When Jane Jacobs Took on the World

ane Jacobs's book on cities published three decades ago had no academic reputation behind it and no basis in theory. The author was neither a town planner nor an architect and held no university degree of any kind. Yet after its publication in 1961, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" became perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning, and simultaneously helped to kill off the modern movement in architecture.

Professional planners and architects, those jealous guardians of their own credentials, have always regarded Jane Jacobs and her accomplishments with rueful wonder. How could a magazine editor with no formal schooling in their discipline produce a work that radically attacked their most important theories and permanently changed the intellectual atmosphere in which they worked? Even as late as 1988, an article by David R. Hill in The American Planning Association Journal criticized Ms. Jacobs's failure to meet the criterion of "empirical verifiability" with conclusions "operationalized for quantitative research" -- even as it acknowledged that she had forced a rethinking of orthodox ideas and changed the assumptions behind city planning.

Largely because of Ms. Jacobs and the mood she created, the large-scale bulldozing of worn-out districts became unpopular, old-style Federal urban renewal on the grand scale ended and the building of freeways through cities slowed. Planners instead turned to mixed-use projects, greater flexibility in zoning and redevelopment of old districts by "infill," the system of enhancing an old street's value by inserting new townhouses in unused space -- all ideas enthusiastically recommended by Ms. Jacobs. Under her influence, words like "neighborhood" and "street" acquired new importance in the planning vocabulary. Ms. Jacobs, alas, did not solve the problem of how to renew America's cities, but she showed how it would not be solved and suggested how more promising approaches could be developed.

Usually, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is discussed by planners and architects, just as Ms. Jacobs's more ambitious later books ("The Economy of Cities," published in 1969, and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations," which appeared in 1984) were often reviewed and analyzed by economists. That is appropriate because the ideas of such an independent thinker can enter the mainstream only if they gather a degree of support among professionals.

BUT "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments. In it, she depends on a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind.

Not only did she attack the most sacred beliefs of city planning, but Ms. Jacobs also helped to subvert an even more powerful orthodoxy: academic credentialism, a religion whose central doctrine states that no analysis of a subject of consequence can be taken seriously unless the writer has professional credentials, preferably at the doctoral or postdoctoral level.

This idea was then relatively new. The writing of serious books by nonspecialists, on subjects ranging from geology to linguistics, had been central to Western culture in the last century and the first decades of this one. In more recent times, however, specialists have pushed amateurs to the margins; the uncredentialed writer may now easily be dismissed as a popularizer or a publicist, someone who absorbs the ideas of specialists and then simplifies them, or oversimplifies them, for the public.

In retrospect, it becomes clear that some of the most powerful books of any given period have been written in defiance of credentialist assumptions. From this distance we can see that the period that gave us "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was especially rich in this kind of writing. The first half of the 1960's produced a cluster of significant books written by authors who were not officially learned or were stepping boldly outside their specializations. They are not of uniform quality and not all of them are as readable today as Ms. Jacobs's book is, but they show similarities of background and effect.

"Growing Up Absurd" was published in 1960, the year before "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." It was the work of Paul Goodman, a poet, playwright, novelist and lay analyst who tackled the specialized subject of youth and delinquency in a way that was startlingly fresh; critics of traditional schooling borrowed his arguments for many years, the New Left of the 1960's briefly adopted him as a guru and his views can still be heard echoing through discussions of education.

In 1962, "Silent Spring," an attack on the poisoning of nature by insecticides, appeared. It turned out to be the seminal book of the environmental movement, but its author, Rachel L. Carson, was not a scientist of any kind. She was a journalist and naturalist with a master's degree in marine biology. In a sense, "Silent Spring" ran parallel to Ms. Jacobs's book. Carson was not principally interested in pest-killing chemicals as such; she was interested in their effects on the life forms she studied, as Ms. Jacobs was interested in the city dwellers affected by massive housing projects and other schemes she regarded as mistakes by planners. The Jacobs approach involved seeing cities as intricate working organisms, something like the way a naturalist sees ecosystems. Today we can read the two books side by side as similar commentaries on the hubris of technology.

Another seminal book by a nonspecialist appeared in 1963 -- "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan. Ms. Friedan was a magazine writer, not a psychologist or social scientist, but her book questioned basic ideas about the role of women, started a new wave of feminism and had a greater effect on thinking about psychology and family patterns than the work of any specialist of her time.

