by Jane Jacobs
*3 Struck from the final manuscript:
Everybody is feeling good about the great outpouring of environmental concern during Earth Week. I have my doubts. In some ways, it looks to me more like Accepting-and-Planning-for-Stagnation Week. Troubles that are the results of stagnation are being analyzed all too thoughtlessly as troubles resulting from progress and affluence. But the affluence is already vanishing like the progress. Stagnant economies inexorably and gradually become poorer as their unsolved problems and undone work pile up and the numbers of their idle people grow. This is happening now in the U.S. economy. To be sure, stagnant economies have very rich people; the rich even typically grow richer as the stagnation deepens, but the numbers of poor increase. Nothing works as well as formerly; even the old services perform less well and cost more. And in the profound absence of creativity, even money becomes of little avail to improve matters. It operates like the vast subsidies that have been poured into our hospital and medical systems through Medicare and Medicaid, to little purpose except to inflate the costs of medical and hospital care and frighten the wits out of everyone who examines the system to see where the money is going.
The reason I fear this may be Accepting-and-Planning-for-Stagnation Week is that, under the delusion that progress and affluence are causing the rape of the environment, the popular answer is to control the population and reduce its growth. Put bluntly, the argument says that overabundance of automobiles is caused by overabundance of people. Put more abstractly and comprehensively, the argument says that our per capita use and abuse of energy and resources cannot continue unchecked; therefore the answer is reduce the population growth. This is planning for protection of the status quo, and stagnation. Of course, life always becomes cheap in stagnated economies, with their mounting problems, persisting poverty, undone work, and idle angry people. Unless the people are drained off by emigration they become an increasing threat to the established arrangements.
*4 Inspired by the work of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), strict population stabilization had a popular following among environmentalists of the time, including Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Week, who spoke alongside Jacobs at this event.
*5 This “gap-filling scheme” is the West Village Houses, originally proposed by Jacobs and her Village neighbors as an alternative to the city’s urban renewal plans for their neighborhood. The houses finally opened in 1974, after years of delays and escalating construction costs that eroded the original vision for the 42 five-story walkups. Architecturally undistinguished, the West Village Houses nevertheless remain a source of relatively affordable infill housing in an expensive neighborhood. In the 1970s, the municipal government in Jacobs’s adopted home of Toronto initiated a similar infill program to create affordable housing with more success (see “Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?” in this volume). Today, this approach has become much more common, as reflected in the increasing popularity of the term infill. According to a recent EPA report, “Smart Growth and Economic Development: Investing in Infill Development,” in 2014 infill comprised an estimated 21 percent of new home construction in America’s 209 largest metropolitan areas.
*6 Struck from the final manuscript: “Anyone who imagines that we live in a postindustrial age in which automation is going to take care of most of our production problems has quite forgotten the fact that new kinds of work must be developed, vast numbers of them; or else does not remotely understand how much effort and duplication of effort that development takes, and at best how quite beside the point is automation until methods, goods and services have been devised and have already become well-established.”
*7 Passed by Congress in 1966, the Model Cities Program was one element of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Intended to offset and end the abuses of the urban renewal years, it provided federal funds to underwrite local efforts at residential rehabilitation and programs for social service delivery initiated by community groups. For all their emphasis on citizen participation—and many did provide a road into politics for the disenfranchised—the programs, as Jacobs suggests, often ran afoul of incumbent constituencies in cities. Model Cities was discontinued in 1974.
*8 In chapter 7 of Dark Age Ahead, “Unwinding Vicious Spirals,” Jacobs provides a slightly updated take on performance zoning. In particular, she adds, “Enforcement should not be ensured by criminal fines but more directly, by civil court orders requiring noncomplying and noncorrecting offenders to halt outlawed performances forthwith or vacate the premises” (p. 156).
*9 Cumbernauld is a planned community, or “New Town,” outside Glasgow, Scotland, begun in 1956. The term “New Town” is often used to refer to a series of modern, planned communities created in the post–World War II era in the United Kingdom, but the movement began before the war and had parallels and offshoots in the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and many other countries. Inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal, reformers all over the world, including Lewis Mumford, pushed their governments to fund the building of dispersed residential communities from scratch outside industrial cities. Most were designed to have carefully delineated zones for residences, workplaces, commercial development, and community amenities all in one development. They were in that sense cities, not suburbs, but their anti–mixed use planning precepts relied on the idea, as Jacobs puts it here, that the traditional industrial city had become “obsolete.” As a result, many critics viewed them as essentially anti-urban.
Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?
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SPEECH AT THE RESIDENTIAL AREAS AND URBAN RENEWAL CONFERENCE, HAMBURG, WEST GERMANY, OCTOBER 12–14, 1981
Some plans have to be big, detailed, and stretch for years into the future because of their substance. A mundane example is a plan for building a city subway system. Or to take a more romantic illustration, when a trip to Saturn is proposed, the planning has to be very comprehensive, very detailed and very much in control until the whole scheme is complete and the aim is finished. The plan has to be big or it is useless.
