As I read through Jane Jacobs attack on orthodox planning theory and their lack of empirical supportive data in her famous 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities , I initially felt swept up in her arguments. Personally, as a physics major, her introduction of empirical evidence as the testing ground for theories, even in a social science, did resonate strongly with my own beliefs. That being said however, after her repudiation of former theories based on their weak foundations, I found her own theory of measuring a city by its diversity to be lacking. After loudly vaunting the merits of empirical support, I would expect her to produce some hard evidence for her own theories.
I am not alone in my critique of Jacobs. In a 2011 article of the Toronto Star, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Kenneth Kidd analyzes Lewis Mumford’s harsh review of Jacobs’ book in the article Mumford wrote mockingly titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies”, where Mumford commented on Jacobs’ “naked unawareness” and “mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” Additionally, Mumford took issue with Jacobs’ encouragement of population density, although as Kidd writes, this had to do with time Mumford was living in, the early 1960s, where thousands left the city due to the congestion of people.
Aside from his critique on how she formulated her theories, one of the fundamental disagreements Mumford had with Jacobs was the scope of her ideas. He found her ideas to be on a scale too small to be significant in actually helping a city, as focused as they are on the individual neighborhood.
That being said however, Mumford also saw the importance to Jacobs’ admittedly unsupported theories, writing, “This able women [sic] had used her eyes and, even more admirably, her heart to assay the human result of large-scale housing,” and felt that her views were something that many people felt but hadn’t been able to quite articulate.
Kidd concludes with contrasting Robert Moses and Jacobs, and essentially saying that while Jacobs views are great on the small neighborhood scale, you need a powerful large scale infrastructure as only a Robert Moses figure is capable of accomplishing in order to worry about the niceties of neighborhood life.
Leave a Reply