The next year, a professor of English, Marshall McLuhan, working far beyond the confines of his discipline, wrote "Understanding Media," a landmark in communications studies. McLuhan today is not taken as seriously as he once was, but the constant reappearance of his views (usually uncredited) in discussions of television demonstrates the permanent force of his work. And in 1965 a lawyer, Ralph Nader, produced "Unsafe at Any Speed." It was essentially about the engineering of automobiles, a field in which he had no credentials.

Each of these books presented a fresh voice that we did not know we needed until we heard it. Each of them provided a fresh way of looking at phenomena that many of us thought we already understood. This is the role of the great amateurs: to see clearly the issues that academic specialists cannot see because they are limited by the blinders of their institutions and their disciplines. These books have been so widely influential that opinions first put forth in their pages are now commonly held by people who have never read them or even, in some cases, heard the names of the authors.

It is a characteristic of such books that their influence reaches beyond the subject they set out to cover. Carson's readers eventually worried about far more than pesticides. Ms. Friedan's attack on the unexamined structure of the American family eventually provided intellectual fuel for gays and other minorities. Mr. Nader's book was the beginning of a broad movement in consumer protection. Ms. Jacobs's ideas also spread beyond her original targets, but in a way that is not quite so easy to identify. Understanding the broad effects of her book requires a glance at her work methods and her arguments.

In the 1950's, as a writer and editor for Architectural Forum, she often visited housing projects designed by some of the leading architects of the day. In most cases, she observed that whole districts had been torn down and replaced by meticulously planned new buildings and parks, each of them a monument to its creator's love of orderliness and hatred of traditional urban chaos. She discovered that these projects were strikingly unsuccessful because they were imposed upon rather than created in collaboration with the people using them. Intentionally, they eliminated diversity -- stores were rigidly separated from dwellings, for instance -- and yet diversity was the very quality that made city life interesting and enjoyable. Planners, with the best of intentions, had created great windswept open spaces that no one wanted to use. Ms. Jacobs noticed that people preferred to spend their time visiting the old and chaotic-looking business streets nearby.

IN a sense, everyone knew something about this; there had already been articles on "the new slums." But Ms. Jacobs brought several important elements to the discussion. She not only understood and radically challenged the theories behind this form of planning, but she also celebrated and honored traditional city streets as the focus of everyday public life. This is one reason her book implicitly called into question the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers. In her view their buildings simply ignored the streets on which they were built. In doing so, readers could see, they ignored the most vivid and potentially exciting aspect of public life in the city.

Above all, Ms. Jacobs argued -- as she has frequently argued since in her books on economics and as she has argued publicly for more than 20 years in her adopted city of Toronto -- for the appreciation and nurturing of spontaneity and inventiveness of individuals rather than the generalized and abstract plans of governments and corporations. Some of her admirers have found an even broader message in what she wrote. In 1982 the political scientist Marshall Berman, in "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," suggested that Ms. Jacobs played "a crucial role in the development of modernism." Mr. Berman said she demonstrated that the meaning for which modern men and women were searching lay surprisingly close to home, in the perpetual motion and change of the city, an "evanescent but intense and complex face-to-face communication and communion."

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was about planning but also about the spirit and energy that animate cities and civilizations. Jane Jacobs argued that we must love cities for what they are: not poor imitations of the countryside or works of art designed by master planners but unpredictable, exuberant and surprisingly rich creations of those who know how to use them and care for them. People who were influenced by her book began to think differently not only about the planning of cities but also about spontaneity and diversity as virtues in themselves. Like a true amateur, Jane Jacobs spilled over the edges of her subject and provided, for many of her readers, a description of modern life that was both sharply critical and warmly optimistic. A 'STIMULATING AND AWFUL' BOOK

When "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" appeared in 1961, reviews were more positive than otherwise, sprinkled liberally with words like "triumphant," "richness" and "seminal." But even those reviewers who admired it found the book unfair.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Lloyd Rodwin, a professor of city and regional planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had this to say: "It won't matter that what this author has to say isn't always fair or right or 'scientific.' Few significant works ever are. . . . Jane Jacobs's book should help to swing reformist zeal in favor of urbanity and the big city. If so, it might well become the most influential work on cities since Lewis Mumford's classic, 'The Culture of Cities.' It has somewhat comparable virtues and defects. Not quite as long or comprehensive, it is wittier, more optimistic, less scholarly and even more pontifical. The style is crisp, pungent and engaging . . . the book is crammed with arresting insights as well as with loose, sprightly generalizations." In his final paragraph, the reviewer used the phrase "a great book."

Many reviewers both admired the book and felt compelled to distance themselves from it. They found it extreme and harsh. Some of them apparently found it frightening. They were unsettled by the way Ms. Jacobs dealt with the great visionaries of planning, men who were heroes to generations of planners and architects.

