Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006
In 1961, when I was seven, Jane Jacobs wrote her masterpiece, Death and Life of Great American Cities, but it was not until a few months ago that I discovered she had later (1992) anticipated my parallel development of the ecosystemic metaphor for urban communities and housing finance:
Jane Jacobs, circa 1965
I realized I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities.
By city ecology I mean something different from, yet similar to, natural ecology as students of wilderness address the subject. A natural ecosystem is defined as “composed of physical-chemical-biological processes active within a space-time unit of any magnitude.” A city ecosystem is composed of physical-economic-ethical processes active at a given time within a city and its close dependencies. I’ve made up this definition, by analogy.
The two sorts of ecosystems — one created by nature, the other by human beings — have fundamental principles in common. For instance, both types of ecosystems — assuming they are not barren — require much diversity to sustain themselves. In both cases, the diversity develops organically over time, and the varied components are interdependent in complex ways. The more niches for diversity of life and livelihoods in either kind of ecosystem, the greater its carrying capacity for life.
Because she was in academic terms a savant — self-educated, self-credentialed — she said only what she thought and wrote only what she cared about. A blowzy Miss Marple (of the Margaret Rutherford variety),
“I don’t think much of that slum clearance plan, do you?”
she took delight in verbally umbrella-whacking the accepted grandees of 1950s’ urban redevelopment: stuffy faux-aristocrat Lewis Mumford, imperious insider-political bulldozer Robert Moses.
Bob Moses on his I-beam, with his UN Headquarters building behind.
As her Washington Post obituary quotes:
She attacked the arrogance of city planners for making decisions without consulting those affected.
“The planner’s greatest shortcoming, I think, is lack of intellectual curiosity about how cities work,” she told the New York Times in 1969. “They are taught to see the intricacy of cities as mere disorder. Since most of them believe what they have been taught, they do not inquire about the processes that lie behind the intricacy. I doubt that knowledgeable city planning will come out of the present profession. It is more likely to arise as an offshoot of economics.”
She took them on because she wrote well — clearly, logically, passionately, with a brook-no-nonsense-from-you-young man peremptory tone.
[A] middle-aged, self-taught architectural and urban-planning specialist with Architectural Forum magazine, she was an incautious woman, at times disheveled in appearance, who tended to anger very powerful people. Several times, she courted arrest to speak out against plans by Robert Moses, a
Architectural Forum, May, 1949
In her heyday, the early 1960s, she was a one-woman urban idea factory, expressing virtually all of what we now consider the canonical principles of New Urbanism, and even tossing off program design concepts like this:
To induce private owners to erect these buildings in neighborhoods where they are needed to replace worn-out building or to augment the supply of dwellings, the government agency involved, which I shall call the Office of Dwelling Subsidies (ODS), would make two kinds of guarantees to builders.
First, the ODS would guarantee to the builder that he would get the financing necessary for construction. If the builder could get a loan from a conventional lending institution, the ODS would guarantee the mortgage.
Second, the ODS would guarantee to these buildings (or to the owners to whom the buildings might subsequently be sold) a rent for the dwelling in the building sufficient to carry them economically. (Pages 326-327)
There in a nutshell are the basic precepts of Section 221d3 and 236 FHA mortgage insurance and Section 8 subsidy. Four years later Lyndon Johnson swept up the detritus of several Federal agencies, stapled their parts together, hit it with a jolt of electricity (appropriations!), and called it HUD.
“Now just pump through volts of funding, and it’ll be alive!”
Ms. Jacobs appeared however to be uninterested in the doing, only the advocacy to do. Delighting in the role of outside provocateur, she removed herself from her native
What is the reason for subsidizing dwellings in cities? […]
A twist of semantics suddenly presents us with people who cannot be housed by private enterprise, and hence must presumably be housed by someone else. Yet in real life, these are people whose housing needs are not in themselves peculiar and thus outside the ordinary province and capability of private enterprise, like the housing needs of prisoners, sailors at sea or the insane.
Perfectly ordinary housing needs can be provided for almost anybody by private enterprise. What is peculiar about these people is merely that they cannot pay for it. (Page 324)
The italics, and the implicit vinegar, are hers.
Jane Jacobs, circa 1985
She also cautioned against complacency:
To combat both stultification and corruption, we ought, every eight or ten years at least, to try out new methods of subsidizing dwellings or add variations to old ones that are working well enough for us to retain. We ought even to call into being entirely new agencies for these new jobs, from time to time, and let old ones fade away. In any case, it is always necessary to check tactics against the specific needs that become evident in specific places. We should always be asking, “Does this device do the job needed here? And if not, what would?” Deliberate, periodic changes in tactics of subsidy would afford opportunity to meet new needs that become apparent over time, but that nobody can see in advance. (Page 335)
Like Hubert Humphrey, who when challenged in 1968 with the question, “whatever happened to all those liberal ideas you espoused,” sharply answered, “we enacted them,” Ms. Jacobs’ own thinking appeared to stop evolving circa 1965. Perhaps she became a prisoner of her own cantankerous fame, being wheeled out to recite her canon:
Mrs. Jacobs thrived as a lecturer and writer. She seldom doubted the rightness of her views and remained an implacable opponent of high-rise buildings and sprawling suburbs even when they proved popular.
and being vocal in service of various causes, signing on to an amicus brief against urban-renewal eminent domain in Kelo v. New London.
Still, like Cushing Dolbeare and Max Kargman, she was sui generis, an astringently clever and effectively visionary advocate for cities and for affordable housing.
Pain in the neck though she undoubtedly was, she remained feisty and provocative to the end. The obituary’s visual cruelty is that it shows you in old age, whereas you should be remembered as you were when your light so brightly shone.
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities
Though Ms. Jacobs is gone, Death and Life remains, still a fantastic book, still a sparkling bundle of provocative ideas and vivid phrases. Remember her as I suspect she would have wished: buy her book (used — she’d crack a smile at that), read it, and yell arguments at her prose as you do.
