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Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
(Photo by Karen Levy)
| Her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was only the beginning of a career as writer, thinker and activist. by Lisa Rochon The Vietnam War was in full roar when Jane Jacobs quit the United States for the political calm of Canada, along with her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, and their three children, Ned, Jimmy, and Mary. Once settled here in Toronto, she did what many other immigrants and political refugees had done before: she staked out a bit of the city to call her own. Jane Jacobs cultivated her garden, like many of us, by experimenting. Sometimes there were mystery bulbs put in during the fall, which, come spring, would turn out surprising quantities of irises. She saved seeds from the Halloween jack-o'-lantern, planted them, and waited for pumpkins to sprout. She ordered maidenhair ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits, unsure of their chances of survival, but willing to risk two dollars to see how they might work out, to learn through her experience. Patient empiricism distinguishes Jane Jacobs as a great thinker of our time. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), was the product of careful, impartial observation of the ways city life flourished in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods, and how it was snuffed out in public housing proj-ects. The book was not only a major rethinking of modern planning, it was a fierce condemnation of the writings of Sir Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, and Lewis Mumford, among others, which Jacobs denounced as utopian screeds responsible for turning people away from the very essence of the city, the street. Over the years, much poison was spilled between Jacobs and Mumford. In the 1950s, though, long before they began to disagree, he recognized great promise in the lively prose Jacobs was composing as an associate editor at Architectural Forum. Offering his avuncular approval to the aspiring critic, he wrote, "There's no one else who's had so many fresh and sensible things to say about the city--and it's high time these things were said and discussed. So get to work--but have a contract sewed up after you've done a chapter or two." The letter was one of several he sent to cheer on somebody he wanted as an ally in the fight for livable cities. But Jacobs recalls that the letters Mumford penned to her were "totally hypocritical, very paternal and condescending." And when his review of The Death and Life appeared in The New Yorker, a full year after the book's publication, Mumford denounced the young writer as "Mother Jacobs," offering a ridiculous "homemade poultice for the cure of cancer." At her Toronto home, 30-odd years after the fact, Jacobs remembers, "I laughed at a lot of it. I have a fairly thick skin. I didn't go into this to win popularity or admiration from celebrities. Nothing could interest me less." Jacobs responded to the review by using her uncommon good sense, and the telephone. She was in the middle of leading a community protest against Robert Moses' planned Lower Midtown Expressway, and Mumford's denouncement of her book was being waved about by city planners trying to impugn her credibility. "I spoke to him on the phone right after that review appeared," Jacobs says, as though it happened yesterday. "I called him up. We were fighting the expressway in Manhattan and the review was being used to discredit me. So I thought that the way to counter that was to show that he was on our side on that issue." She pauses for emphasis. "He was really a stuffed shirt. I said who I was, and--to clear the air, because he knew I was going to lambaste him--I said, 'This isn't about The New Yorker. Of course, I don't agree with you, but that doesn't matter. We're having this fight and would you send a letter of opposition to the expressway that could be read at a hearing coming up and that we could publish, too?' And he said, 'Yes,' he would be very glad to. And he did. He wrote a good letter." Jacobs has never shied from controversy. In 1980 she stirred up Canadian nationalists' rancor with her book The Question of Separatism (Random House, 1980), which suggested that the partition of Quebec from Canada might well be an intelligent move. (Economic strengths and weaknesses, she argued, would be more effectively reflected in independent currencies.) She has been bombastic and snide in front of politicians and regularly lashes out at journalists. But at other times, she is not only personable and caring but also downright girlish in her infectious enthusiasm for life and the people moving through it. Born Jane Butzner on May 4, 1916, in the coal-mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, she grew up a regular kind of girl, the daughter of a family physician. But she was also quick to question conventional wisdom handed down by people who pretended to know--like her third-grade teacher. Though Jacobs is now a Canadian citizen, the narrative in her mind is strongly American, a perspective earned by testing the civil rights and liberties of her native country. She was arrested (along with Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and others) during antidraft demonstrations in New York. Before that, in 1952, her allegiance to the U.S. was investigated by the Department of State's Loyalty Security Board, whose interrogatory provoked her to add several pages as an attachment. "First of all," she wrote, "I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas." And when she wrote her most recent book, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Random House, 1992), a thoughtful but heated debate about morality, she heard the five participating voices as Americans, specifically New Yorkers. "I wasn't up to imagining Canadians having that kind of conversation," she says. "I like that about Torontonians, their civility. But they often don't speak their minds." Today, Jacobs lives alone in the Annex, a newly hip neighborhood just north of downtown--she lost her husband in 1996. The area offers helpful distractions. It's a tightly knit community of academics and students, animated by cafés, dance clubs, bookstores, and bakeries that sell enormous wedges of cheesecake. The old apple, pear, and black walnut trees that line the residential streets link the dense neighborhood to its history as farmland. (Ironically, given Jacobs' antisuburban sentiments, the area was originally a suburb, and eventually annexed by Toronto.) Here, Jacobs has produced several of her books; she has never considered retirement. Looking back at The Death and Life reveals another irony. Jacobs' denunciation of the planning pooh-bahs of the day was swift and brutal and took no prisoners; one target was Sir Patrick Geddes, for his endorsement of Ebenezer Howard's idea of the Garden City. But the early and extensive planning work by Geddes was based on much the same kind of empirical observation that Jacobs has promoted and practiced over her lifetime. And it was Geddes who concluded--after working in 50 different communities in India--that the widespread use of slum clearance, a common strategy of British planners in the colonies, was an outrage. His work in India, which dates back to 1917, is documented in the remarkable Patrick Geddes in India. In it, he observes how the dreary and conventional plans of the British effectively destroyed neighborhood life. And he asks the traditional planner to consider the costs to the individual: "For, when her old home is taken away, what joy has a woman in the inferior lodging to which we have now consigned her?" These words could well have been penned by Jacobs, but they belong to Geddes, written more than five decades before Jacobs' first book. Who is Jane Jacobs and where does she fit in the world? The question is asked by Peter Gzowski, the eminent radio personality, in front of hundreds of admirers gathered at the Ideas that Matter conference. Jacobs bows her head to collect her thoughts... her answer is so clear and refreshing, it reverberates deeply throughout the auditorium. She begins by way of fractals. Fractals make Jacobs curious. "Are they little things in a big thing, or is it a big thing in a little thing?" Fractals help her to explain her place in the world. "Once you know about fractals, you know you live in all of them," she finally answers. "I live at 69 Albany Avenue in Toronto, but I also live in the universe. And I'm at home in both of them." |
Keywords:
Jane Jacobs, urban planning, city