It seems to me sometimes that many city and town planners must be frustrated space-travel planners. But pieces of our cities, or for that matter suburbs or even New Towns, are not going to take off for Saturn. They aren’t going to take off for anywhere. The substance doesn’t mandate big, comprehensive, tightly controlled planning the way either a subway system or a spaceship does. Little plans are more appropriate for city renewal than big plans. First I am going to mention some of the disadvantages of big plans, then suggest how we can treat our cities in ways appropriate for their renewal.Boredom has to be taken seriously, and especially visual boredom.
To begin with disadvantages of big plans, let us think for a moment about boredom. Making big plans doesn’t bore planners. Indeed, the bigger and more comprehensive the plan, the more it engages all their faculties and so the more it interests and engrosses them. But the results bore everybody else. A scholar who retired some years ago after a lifetime of work in the American Museum of Natural History told me he had been spending a good part of his new leisure exploring post-war housing projects and suburban tracts. What he saw appalled him. Consider, he said, the value that human beings throughout the ages and in all cultures have placed on visual diversity and elaboration. Man is the animal that decorates himself and all manner of things he makes and builds. If we were to find a trait so persistent and widespread in any other species, he went on, we would take it seriously. We would conjecture that so striking and universal a trait had some connection with the success of the animal. His own surmise was that our busy human brains demand a constant flow of extremely diverse impressions and information to develop in the first place, and thereafter must be fed with constant and diverse flows or they are genuinely deprived. In sum, he said, boredom has to be taken seriously, and especially visual boredom. Hatred of boredom may be a healthy revulsion against sense and brain deprivation. Paradoxically, he went on, it is thus probably logical for us
to behave illogically, even destructively, if that is what we must do to escape boredom.
Whether his analysis is correct or not, his own revulsion against the terrible visual monotony he found in the carefully planned city is not unusual. I myself had assumed the monotony was hard on adults, and perhaps hardest of all on adolescents, and least bothersome to little children. He disputed this. Little children in genuinely rural or in wilderness surroundings, he pointed out, are inundated with a rich diversity of natural details during their formative years. So are little children brought up amid richly diverse streets of cities and towns where many kinds of activities and sights come to their attention. But in the planned city and suburban precinct, he said, especially those of large scale, small children are being deprived of diverse everyday visual impressions as few children anywhere have ever been deprived before.
Thinking of his words I sometimes wonder whether the hunger for television we see in so many of these little children is a struggle to fill the visual vacuums of their lives. Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.Genuine, rich diversity of the built environment is always the product of many, many different minds, and at its richest is also the product of different periods of time with their different aims and fashions.
There is no way of overcoming the visual boredom of big plans. It is built right into them because of the fact that big plans are the product of too few minds. If those minds are artful and caring, they can mitigate the visual boredom a bit; but at the best, only a bit. Genuine, rich diversity of the built environment is always the product of many, many different minds, and at its richest is also the product of different periods of time with their different aims and fashions. Diversity is a small-scale phenomenon. It requires collections of little plans.
Big plans, in theory, are justified as being gifts to the future. Planning is foresight; the future is what it is all about. Yet big plans, in which everything has been foreseen as far as possible, stifle alternative possibilities and new departures. To plan for the future, and at the same time stifle fresh possibilities, is a contradiction in terms.
Where do the fresh ideas about planning itself emerge and prove themselves? In the planned precincts? No, that is the last place to seek them. The fresh planning and architectural ideas of our own time have emerged in unplanned places, or amid collections of many little plans, and we may expect that the same must be true of the future, true of planning ideas we can’t foresee today.
Planning has its styles and its changing rationales just as surely as clothing design does, or as any other industry or profession does that is concerned with design and function and the relationship between the two. Nowadays the fashion in planning is to plan for mixed uses. This new fashion didn’t arise in the city housing projects, suburban tracts and New Towns that exist today. They were not only the product of a different fashion; they stifled any other fashion in planning thought from incubating there. Thus, ironically, new ideas concerning planning itself had to emerge, if they were to emerge at all, where planning had less influence. Here and there, among muddled collections of little plans in parts of cities that predated modern planning, people found loopholes in zoning and they also found food for imagination. In old industrial buildings, strange new architectural flowers blossomed. Here an abandoned spaghetti factory, there an obsolete chocolate factory, yonder a fine old warehouse took on new life as shelters for skylighted garden restaurants, dance rehearsal halls, little shops, small workshops, all muddled together, sometimes with an office or an apartment sneaked in.*1 Here and there people began surreptitiously moving themselves and their families into loft buildings, manufacturing spaces, because they liked what they could do with the grand, raw spaces they could transform by grace of their own little plans.