In the 1960's, when discussing modernist design, it was commonplace to acknowledge that monstrous mistakes had been made, but critics usually explained that these errors were the result of distorting the ideas of the great masters. That was not the position Jane Jacobs took. Her book was not an extension or refinement of earlier work; it was the antithesis of earlier work. She was challenging not simply the mistakes she saw around her but the very idea of a designed urban Utopia, an idea to which generations of intellectuals had wistfully committed themselves. For these movements she had a startling word: "reactionary."

Professional planners found this especially painful. It was one thing to say what much of the world had already noticed, that many public housing projects were designed without imagination and with little concern for the lives of the people using them. It was another thing altogether to say, in effect, that megabuilders like Robert Moses and the Washington housing bureaucrats could be placed in roughly the same box with Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, Sir Patrick Geddes and even a man then widely regarded as a kind of saint of urbanism -- Lewis Mumford.

To some professionals, it was even more painful to watch Ms. Jacobs undermine the intellectual and social rationale for zoning, the carving up of cities into single-use neighborhoods. In most of North America at that time, single-use zoning was the principal activity of city planners. Their greatest accomplishment was the segregation of cities by function -- housing here, commerce there, industry over there. Ms. Jacobs said, persuasively, that this whole idea was nonsense, and dangerous nonsense. It was as if she had somehow tried to persuade dentists that filling teeth did more harm than good.

Still, in the summer of 1962, when the book appeared in Britain, it called forth more enthusiasm. Jonathan Miller, writing in The New Statesman, called it "a hot, trenchant pamphlet in defense of the city street" and noted that Jane Jacobs's ideas had already become conventional wisdom among young urban sociologists. Marcus Cunliffe, in The Spectator, wanted everyone to read the book and grew so excited that he sprayed out a series of metaphors: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," he said, "has the force of a sledge-hammer and the shock of a cold shower" and "the brilliance of an ordinary sunny day."

The most eagerly awaited response was Lewis Mumford's, but the world had to wait more than a year for it. In 1961 Mumford was 66 years old and an Olympian figure in American culture. He had written influential books on literature and technology, but it was as an architectural critic, particularly for The New Yorker, that he was best known. He had noted some of Ms. Jacobs's earlier work with pleasure and agreement, and perhaps he opened her book in the expectation of agreeing further. Instead he found that the entire Garden City tradition, the tradition for which he was the most articulate advocate, was under attack. The ideal of Garden City visionaries was a stable, ordered, carefully planned environment, close to nature. Ms. Jacobs argued that Utopian thinking of just this sort was draining the life from cities. Mumford was irked, and irked even more when he discovered that critics were comparing these new ideas with his own and finding his outdated. Donald L. Miller describes Mumford's reaction in his 1989 biography, "Lewis Mumford: A Life."

"What turned Mumford's rancor into boiling rage was Jacobs's crude portrayal of his . . . ideas, an analysis of garden city thinking he considered almost 'comical' in its inaccuracy." Mumford began composing his reply almost as soon as he closed Ms. Jacobs's book. Later he wrote to a friend, "I held my fire . . . for a whole year, but when I got down to write I discovered that the paper burned, in spite of the long cooling period."

According to Mr. Miller, Mumford produced not one but three long articles. The New Yorker persuaded him to cut them down to one piece and tone down his anger. His article ran through 20 pages of the Dec. 1, 1962, issue. He seems to have decided that since he felt Jane Jacobs had oversimplified his thinking, he would oversimplify hers. He wrote: "If people are housed in sufficiently congested quarters -- provided only that the buildings are not set within superblocks -- and if there is a sufficient mishmash of functions and activities, all her social and aesthetic demands are satisfied." He described her as a writer of some insight who had gone horribly wrong. Privately, he told friends he thought her book was "stimulating and awful."

Later, various commentators suggested that in opposing the planning tradition Ms. Jacobs was asserting the female principle (specific, practical, intimate) over the male principle (general, visionary, grand), the male principle having been the thought system for generations of planners before her. I think at some level Mumford understood this, without liking it at all. His article on "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" appears in "The Lewis Mumford Reader," published in 1986, under the heading, "Home Remedies for Urban Cancer," which suggests that Jane Jacobs's ideas are to traditional planning as folk healing is to medical science. But in 1962 in The New Yorker, either Mumford or his editors put an even more scornful heading on it -- "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies."

Hostile or not, that was not far from the truth. Ms. Jacobs had in fact developed, through direct observation rather than Utopian theory, a highly personal way of thinking about cities, and explained her home remedies so effectively that they have since been adopted by generations of planners.