Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  The mayor of Toronto, when he learned what had happened, used the few hours of grace the protestors had won to persuade the provincial housing authorities to hold their plan in abeyance while he explored alternatives. The provincial authorities agreed, provided that an alternative cost no more than their scheme and would provide as many housing units. They did not expect those provisions to be met, because big planning had stifled their own imaginations and sense of ingenuity. But over the next few weeks the Mayor, the city’s commissioner of housing, and one of the city’s most brilliant firms of architects did plan what was supposedly impossible.*2 Their alternate scheme saved all the old houses and converted their interiors into new flats. The rest of the housing required, which was most of it, was put into new buildings inserted in the backyards. The new buildings had to be ingeniously, even a little crazily, worked into the space, and so did lanes and little courtyards. Furthermore, to make the thing fit, the apartments couldn’t be more or less duplicates of each other. The scheme, because of the very limitations the site imposed when the old buildings remained, had to embrace a variety of accommodations, from dwellings for families with children on lower floors, to apartments for single people, for elderly couples, and even—in one of the old houses—a boarding house for elderly men. Standardization of any sort wouldn’t work on a site so difficult, but variety would.

  Getting this alternative accepted was not easy. Even after the provincial authorities agreed to it, there were struggles with federal bureaucracy, the lender of the building funds. The width of every courtyard and lane had to be defended, and even the size and placement of some of the windows. Nevertheless, the city by standing firm won its points. The thing was built. It has now been occupied for almost six years, and it fits so well into the neighborhood, and so much adds to its interest instead of distracting from it, that the old houses across the street, which had also been run down and dilapidated, have now been bought up and rehabilitated privately. No such renewing effect as that occurred on streets bordering the city’s big planned projects. The builder of a luxury project in another part of the city so much liked what was being done in this poorer section that he too set his projects behind a row of old buildings, linking the two with lanes. This is the only instance I know of in North America in which an expensive building copied a low-income building.

  The success of this first publicly financed infill housing plan led the city to seek out other awkward sites for scattered little plans. Every site was different, with different planning problems. In all cases the old buildings were left, not destroyed, no matter what limitations that imposed. Sometimes the old buildings nearby were incorporated in the new schemes and rehabilitated too; in other cases the new buildings were simply inserted among the old in what had been vacant lots or parking lots. Some of the infill building has been high; most of it is low; but high or low these little plans have all been used to knit together again places of the city fabric that had become frayed or unraveled.

  That is one form of city renewal, knitting up the little holes, but what about the very big holes? What about the sites that seem to demand big planning because they are big sites? In Toronto, some of the parts of the city that have needed renewal most are huge areas near the waterfront, which were first blighted by the railroads, then by expressways bordering the railroad, were taken over by industries and then abandoned by industries, leaving them as wastelands of junkyards, parking lots, and weed grown vacant spaces interspersed here and there with an old industrial building, a warehouse, a transformer station.

  Just such a great tract was chosen by the city for renewal in 1975, a tract so large that the construction would have to take place in phases, requiring, it was thought, about fifteen years for completion.*3 Only a few years earlier, the city’s planners and politicians would have assumed that to do anything here they must first make a comprehensive, detailed plan for the whole thing. But the planners, administrators and politicians who had already previously worked on the infill schemes I have told about had been changed by that experience. Now they respected little plans, ingenuity, opportunism, variety; and from their infill experience they had learned new ways of thinking about planning itself. For this big tract, they did not work out a big, finished plan, but instead a scheme that would be hospitable to many little plans. For this they used five major devices.

  First, instead of thinking of the big tract as a place in its own right, to be set apart from the city, they thought of it as just another piece of city fabric, to be knit into the existing city on its north, east and west. They could not knit it in on the south because there it was cut off by the railroad and expressway. So first they planned streets that would attach the tract into existing city streets without a break. They forgot everything they had learned in school about planning cul-de-sacs, and about buffering off residential areas with figurative Do Not Disturb signs, and laid out streets inside the tract that connect every part with every other part. These streets, real city streets, not fake suburban or country streets, together with a long narrow spine of park or commons running through the tract from end to end, are the skeleton of the plan.

  Second, apart from providing this skeleton, they did not try to plan the whole tract from the start. They planned only the first phase to be built, and planned even that loosely. Apart from choosing a location for a combination school and apartment house—a mixed use building—they contented themselves with designating some streets for low buildings and some street locations for high buildings.

  Third, they left to developers and their architects how the buildings were to look and what kinds of dwellings they were to contain. The developers include, to be sure, the city’s own housing department, but they also include a great variety of independently run housing cooperatives and private developers as well. Some of the housing is for rent to residents, some is for sale. If the developers want to mix stores, restaurants or theaters in with the housing, they can. That is part of leaving room for little plans. There is no shopping center. Shops turn up where other minds than those of the planners think they will be successful.

