Jane Jacobs brings up many fascinating points when discussing “current city planning.” It seems as though she has many issues with the idea of “planning a city.” Can the outcome of a city really be planned or will it always be a economic and social fail? Jacobs seems to think that the latter is the case.
In her work, she criticizes the “planning theory,” stating that it is “decaying city after city” and refusing to let the wrong areas decay. For this she gives an example of Morningside Heights in the 1950’s. She says that Morningside Heights was a “slum in which people fear to walk the streets, the situation posed a crisis for the institutions.” However, when people used city planning to try to make Morningside Heights a better neighborhood, it backfired. “After that Morningside went downhill even faster” the author describes.
She argues that city planning is a fail because the people who plan these cities fail to look at the “real cities.” People are so caught up in their ideals of what is to be a good or bad city, that they ignore what it is to be a real city. She looks at city planning as a laboratory experiment, with trial and error, failure and success. However, she believes that people overlook the experimentation part, and think only of what they have been taught and believe to be true. Their own stubbornness is the source of the problem. They are guided by principles and not reality.
In some ways Jacobs seems to understand the intentions of legislators and of city planners better than the people do. She claims that “extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility, and vulgarity.” However, it is only to the benefit of the powerful and not the common people. Those in power are saying that these urban developments are for the benefit of the people, but Jacobs seems to think this is not the case.
Although Jacobs does not many an allusion to Robert Moses in her passage, it is assumed to me that she would not be in favor of his public work. She seems to be a libertarian to a certain degree and I think that she would probably not like Robert Moses sticking his hands into the communities of people and telling them to move out and make way. Although Moses was a visionary in many ways, I think Jacobs would argue that what he did forced people to move out into other crowded neighborhoods, making already slum-like ones, slummier. I’m surprised she did not outright criticize Moses, but I’m assuming that she would not like his city planning, as she did not like the others.
