Dream Cities by Wade Graham

Author:Wade Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was received like an alarm sounding, earning a wide readership eager to understand why, even after billions spent, Urban Renewal seemed to be making the “urban crisis” worse instead of better. Inside the planning profession, Jacobs was generally dismissed as an amateur at best, and a meddling housewife at worst, including by Lewis Mumford in a 1962 New Yorker magazine article called “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer,” in which he called her “a new kind of ‘expert’” and an “able woman” who “used her eyes, and, even more admirably, her heart to assay the human result of large-scale housing,” but who was unqualified to criticize the scientific expertise of professionals. The book would eventually be translated into six languages and sell a quarter-million copies. Jacobs’s work was part of a larger dialogue, both national and international, about the causes of the decline of central cities, fueled by deep anxiety about the runaway growth of suburbs everywhere and particularly in the Sunbelt, which was being transformed into a collection of metastasizing, suburban city-regions like Southern California, Phoenix, Houston, and South Florida. Combined with widespread doubts about Urban Renewal, this suburban sprawl helped spark a backlash against conventional planning, a backlash that took Jacobs’s Death and Life as a guide and users’ manual.

Against the backdrop of New York City’s struggles—symbolized by the loss of the Giants and Dodgers baseball teams to California in 1957 but painfully lived in white flight, labor strife, soaring crime, the blackout of 1965, and chronic financial woes culminating in near bankruptcy in 1975—analysts and observers mounted an urgent effort to extend Jacobs’s insights to how cities actually worked and why the planning efforts were failing. This campaign was exemplified by architect and planner Oscar Newman’s 1972 book Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, which corroborated Jacobs’s identification of public surveillance by “eyes on the street” and clear demarcation of public and private territory, creating a sense of ownership and responsibility, as critical to making safe places. A more positive effort involved celebrating the successes of the city through its diversity and grit in music, movies, and television shows like the wildly popular Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969 and was in a sense Jacobs’s street “ballet” rendered with live people interacting on an “inner city” streetscape with fuzzy puppets of the baker, the policeman, the cook, and even the bum in the trashcan. Jacobs’s effort was part of an upsurge of quasi-anthropological investigation of how cities worked by observing its denizens in action.

The condominium was one of the most significant developments in design and building of the twentieth century, and it is no coincidence that it appeared at virtually the same moment as Jacobs’s book. The postwar boom in suburban single-family home building had largely left out the cities, as lending requirements made dense, multiunit projects difficult to finance, and renting lost its allure. Developers needed a different kind of property ownership to justify large projects for owner-occupiers. The

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