hipercroquis

By Karrie Jacobs

I have a confession. Despite the fact that I
consider myself a hard-core urbanist steeped in the gospel of Jane
Jacobs, until recently I had never actually read her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Sure, I owned a copy for decades (and dutifully replaced it every time
it was permanently borrowed). I’d referenced it on occasion, reading
passages that seemed relevant to whatever I was working on at the time,
but never sat down and read it cover to cover.

I decided to read it—really read it—about a year ago, after New York
Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff pinned opposition to
developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards megaproject in Brooklyn on
“acolytes of urbanist Jane Jacobs.” Something about that turn of phrase
seemed wrongheaded, as if Jacobs devotees (she and I are not related)
were too quaint and insular to appreciate the grand gift that Ratner
and his chosen architect, Frank Gehry, wanted to bestow on them.
Predictably I didn’t sit down with the book until after Jacobs died in
April.

Like many people, I’d made plenty of assumptions based on second- or
thirdhand readings. For instance, because Jacobs is repeatedly cited in
Suburban Nation,
the New Urbanist tract by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and
Jeff Speck, I assumed that she would have been a willing accomplice to
that movement. It seems logical that Jacobs—with her reputation for
advocating “close-grained” detail and mixed use—would support the
calibrated street life meted out by Duany and his ilk. But as I read
Jacobs it became clear that she never intended her ideas to be applied
to smaller suburban settlements. She was writing only about big cities,
with all their native grit and mess. Moreover, she consistently
ridiculed the Garden City movement of the nineteenth century, the
clearest precursor to New Urbanism, attributing to it the notion of
“harmony and order imposed and frozen by authoritarian planning.”

The Jacobs I thought I knew—an advocate for small-scale thinking and an
opponent of large-scale projects—is not the one I discovered when I
actually began to read her text. Her main argument was quite different:
she used the example of her own Greenwich Village neighborhood to make
the case that all planning and development should “generate city
diversity”; but she did so to contrast the rich detail of urban life
with the bold strokes then typical of planners. “The main
responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop—insofar
as public policy and action can do so—cities that are congenial places
for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to
flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises,” Jacobs
wrote.

Like many absorbers (as opposed to readers) of Jacobs, I had long
thought that she wanted cities to look and behave like her beloved
little block on Hudson Street. And I’d always assumed the knee-jerk
opposition to anything new that inevitably surfaces at community board
meetings—along with the plague of “contextual” faux historical
architecture—could somehow be traced to her town-house door. Now I
don’t think so.

Yes, Jacobs was articulate about her contempt for Le Corbusier and his
vision of the Radiant City, which, she wrote, “had a dazzling clarity,
simplicity, and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to
understand. It said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement.”
Her target, however, was not his architectural style per se but rather
the idea that vast stretches of green space were automatically
beneficial to urban life, that Corbu’s brand of reductive thinking
could produce a genuinely urbane place. I was delighted to find that
Jacobs didn’t have a problem with new construction or contemporary
architecture as long as it was well integrated into the urban fabric.
She praised the new office towers of Park Avenue, such as Lever House
and the Seagram Building, calling them “masterpieces of modern design.”

Ouroussoff’s dismissal of the critics of Atlantic Yards is a
misreading. I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or
disapprove of Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would
likely be a bit more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In
certain ways the Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of
residential and office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her
thinking. The project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing
units adds to its overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge
project by one developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s
possible that Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much
as she reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying,
by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently
separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The
new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods;
instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to
urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of
what she termed “border vacuums.”

In a more recent bad-boy postmortem headlined “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs,“
Ouroussoff continued to lump her in with the progenitors of faux
historicism, classifying her as an advocate of the twee and charming
instead of what she actually was, a champion of big cities and the
opportunities they represent. Her ideas may be nearly 50 years old,
penned as American cities began a long decline, but they didn’t come
into vogue among planners, architects, and developers until nearly 30
years after the book was published. The urban renaissance we’re
currently experiencing is young—10 years, maybe 20, in the making—and
was built on groundwork laid by Jacobs. (Although she wrote with great
prescience about the tendency of the most vibrant neighborhoods to be
undermined by their own success, I don’t think she could have
anticipated how a process she characterized as “unslumming” would
eventually play out as a raging real estate boom.)

Admittedly I could be the one misreading Jacobs—cherry-picking her book
for the ideas that support my own penchant for density, diversity, and
complexity—but it’s clear from the book’s final chapter, “The Kind of
Problem a City Is,” that she was arguing above all against reductive
thinking. Jacobs concludes by declaring that scientific methodology was
finally sophisticated enough to take on the city, that we’ve at long
last achieved “the ability to deal with problems of organized
complexity.” She explains that the city-planning strategies she
opposed—the urban-renewal projects of the postwar years and onward—were
based on the notion that cities and their residents represented
“disorganized complexity,” and that their movements and actions could
be plotted statistically, as if they were electrons or billiard balls.
She predicted that new ways of thinking and seeing would allow future
planners to better analyze the complex web of interactions that cause
urban neighborhoods to succeed or fail. She was writing in 1959 and
1960 as if she’d seen a preview of today’s computer-modeling
capabilities.

The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard
her as a champion of stasis—to believe she was advocating the world’s
cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers
and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and
turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration
to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic,
ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small. The
real notion is to build in a way that honors and nurtures complexity.
And that’s an idea impossible to outgrow. °

[via metropolis mag]

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