More on Jane Jacobs

Mike Joyce's clever campaign in 2009 pushing back on gentrification*

Currently reading: Saskia Sassen, 'How Jane Jacobs changed the way we look at cities' (5 May 2016) The Guardian.

Nathaniel Rich, 'The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs' (November 2016) The Atlantic.

Sassen describes meeting with Jacobs and the line of inquiry she was subsequently subjected to by Jacobs, who reframed Sassen's thinking on urban policy in reference to 'place' and the consideration of the 'loss of neighborhoods and erasure of local residents' experiences'. Sassen describes this approach of considering the built form / urban policy as a thinking about the city at the 'micro' level.

Sassen considers that the scale and enormity of what cities have become makes it easy to depersonalise and generalise data on the city; diversity and the individual lived experiences that produce 'sub-economies' within global metropolises are 'now seen as irrelevant... or belonging to another era'. But Sassen states that Jacobs' works indicate that this macro approach to viewing the city is erroneous as it neglects consideration of displacement and the impacts of gentrification.

'Indeed, I can imagine she would have affirmed without a quiver of doubt that, no matter how electronic and global the city might one day become, it still has to be "made" [ie. that it exists and impacts urban behaviour through its physical form] - and therein lies the importance of place'. Sassen argues that this sense of place permits further understanding of the role a city plays in its own economy, returning to the analytical framework so dominant in the earlier half of the 20th century where (from the 1900s) 'the city was a lens for understanding larger processes' and, which permitted sociologists observing the city to understand the 'major processes of [the] era', namely, 'industrialisation, urbanisation, alienation, and... urbanity'.

Rich's article on Jane Jacobs is just a masterpiece - I'll be fortunate if my writing approaches even a fraction of this in my PhD thesis. He weaves the works of Jacobs as a passionate treatise on the 'fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble'... and in our current global political climate with the hounds of the far, far right and the barren left shouting at each other, Rich's curated and thoughtfully chosen observations on Jacobs' works are just delicious.

He references her 'six-month purgatory in Higgins', where Jacobs (then Butzner) spent time with her Presbyterian missionary aunt, who on coming upon on a town isolated in the mountains (Higgins), was 'so staggered by its poverty that she refused to leave'. And while Jacobs only referred to Higgins in Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) and Dark Age Ahead (2004), the lesson from her time in Higgins was imprinted in her works: (in the voice of Solon) beware the empire in decline!

Jacobs' study of fallen empires pulled together 'common early indicators of decline: "cultural xenophobia," "self-imposed isolation," and "a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit... to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and worldview." Clearly, these themes resonate in our current global political climate.

Rich then traced the investigation she faced as a suspected Communist sympathizer, beginning in 1945 when she had tried to travel to Siberia. By 1952, Jacobs had declared to the Loyalty Security Board (in 8,000 words no less) 'there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment' (almost paraphrasing in a way the argument against 'Groupthink', coined by her mentor William H Whyte). This book I'm currently reading, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is what Rich describes as Jacobs translation of 'principles of individual liberty into urban design'. And I think it makes a great starting point and framework to consider how the principles of individual liberty are compromised / enhanced / manufactured in this world of video / AI surveillance we've now inherited, contrasting this to Jacob's thoughts on natural surveillance and 'the wisdom of crowds'.

But what caught my attention was this paragraph from Rich's article:
'She was sensitive to reader opinion... In 1949, V. Kusakov of the academy of Architecture in the U.S.S.R. complained in a Soviet publication about two articles, uncredited by written by Jacobs, praising the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modern architects. Kusakov attacked Amerika for neglecting to cover the more important story: "the ever increasing housing crisis which the cities of America are experiencing." American capitalism, Kusakov wrote, "dooms the majority of the population to a negative existence and death in ill-smelling cesspools, in slums deprived of air, sunlight, and trees or shrubs. / The column unsettled Jacobs, who responded with a thorough investigation of life in America's inner-city neighborhoods.'.. and that 'seemingly narrow question' of how to address this negative experience of living in the city '[broadened] into one of the biggest questions of all: What, really, was the Good Life?' How, in other words, could urban policy promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?'

*Graphic Designer Mike Joyce's clever campaign in 2009 pushing back on the gentrification of Greenwich Village in New York. In his interview with blogger, Jeremiah Moss, he notes that this campaign was not meant to be a personal statement against Marc Jacobs (who he states is 'really talented'). It was merely a play on words reflecting the taking-over of the Village by 'franchises and chains of all kinds'. Read more here.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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)

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.