Photos: Main St.Santa Monica; Prince and Broadway, NYC; Woolworth Bldg. NYC.
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The writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs died last week at 89. In college, I read her book, “The Life and Death of Great American Cities”. What she wrote I still remember.
Her ideas weren’t only about cities, but about human life and humanism.
Only last month, I bought her latest book, “Dark Age Ahead” in which she argues that our latest human chapter carries the peril of decline and a new dark age. These five pillars of civilization are collapsing: community and family, higher education, scientific integrity, taxation and government and the self-regulation of the learned professions.
“Dark Age Ahead” brought Jacobs’ ideas to the 21st Century. She criticized colleges that promoted growth and factory-like dispensing of degrees to students. She saw the sad end of taxation for social progress, as cities struggled to pay for education, parks and social services desperately needed. She discussed the false reporting of profits, by major multi-nationals, and the redistribution of income to the wealthiest top percent.
She lamented the loss of indigenous cultures and customs: songs, painting, crafts and languages. If a culture failed to pass along to each succeeding generation ideas and learning, it was headed to extinction.
Jacobs may have traveled around the globe in her critique of humans, but she always came back to the city. Her heroic efforts and energies to prevent New York’s Robert Moses from destroying cast iron Soho to build a crosstown expressway marked an end of a dark age in urban destruction.
But some revisionists are arguing that Jacobs’ ideas are now dated. Modernism is right, we may need a strong urban planner like Moses, and look what happened to the quaint part of the city: it has become a Starbucks and chain store nightmare of consumerism. The NY Times’ Nicolai Ourousoff wrote an article entitled, “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs”:
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.
It’s strange to argue that a destructive force like a freeway somehow regains a noble purpose merely because it walls off a historic neighborhood or has “heroic scale”. I walk under the dark concrete mass of the heroically scaled 405 as it passes over Victory Blvd. and am continually edified by the dead animals, urine smell, trash and tailpipe emissions underneath. Is Ourousoff living in the same city as we are?
He also takes issue with Jacobs’ alleged disparagement of modernism:
Just as cities change, so do our perceptions of them. Architects now in their mid-40’s – Ms. Jacobs’s age when she published “Death and Life” – do not share their parents’ unqualified hatred of Modernist developments.
They understand that an endless grid of brick towers and barren plazas is dehumanizing. But on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center – or even at the old World Trade Center – can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Here he defends modernism not by its function, but because of its style! Wasn’t the whole purpose of modernism to make architecture a machine for living? The glass towers of Park Avenue were not built to provide a quiet respite for strolling. They were erected for profit and rentable square footage.
If some of our cities have become gentrified shopping malls, with restored factories converted to luxury lofts and coffee bars, it cannot be credited to Jacobs. Her work pre-dated the era of the Faneuil Hall and Pike Place Market. She pointed out the obvious, that the organic city of the pre-automobile age had its merits.
Moses built a way to escape the city. Jacobs told us to make it better.
Here in Van Nuys 