A diatribe against the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” utopian, top-down planning that was popular in the 20th century, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs makes a compelling argument that cities fundamentally require variety to thrive. She extends this fundamental definition of city vitality to make compelling cases for why low-income housing projects so often fail, why some slums stay slums and others “unslum”, and even why San Francisco’s Civic Center struggles so much to become positive public spaces.

Especially insightful to me was Jacobs’ argument for the importance of a variety of income levels living in proximity. Housing projects that people must leave if they raise their income, she says, make for housing projects that residents yearn to leave and thus don’t get invested in. The middle class, she says, grows out of the low-income population:

However, cities need not “bring back” a middle class, and carefully protect it like an artificial growth. Cities grow the middle class. But to keep it as it grows, to keep it as a stabilizing force in the form of a self-diversified population, means considering the city’s people valuable and worth retaining, right where they are, before they become middle class.

Overcrowding, which is one symptom of the population instability, continues. It continues, not because the overcrowded people remain, but because they leave. Too many of those who overcome the economic necessity to overcrowd get out, instead of improving their lot within the neighborhood.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for years—since I heard about its legendary status in an intro urban planning class early in my undergrad. It still felt extremely relevant even 65 years later (perhaps not the most encouraging thought), and it had lots of good ideas well-stated and well-argued, but I really struggled to get through it, falling asleep after just a page or two many nights. I’m not entirely sure why. While I found most of her eventual points well-argued, I thought that some of the lead-up to those points, especially some of her criticism of pedestrianization and anti-car sentiment, somewhat incomplete especially given her eventual conclusions (service vehicles seem like a solved problem today, though maybe they weren’t in 1961). When I was on board with what she was saying, I still found it hard to stay engaged. And I was, like with many books in this genre, left with an incomplete idea of how to achieve the properties that Jacobs identifies and argues for an necessary for city vitality. Admittedly, though, a large part of Jacobs’s thesis is that cities are immensely complex, organic creatures, so I can hardly expect a straightforward solution. I’m glad that I finally read this and I do think I definitely got some new ideas and perspectives out of the book.

Quotes

The Great Blight of Dullness is allied with the blight of traffic congestion. The more territory, planned or unplanned, which is dull, the greater becomes the pressure of traffic on lively districts. People who have to use automobiles to use their dull home territory in a city, or to get out of it, are not merely capricious when they take the cars to a destination where the cars are unnecessary, destructive and a nuisance to their own drivers.

Consideration for pedestrians in cities is inseparable from consideration for city diversity, vitality and concentration of use. In the absence of city diversity, people in large settlements are probably better off in cars than on foot. Unmanageable city vacuums are by no means preferable to unmanageable city traffic.

The processes that occur in cities are not arcane, capable of being understood only by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody. Many ordinary people already understand them; they simply have not given these processes names, or considered that by understanding these ordinary arrangements of cause and effect, we can also direct them if we want to.

Just so, the New York Public Library building, set in its commercial matrix at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, forms an excellent landmark, but this is not true of the public libraries of San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as examples. These have the disadvantage of being set among institutions which contrast insufficiently in function or—inevitably—in appearance.

One of my first disappointments when exploring SF was how underwhelming the main branch of the library was, especially compared to Boston’s.

In transportation, either regional or local, nothing is offered which was not already offered and popularized in 1938 in the General Motors diorama at the New York World’s Fair, and before that by Le Corbusier.

65 years later, this still feels true. I hope, with reservations, that self-driving will be the thing that puts and end to it.