Urbanism
I confess that I’ve never read a word that Jane Jacobs has ever written. Although I plan to. And I know that others have commented on her recent passing.
But I read this in today’s New York Times, and found some of it quite thought-provoking.
It praises her for staring down Robert Moses and his plan to raze parts of Greenwich Village and SoHo to build an Expressway, but…
But the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation’s dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification. And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.
The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs’s generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses’ bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.
The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled.
SoHo is, indeed, a mall with cobblestones. But those galleries, artists, and manufacturers have moved on to other, previously neglected parts of New York City. Brooklyn didn’t become hip until people started getting priced out of Manhattan.
Perhaps her legacy has been most damaged by those who continue to treat “Death and Life” as sacred text rather than as what it was: a heroic cri de coeur. Of those, the New Urbanists are the most guilty; in many cases, they reduced her vision of corner shops and busy streets to a superficial town formula that creates the illusion of urban diversity, but masks a stifling uniformity at its core.
This is true in large-scale projects as diverse as Battery Park City or Celebration, Fla., where narrow streets and parks were supposed to create an immediate sense of community. As it turns out, what the New Urbanists could not reproduce was the most critical aspect of Ms. Jacobs’s vision, the intimate neighborhood that is built — brick by brick, family by family — over a century.
For those who could not see it, the hollowness of this urban planning strategy was finally exposed in New Orleans, where planners were tarting up historic districts for tourists, even as deeper social problems were being ignored and its infrastructure was crumbling.
The answer to such superficiality is not to resurrect the spirit of Robert Moses. But in retrospect his vision, however flawed, represented an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure — roads, parks, bridges — that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.
On the one hand, the author makes some interesting points. Once in a while, the grand project isn’t so bad. Lincoln Center is brought up as an example.
On the other hand, I’m reminded of a character that David Cross used to periodically play on Mr. Show. The freakish intellectual who dresses in a scarf and trench coat even on a hot summer day. He scoffs at the idea of listening to music CDs, and relies on his old Victrola because it’s so “pure it hurts“, refuses to own a TV, etc.
New Urbanism may be nouveau and all, but it tries to maintain the principles that make a neighborhood a neighborhood. And a contrived neighborhood is better than a soulless concrete block or thruway.
