This post discusses the image used for the eportfolio header and also serves as an intro to your reading for February 16, Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Parts of this post are modified excerpts of a paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar titled “Mid-Century Narratives,” and I’m super excited to get to share some of my research. This post first addresses the advertisement’s line, “The city planners are ravaging our cities” followed by a comparison between the ideas of Jane Jacobs and her former mentor, then-architectural critic for the New Yorker, Lewis Mumford.
Why the tagline “The city planner are ravaging our cities?”
Within the historical context of both New York in c. 1960 and modern city planning, the advertisement’s tagline “The city planners are ravaging our cities” directly refutes ideas by city planner Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford, architectural critic at the New Yorker and former mentor to Jacobs. At the beginning of The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jacobs states the book is an “attack” on modern city planning and later calls most efforts “intellectual mush” (3 and 90-91).
The most influential idea of The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jacobs’ praise for “mixed-use development,” typically characterized as areas of low-medium density where residential and business spaces coexist, as a way to maintain city vibrancy while increasing safety. Jacobs believed mixed-use development offered “greater and more plentiful the range of legitimate interests” to shape the city (Jacobs 41). Her vision of a city full of mixed-use development was starkly different than Moses’ attempts to modernize the city by tearing down buildings to add highways or Mumford’s belief in green spaces to combat the ailing aspects of the city.
Writing as a mother and city resident, The Death and Life of Great American Cities reads at times like a populist response to professionals like Mumford and Moses:
I shall mainly be writing about common, ordinary things: for instance, what kinds of city streets are safe and what kinds are not; why some city parks are marvelous and why some are vice traps and death traps; why some slums stay slums and other slums regenerate themselves even against financial and official opposition … In short, I shall be writing about how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attributes.
The above passage conveys Jacobs’ distaste for planning because, despite the amount of efforts and money spent to improve the city, she believes the professionals overseeing the amounts of time, effort, and money to improve the city haven’t adequately addressed the everyday fears of residents like being mugged or assaulted on the street. In addition to her book’s content, Jacob’s writing style also reinforced the sense that she was offering commonsense solutions that were based on lived experiences. Writing in the first person voice, Jacobs and her ideas come across as practical, down-to-earth – the exact opposite of “intellectual mush.”
City Planning: Containment vs. Movement
Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities was published the same year as Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. Mumford’s ideal city resembled and functioned like the agora in ancient Athens or the medieval European town, contained spaces where residents had access to both nature and the productive cultural life associated with larger cities. In contrast, Lewis viewed “megalopolis” cities like New York as too congested to foster cultural life while unchecked city sprawl reflected the industrial and technological growth of the twentieth century. To remedy the megalopolis’ overgrowth and subsequent impact on civilization, Mumford advocated for the type of regional planning associated with the U.K. planners Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes: radial designs incorporating greenbelts and parks to provide residents with regular exposure to sunlight, fresh air, and space while also effectively working to contain the congestion and sprawl of the city. (New York City trivia: Lewis Mumford lived in Sunnyside, Queens!)
Jacobs lived at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and famously compared New York street life to an urban ballet. She describes cities as spaces of organized chaos where “[an] intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations” (50). On the sidewalk, neighbors come into contact with each other, look out for each other’s well-being and watch over each other’s children who use the sidewalk as their primary zone of play.
The sidewalk is an instructive comparison for the freshness of Jacobs’ ideas compared to those advocated by Mumford and Moses. Jacobs rightly pointed out that most people avoid empty streets and other public spaces out of the perception that empty = dangerous. The mixed-use development block creates busy sidewalks that actually prevent crime due to the friendly surveillance from local residents, retailers, and visitors. Moreover, those busy sidewalks foster urban diversity and social cohesion between neighbors and also acting as arteries that bring non-residents to the area for specialty shops, restaurants, or simply for a change of scenery.
Neither Mumford nor Jacobs were planners or developers and therefore not in a position to execute or support any urban development, putting the onus on their books to establish their authority. The significance that both The City in History and The Death and Life of Great American Cities were published in 1961 stems from a variety of factors. Enough time had passed so that critics like Jacobs and Mumford could critically evaluate the impact of post-WWII housing policies and urban renewal plans. Both Mumford and Jacobs tapped into the audiences’ feelings of anger over deteriorating social and racial relations and frustration over ineffective city planning that failed to take into account citizens’ concerns over shaping the city. As such, their books address many of the topics that motivated civil rights movements in the sixties such as civil rights, zoning, and citizen activism. Moreover, their ideas and solutions are still debated by contemporary planners and developers who seek to revitalize downtowns, alleviate urban poverty, ensure fair housing to residents, all while creating sustainable and walkable cities.