  Fourth, the planners gave thought to other aspects of flexibility. In buildings developed under the city’s own supervision, what is today a house for a family can potentially be recycled into flats in the future, and vice versa. What is now housing can potentially be recycled into shops in the future, just as happens in a living, changing city which isn’t going to take off for Saturn. Other developers have been encouraged to think in terms of adaptability too.

  And fifth, the few old brick industrial buildings scattered about in the site, which had been thought of previously as part and parcel of its blight, were not demolished to create a clean slate. Every one of them is cherished, to be recycled and to help provide a few links with the past and its fashions in building. The fact that the tract contains so little from the past was not thought of as an asset, but as its chief deficiency. The first of the recycled industrial buildings is now occupied by housing and shops, and a handsome building it is. Significantly enough, even before the site was chosen for renewal, one of the old industrial buildings had already been recycled into a beautiful young people’s theater, and of course it remains.

  About a third of the tract is now completed and occupied, and its streets are delightful, full of variety with surprises around every corner. It is so popular and successful that the building of the rest is proceeding faster than the planners had at first supposed was feasible.

  Recently I asked the architect who had been employed in the city’s housing office to lay out the street skeleton and park and choose the school site what he thought would go on a particularly prominent spot, still untouched. “I have no idea,” he said. “Nobody knows at this point. All we know is that when the right idea comes along, the city will probably recognize it. We don’t have to decide until then, just for the sake of deciding. We don’t have any monopoly on ideas for this neighborhood. Why should we?”

  Into my mind when he sai
d this flashed a memory from my previous visit to Germany, back in 1966. I remembered a day I had spent with Professor Hillebrecht, the city architect of Hanover.*4 First he had shown me around the center of the city, and I was filled with admiration for the skill, sensitivity and imagination with which new buildings had been inserted there to repair the destruction of the city’s fabric from the war. Then he took me to the city’s outskirts to see a large residential tract, a big plan, as boring as all big plans. Perhaps to cheer me up, the next thing he showed me, also in the city’s outskirts, was a romantic looking, vacant and dilapidated, rambling masonry building, which if I remember correctly had once been occupied by a religious order, and which was surrounded by large wooded grounds. “What are you planning to do with this?” I asked. “We don’t know,” he answered. “The right idea hasn’t come along. That doesn’t worry me,” he went on. “We don’t need to decide everything. We have to leave something for the next generation. They’ll have ideas too.”

  With that, my admiration for Professor Hillebrecht, which was already high, really soared. Here was a planner who was really thinking of the future—thinking of it with respect, hope and affection. How different, I thought, from Daniel Burnham. Burnham was an American architect living at the turn of the century. He said something very influential in America. “Make no little plans,” he said. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.” Naturally, that sentiment remains to this day a favorite quotation of American planners. Burnham wanted to control the future.Make no plan bigger than it must be.

  Planning for all of us is a practical, everyday necessity. No responsible person can get along without trying to apply foresight. It is also enjoyable to most of us. Indeed, planning is so enjoyable that the chance to do it in a great big way is one of the seductions of great power: one reason people seek great power. But planning to gratify the impulse to plan, planning done for the sake of planning itself is deadly stuff. If we are going to err in our planning—and we are, because what is perfect?—it is better to err on the side of being loose, minimal, a little too open to improvisation, rather than the reverse. A good rule of thumb would be to make no plan bigger than it must be, and to project it no farther into the future than we simply have to. Wherever we have the choice between making a big plan or providing instead for collections of little plans, let us choose the collections of little plans and the advantages they bring us with their diversity, fresh ideas, and flexibility.*5

  * * *

  *1 The places Jacobs references here are, respectively, the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco’s North End; Ghirardelli Square, also in San Francisco; and Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. In a similar speech delivered at The Great Cities of the World Conference at Faneuil Hall a year earlier, Jacobs suggests a direct link connecting these three projects, each one elaborating upon a prior little plan until it became a big one. Indeed, Benjamin Thompson, the designer of Quincy Market, had a location of his own store, Design Research, in Ghirardelli Square, and drew upon what he learned there for his “festival marketplace” in Boston.

  *2 The firm in question is Diamond and Myers, now defunct, though both partners, Jack Diamond (1932– ) and Barton Myers (1934– ), went on to have laudable careers in their own right. The infill project became known as Dundas-Sherbourne Housing or Sherbourne Lanes.

  *3 This tract became the St. Lawrence neighborhood, bounded roughly by Front Street to the north, Yonge and Parliament Streets to the west and east, respectively, and the railway tracks to the south. Some accounts claim that Jacobs somehow steered this project, but the parties directly involved in its design contradict this story, according to historian Richard White’s article “Jane Jacobs in Toronto, 1968–78.” White reports that Jacobs’s only formal role was recommending the project’s lead planner, an architect at her husband’s firm named Alan Littlewood, who notably had no formal training in city planning. That said, the project’s masterminds all cited Death and Life as a major influence and often chatted casually with Jacobs.