To be sure, in one sense this was nothing new. People in previous generations had converted carriage houses to dwellings, inserted stores into houses, turned former mansions into schoolhouses. But fresh ideas did emerge, especially in former industrial buildings. The architectural adaptations were often stunningly imaginative and humanistic. The very muddles of activities that took to coexisting within buildings, as well as in adjoining buildings, seemed to stimulate architectural imaginations grown weary and stultified under the iron hand of big planning. Finally, after enough of the new little aberrations had emerged, architects a few years ago began talking boldly of planning new buildings, too, for mixed use. The idea of mixed uses, muddled together, has now begun to sink even into the consciousness of big planners and developers.All new ideas start small and all new ideas, at the time they emerge, flout the accepted ways of doing things.
The principle at work here embraces more than fresh ideas about planning itself. It embraces ideas about fresh possibilities in general. All new ideas start small and all new ideas, at the time they emerge, flout the accepted ways of doing things. By the time an idea of any sort is risked in big planning, it is already middle-aged or old as an idea. Big plans live intellectually off of little plans. Big plans, precisely because they are big, are not fertile ground for fresh, different possibilities. The deficiency, like their boredom, is built right into their bigness and coherence. “Renewal” shouldn’t imply fossilization. The two are again a contradiction in terms. It is absurd to think of big plans as appropriate tools for city renewal, of all things.
My third and final objection to big plans is that once in place, they are so inflexible. The greater the scale of the planning, the more inflexible the result. When change impinges itself on big plans, adaptation to change comes hard. And again the deficiency is built in. It is a price of comprehensiveness and coherence. The United States, for example, has become woefully inflexible with respect to transportation, not accidentally but by plan. The country’s great highway program was a twenty-year plan adopted in 1956. It was a big plan both in geographical and in time scale, and into it was dovetailed almost all the country’s suburban planning and the cities’ master plans too. Now, too late, with alternatives long stifled, the side effects of this grand planning can be seen: exorbitant energy use, pollution, land waste, and costs imposed for personal transportation on people who can no longer afford the costs. But the suburbs built to coordinate with this transportation, and the cities rebuilt to coordinate with it, are unadaptable to alternative ways of moving people and goods, precisely because they were so well planned for the automobile instead.
Big plans make mistakes, and when the plans are very big the mistakes can be very big also. But the objection I am raising when I speak of flexibility and adaptability goes beyond saying that big plans can turn out to be bad plans. In their very nature, big and comprehensive plans are almost doomed to be mistaken. This is because everything we do changes the world a bit. Everything has its side effects and repercussions. Everything others do changes the world a bit too. We can’t anticipate all the effects and repercussions of change. Big plans render us unadaptable because we can’t adjust to the changes not foreseen in their making; we can hardly even acknowledge the changes as they become evident. We become too committed, in a big way, to our big plans.Life is an ad hoc affair. It has to be improvised all the time because of the hard fact that everything we do changes what is.
Life is an ad hoc affair. It has to be improvised all the time because of the hard fact that everything we do changes what is. This is distressing to people who would like to see things beautifully planned out and settled once and for all. That cannot be.
Does all this mean that trying to plan is useless? No, of course not. Trying to use foresight, which is what planning is, is obviously so necessary and useful that most of us are practicing it constantly. We plant daffodil bulbs in October and set the alarm clock at night. We can plan for our renewal of cities too, but what I am proposing is that we practice making little plans for that purpose, not b
ig ones. I think we need to relearn the art of doing that, and that there are ways to relearn it.
To explain what I mean, I will tell how the practice of renewal planning has gradually changed in my own city, Toronto. I am using Toronto not because it is necessarily avant-garde or has all the answers. It doesn’t. Nobody does, and no place does. But we have been getting a glimmer there of how to plan for little plans, even for large collections of little plans on big sites, and for that reason and because I have watched the change come firsthand, I’ll tell a story about Toronto.
The story begins in 1973, when citizens’ anger against big planning there boiled over one chilly spring morning before dawn, on a dilapidated street where, the day before, employees of a building wrecking company had erected a high board fence around twenty old houses that were to be demolished, and had begun crashing holes in the roof of the most beautiful house right in the center of the group. These houses, although they were neglected and run down, were interesting and human looking in comparison with what was to go up in their place: six identical apartment towers planned by the province’s housing ministry for low income tenants. Actually, the plan for the new housing was not a big plan, as such things go. It occupied not quite half of a single long city block. But it looked like a big plan. It shouted monotony, stultification, inflexibility.
The people gathered in the predawn dark that morning to protest what was planned came from neighborhood organizations far and wide across the city. They weren’t against low-income housing; they were against big plans and things that looked like big plans which, bit by bit, had been destroying the fabric of the city. They had no plan for how to stop this scheme, except to plead with the wrecking workmen to stay their hands. But as they stood talking together and stamping their feet in the cold waiting for the workmen to come, somebody mentioned that it is illegal to wreck buildings unless a fence has been put up around them. The remark was repeated from person to person, and group to group, and without another word everyone began taking action. You would be amazed at how rapidly and purposefully several hundred men, women and children, with no one directing them, can dismantle a sturdily built fence and turn it back to neatly stacked piles of lumber. When the workmen arrived, just as the last boards were being stacked, they couldn’t do anything until they had rebuilt the fence.