Jane Jacobs and architecture school
As part of preparing for this research class I'll be teaching this semester in the architecture school, I've been re-reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning. I remember reading the book in my 4th year of architecture school (as part of our social theory and architecture class), and experiencing (very vividly) that critical distance between a concept you've been taught for so long and felt aligned to (in that case, Le Corbusier's Radiant City) and this arm's length point of view of a critic. Prior to reading the book, I had been quite madly in love with Le Corbusier's masterplan - but it's when I got to this particular quote (quite early on in the book) that I paused:
As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners at large.
(p 27)
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| UQ has a lovely copy of Jacobs' book that's been re-bound to keep it intact... it is clearly well-used! |
I am still a fan of Le Corbusier's masterplan - despite Jacobs' misgivings. At the time, I thought a lot of the criticisms she had was rooted in a rather American-centric view and experience of the city (which was unsurprising, given the book's title). But I don't think my initial observation was particularly novel - it's not difficult to walk down the streets of Hong Kong or Singapore and intuit that these are different cities to New York. But with the perspective of having worked in a number of cities, and seeing that global accretion of all cities turning into shades of each other (well, yes, that's a bit of an over-generalisation here) I'm reading Jacobs this time looking for gems on this idea of 'surveillance' and 'trust' (see tweet above) beyond her very well known 'eyes on the street' framework.
How I started teaching Architecture (again)
(I thought here's a good point as any to share how this PhD student in law ended up teaching architecture.)
So it started off with me reading up on smart cities, and one of the criticisms that leapt out at me was this observation that a lot of the architecture / urban planning that's been proposed around these smart city proposals draw heavily from 'New Urbanism'. Much of the criticism that's captured in Jacobs' book can easily be refocused on the New Urbanists... but it did lead me to think of this lecturer I had in architecture school (back in Melbourne), Sandra Kaji-O'Grady. We did a research subject where I explored marine utopias (which led to the book), and I have such a vivid memory of her criticisms of New Urbanism.
Long story short, I googled her and found out she was the head of the school of architecture at UQ, and reaching out to her for a coffee, I got invited to teach. So I return to teaching architecture almost a decade after I had previously taught it. And coming back to some of the incredible material by the greater thinkers of architecture (while I prepare the course notes)... I can't help feeling like this has been a part of the puzzle I've been missing in my life for a while. Apologies if the blog suddenly veers into a stream of consciousness about urban design and architecture. It's been quite a few years since I've had the freedom to really sit and think critically about the city.
