Americans Against the City by Conn Steven

Author:Conn, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The End of the Age of Planning?

When William Whyte published The Exploding Metropolis in 1958, he did so to offer an alternative view of the city to the one guiding the work of urban renewal. The last essay in The Exploding Metropolis came from Greenwich Village resident Jane Jacobs. Three years later, Jacobs would publish her own book and change fundamentally the debate over cities and the practice of city planners.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities created a stir when it appeared in 1961, and a half-century later it stands as undoubtedly the most influential book about cities to appear in America after the Second World War. If William Whyte was angry with what city planners—“a surprising number of whom like to live in suburbs,” he wrote accusingly—were doing to the American city, Jacobs spent more than 400 pages denouncing the entire profession. She made that absolutely clear from the book’s very first line. “This book,” she began, “is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”98

Jacobs wanted to present a view of how the city actually worked from the level of the street and the sidewalk, not from the aerial view or from the aggregate metropolitan statistics preferred by the “orthodox planner.” Where planners saw “problems,” Jacobs saw vitality; what planners wanted to destroy, Jacobs insisted be kept. Density, diversity, mixed use, variety, bustle, all the things planners wanted to eliminate from the city—these were the things that made cities work, and Jacobs celebrated them all. The table of contents sketched an anatomy of the city: sidewalks; parks; neighborhoods; small blocks, old buildings; diversity; concentration. Her point of view, unorthodox to the point of contrariness in 1961, has itself now become the conventional wisdom for city planners, even if sometimes more in word than in deed.

So given how canonical The Death and Life of Great American Cities has become, it is worth remembering that when the book appeared, both it and its author got badly panned. In 1961, it was easy to dismiss Jane Jacobs herself. After all, for chauvinists of the day she was only a woman—a housewife, at that—and seemed to lack any professional credential. (She was, in fact, an editor at Architectural Forum.) Lewis Mumford’s New Yorker review of Death and Life drips with that sort of nasty sexism. He summed up the book as a “mingling of sense and sentimentality, mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” He titled his review of this “schoolgirl’s” efforts “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies” for urban problems. Arthur Row called her a “screeching critic.”99

Others noted that the “orthodox planner” Jacobs complained about was really a straw man. The book included no specific names or projects or theories, Lafayette College professor Paul Pfretzschner pointed out, but plenty of “vituperation” and “unlikely stories.” And since the book’s great strength lay in its fine-grained observations of New York City, some asked whether the book had any relevance outside of Gotham, or indeed outside of Greenwich Village. “Her book is not about Toledo or

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