The introduction to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, for the most part, sums up some of the difficulties facing New York City at the time of her writing (1960’s). Neighborhoods such as Morningside Heights were descending on a downward spiral towards a slum like squalor, in spite of the city’s multiple planning efforts to revitalize the area. To Jacobs, this allegiance to “orthodox urbanism” – employing classical teachings to city neighborhoods that clearly did not work – on the part of the city’s planners was not redeveloping the city, but sacking the city instead.
In Jacobs’s view, a successful urban city is one that has diversity. According to her, this diversity is not automatically generated,but is instead generated because of the various efficient economic pools of use that they form.
I believe that significance of her methodology lie in the fact that she rejects the paternalistic, authoritarian approach to city planning and instead fosters (on some level) a sense of community participation in the city planning process. Although her approach is by no means a democratic process, it relies on the diversity of communities and therefore interacts with how individual people within a neighborhood have shaped the space around them. Her idea of city planning is then an extension of this, maintaining the value of previous structures and economic pools while consistently adding new ones that fit within the system.
Based on this principle, it is entirely possible for huge cities like New York to develop in a holistic way, examining neighborhood dynamics as well as fostering economic and density growth (even if the power to do so is centralized within a city agency). As David Halle acknowledges in “Who Wears Jane Jacobs’s Mantle in Today’s New York City,” “The Death and Life is a cry for better central planning, albeit a planning that recognizes and respects local and market-based characteristics of neighborhoods” (240). In terms of influence, Jacobs’s work seemed to be ahead of it’s time in promoting a more inclusive methodology of city planning that is “geographically balanced and sensitive to neighborhoods,” a method which the Bloomberg administration implemented in the Department of City Planning (240).
Interestingly, it was community boards, not city officials who misconstrued Jacobs’s arguments. Her reaction to Moses and the “modern world” was not one that promoted a return back to small, intimate cities, but one that was growing with diversity (both old and new) and increasing density. According to her arguments, tall buildings that were opposed in Greenwich Village were at odds with her fundamental ideas. To allow the city to grow, old structures should mingle in close quarters with new, and the city should also build upwards if necessary to facilitate greater urban density.
The days of authoritarian city planners (at least to the extent it was during Moses’ time) has ended. Communities are more interested in democratic ways of becoming involved in their communities, and city wide initiatives have shown this to be true. Participatory budgeting for example, has been implemented in various community boards throughout the city. In this program, citizens are able to directly allocated funds towards various projects within their community, such as investing in public spaces like parks or recreational facilities. While this doesn’t directly influence the new structures entering a neighborhood, it does provide an opportunity for maintaining some of the old structures Jacobs described as essential to urban diversity. Overall, Jane Jacobs’s legacy of activism and central planning was a valuable starting point for the greater sense of representation that exists in city planning today.
Participatory Budgeting: http://ideas.pbnyc.org/page/about
