Toronto by Allan Levine

Author:Allan Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771620437
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 2014-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

JANE’S DISCIPLES

Urban guru Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) argued that people in cities should live in densely populated, mixed and “lively” neighbourhoods on short blocks, surrounded by old as well as new homes and businesses. Her ideas and writings inspired a generation of Toronto politicians as well as civic leaders across North America. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ-62-137838

Before the real city could be seen, it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were kind of a charting.

—MICHAEL ONDAATJE, IN THE SKIN OF A LION, 1987

The various proposals to transform the downtown were referred to as “urban renewal,” a catch-all term for so-called progress. What the proposals really meant, however, their many critics argued, was the expropriation of whole neighbourhoods regarded as derelict slums and their replacement with isolated Regent Park-like highrise apartments. The needs or wants of the long-time residents living in these areas were largely ignored. “If you are going to make an omelette,” said Mayor Philip Givens about one urban renewal project, “you have to break eggs,” implying that with sacrifice came something that was supposedly far better. From the black-and-white perspective of those in power, skyscrapers, slum clearance, and a vast expressway network linking the suburbs with the downtown was Toronto’s future. Anyone who challenged this vision was out of their depth and probably a Marxist.

Yet challenge it they did. Many of the so-called agitators were in their twenties and thirties, university-educated and not afraid to question authority. Whose city was it, they wanted to know—was it the property of the developers, politicians, and automobiles, or did Toronto belong to its citizens? Their defiance was inspired by the eminent urban guru of the era, Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book Death and Life of Great American Cities altered perceptions about ideal city life. A keen observer of the human condition, she rose from being a New York magazine writer in the forties with an interest in architecture to becoming a creative thinker about cities in the same way that her contemporaries Marshall McLuhan thought about the power of television, Betty Friedan wrote about women and motivated feminism, and Ralph Nader pushed the big automobile companies about safety.

Going against the accepted precepts of modern urban planning, Jacobs argued that people in cities should live in densely populated, mixed, and “lively” neighbourhoods on short blocks, surrounded by old as well as new homes and businesses. She disdained housing projects that segregated residents by income and cities built around traffic congestion. A pleasant and charming woman, Jacobs was an unrepentant critic, which drove her many detractors to distraction. Lewis Mumford, the urban historian and highly regarded expert on city life was one of them. “Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean of all habitations, good or bad,” he wrote caustically in the early sixties, “she bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century, and every competing idea, without even a pretense of critical evaluation.”

This was an unwarranted censure of her urban philosophy.

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