  *4 Rudolph Hillebrecht (1910–99) was, as Jacobs says, the chief planner for Hanover, Germany. He was admired for his attempts to preserve the bomb-damaged historic fabric of the city and do as little clearance as possible. By this point, Hillebrecht had visited Jacobs, in New York in 1964 after reading Death and Life and again in 1970 after her move to Toronto. After Death and Life’s translation into German, he also helped disseminate its lessons in Germany. Ironically, however, Hillebrecht’s Hanover was also regarded by German planners of the time as a model of car-friendly planning. For more, see Dirk Schubert’s article “Jane Jacobs’s Perception and Impact on City Planning and Urban Renewal in Germany” in his edited volume Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs.

  *5 In September 1980, at the Great Cities of the World Conference convened at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Jacobs delivered a version of these remarks in which she celebrated all the “vital little plans” that made the Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall a fresh idea—but she warned that repetition of the “festival marketplace” concept might result in sterility over the long run. It’s a fitting way to sum up the core of Jacobs’s ideas: To sustain and renew a city’s physical, economic, and social vitality efforts must always enable and protect such “vital little plans.” That speech can be found in a 1981 issue of Urban Design International under the title “Safdie/Rouse/Jacobs: An Exchange.”

  Jane Jacobs window-shops in front of Book City, a bookstore in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto where she lived, circa 1983–87.

  Throughout her career, Jacobs encountered behavior on the part of politicians and bureaucrats that mystified and frustrated her. Why should New York’s government deceive its own people? Why are leaders who excel at military matters so poor at managing their economies? She was baffled at the failure of so many to exercise what seemed to her basic ethical common sense. So after Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs turned her sights on the ethical underpinnings of economic life, which became the subject of her Socratic dialogue Systems of Survival, published in 1992. Given her own predilections and past experience, this exploration of morals and ethics became as much a personal exploration as an examination of the behavior of others; it was also a window on a host of related issues, from regulation and equity to governance and privatization.

  For fifteen years, Jacobs had been following one of the whims that so often spurred inspiration for her writing. She had been collecting a list of “esteemed behaviors” commonly performed by heroes in literature or attributed to people in their obituaries and biographies. She began to find that many of these virtuous ways were contradictory: honesty and deception, innovation and tradition, dissent and obedience. Finally, when she grouped characteristics that showed up together and eliminated the virtues common to all, she found herself with two lists of mutually exclusive attributes, and the beginnings of an answer to her bafflement. One set of virtues—what she came to call the “guardian moral syndrome”—appeared in writings for and about people in government, military, policing, regulation, preservation, and activism, while the other list—the “commercial moral syndrome”—appeared in writings for and about people in commerce, industry, and science. These two lists formed the basis of Jacobs’s Systems of Survival, the nuances of which she discusses at length with the conservative journalist David Warren in “Two Ways to Live,” included here.

  Early in the writing process, Jacobs named those following the commercial moral syndrome “traders” and those following the guardian syndrome “raiders,” a negative term that revealed her own initial bias. To her, raiders were those frustrating politicians, planners, and powerbrokers who prized hierarchy, exclusivity, tradition, and obedience, who sometimes used force and deception to get their way. “I’m really a trader and I believ
e in that,” Jacobs admitted in a 1985 interview. She believed first and foremost in honesty, openness, dissent, novelty, and exchange—all traits she said were shunned by the raiders. Nevertheless, she told the interviewer, she would “try and be fair.” By the time Systems of Survival appeared, she realized that she had been “laggard at recognizing that ‘raider’ precepts are as morally valid as trader ones, and are grounded in legitimate territorial concerns.”1 Ultimately, Jacobs developed sympathy for guardian ways, understanding that traders like herself rarely trust or understand them and vice versa (as “Market Nurturing Run Amok” succinctly demonstrates).

  Jacobs never viewed her work on ethics as simply abstract philosophical musing, and she joined with others to test her theories even as she developed them. From 1981 to 1997, Jacobs served on the board of the Energy Probe Research Foundation, an environmental NGO based in Toronto that challenged the guardian values of both government and the mainstream of environmentalism alike with a distinctly “commercial-minded” alternative.2 Like Jacobs, Energy Probe considered new goods and services the key to facing our environmental problems and believed that the guardian culture of government was ill equipped to provide them. In 1994, Jacobs co-founded a program of Energy Probe called the Consumer Policy Institute, which, as the “First Letter” in this part explains, made its mission the privatization of government monopolies in mail delivery, transportation, and energy, among other services. Jacobs’s support of privatization, however, was not driven by the dogma of indiscriminate “small government” offered by politicians like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. The destruction of the social safety net under Thatcher’s administration “appalled” Jacobs.3 In her letter to the Consumer Policy Institute Jacobs explains a clear role she saw for government: regulation—so long as it remains independent from influence, responsive to changing circumstances, and open to creativity. These many nuances of her thought (further elaborated in “Efficiency and the Commons” in Part Five) made Jacobs notoriously difficult to pin down on the conventional political spectrum.