untouched by the fate of the parts.
Even city governments today are demonstrably too bureaucratized and too centralized to govern creative, problem-solving cities. I have been arguing that one of our most pressing needs is the liberation and funding of communities within cities to govern themselves in most matters and to find and permit solutions of their own. Some would accomplish little, perhaps. But if any were innovative it would be a clear gain, and their solutions could be copied and adapted, as successful solutions always are in creative societies. The present situation is truly hopeless.
The usual objection to local self-government within cities is that their people are shortsighted, selfish and either oblivious to the good of the whole or opposed to it. While in some cases this may be true, I am far more impressed by how often the good of the city district or neighborhood corresponds with the good of the whole. The whole, in fact, turns out not to be an abstraction untouched by the fate of the parts.
The stock argument—the clincher—of those who think power to the people would be impractical or ruinous is to bring up the question of highways and to point out that no community in a city would allow a new highway through it, if it had the effective power to stop it. Precisely. Here we are, back at transportation.
Time has vindicated the selfish, shortsighted city communities that tried so hard to stop expressway programs and failed. Suppose it had been truly necessary for officials to be content with ordinary roadways, when city districts objected to having expressways hurtled through them, their parks cannibalized by parkways, their trees cut, their sidewalks narrowed, their houses destroyed, their air polluted, their streets rezoned for gas stations, and so on. Then it would also have become necessary to employ newer means, in addition to automobiles, for solving city transportation problems.
As it is, increasingly angry talk about banning automobiles entirely is understandable in view of growing desperation. But in practical terms, the bans are gestures; a sort of occupational therapy for protesters; and so they will remain in the absence of the use of new services and vehicles. Just as in the case of waste-recycling and pollution prevention, solutions depend on work now being left undone. Ironically, there is no more dramatic illustration of the need for local autonomy within cities—power to the people—than the stock objection, “They obstruct highways.”
I would like to say, since my temperamental preference is to be optimistic, that I see some evidence that intelligence and creativity are breaking through in the United States. I honestly do not think they are.
What I see, instead of relevant change, is a growing acceptance of stagnation, an assumption that we can deal with our mounting problems and undone work not by getting on that work but by reducing population growth.
A population control program is not going to develop a single new waste-recycling enterprise. It is not going to prevent a single oil-slick in the sea because it is not going to develop new transportation services and vehicles. It is not going to clean up the wild and beautiful Abitibi River in northern Ontario, now polluted by the great pulp mills of The New York Times. The Times frequently editorializes to the effect that protection of the wilderness hinges upon control of population growth. What does this mean? That population control will make sufficient inroads upon the readers of The New York Times to clean up the Abitibi? Population control is a cop-out for The New York Times. It is a cop-out for the oil companies. Most of all, it is a cop-out for everybody who wants the comfort of a big, sweeping answer to a multitude of complex, hard, perhaps boring realities.
Population control is not only an irrelevant answer for what ails us, it is a dreadfully dangerous answer. There is all the difference in the world between private, voluntary decisions about family size and public programs with public goals. Nothing in America works the same way for blacks and whites, and we may be absolutely sure that population control will not work the same for blacks and whites, either. Many blacks fear it as a plan for genocide. I do not think their fears are unrealistic. I think of how easily and how long white liberals ignored or rationalized away—some still do—the insanities and brutalities of slum clearance, public housing, welfare and urban renewal carried out in the name of abstract societal progress. I wonder therefore how easily and how long genocidal insanities and brutalities could be ignored or rationalized away by
white liberals if these were carried out in the name of an abstract—a very abstract—protection of the ecology. The thought is not reassuring. As it now stands, this is demonstrably not a fit society to possess public powers for population control.
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*1 In a similar speech for the 1970 Alan B. Plaunt Memorial Lecture, Jacobs expresses her hope that the Canadian tendency toward sober second thought would help avoid what she perceived as stagnation south of the border. Citing philosopher Marshall McLuhan, she observes that America acts as Canada’s “built-in Early Warning System” for urban problems of all kinds, a remark she repeats in “Pedaling Together” in this volume.
*2 The Carveyor, developed by Goodyear and a conveyor belt company called Stephens-Adamson, would have been a system of conveyor belts carrying a series of ten-person cars. Aside from the 42nd Street route, it was proposed for a variety of other projects, including Victor Gruen’s scheme for East Island/Roosevelt Island, which Jacobs takes to task in “Do Not Separate Pedestrians from Automobiles” in this volume, but it never found widespread use. The Alden staRRcar system did, on the other hand, find one permanent incarnation as the Personal Rapid Transit system of Morgantown, West Virginia; it opened in 1975.