I like the way that Jane Jacobs views a city as an evolving organism rather than a puzzle with one shape. As I was reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it almost sounded like the planning of a city is a hit or miss with no known outcome. It reminded me a little bit of trends that catch on. One day an object can be the “must-have” and the next it is in the pile of trash with Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch Kids. This might be able to answer Jackie’s question as sometimes the evolution of an organism takes more than a generation to fully evolve. Yes, at first Times Square would be unrecognizable to what it was today, but it had to start from somewhere. At some point, one change led to the next, which summed up to the tourist wormhole that we all love and hate. Sometimes what may seem to be the right medicine for a dying city might just be the poison. When Jacobs wrote about “sacking of the city”, she is referring to the repairs that were supposed to revive the city, not necessarily the rejection of the city itself. Though Jacobs does have a pessimistic view (and biased opinion) of what a city should and feel like, it all depends on who is evaluating the city. A person like Jacobs seems to want a city more directed for families and the social life of people, rather than just a function for business. Jacobs says she likes dense cities, and she seems to repeat her affinity for parks and their benefits for a city. What one person may consider an amoral sex-filled wasteland, another person may call home.
I found it very interesting that when Jacobs spoke about Morningside Heights’s supposed downturn revitalization, she makes it sound so instantaneous. She doesn’t describe the process of the downward destructive path but rather she just says that it failed. This goes along with what I said earlier, that planning of a city seems to be a hit or miss; it’s a game of Russian roulette, you end up successful, or dead. Though I have to disagree with Jackie, because just as she said cities can change, so why is it possible that Morningside Heights cant be like what Jacobs explained, didn’t New York’s Times Square change for the better over time?
Lewis Mumford’s, The City In History, connects some of the ideas expressed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Five Points. When Mumford talks about the effects capitalism/mercantilism (more primarily, money), he is hitting on the crux of what society is sadly based on. If there were no benefit for someone to create a bussing company, or build a new apartment building, then how would our cities be built? Though it is the corruption of the people that could help the most that hurts the people the worst. The slums that Jacobs and Anbinder speaks of have a common source of overpopulation and neglect for the tenements the people live in. It’s because the landlords can fill the building for a greater tax return and a higher rent charge, which allows landlords to neglect the tenants and their needs. This neglect turns the cities with great potential into slums that the nation is ashamed of. It’s because some people can make a quick buck on the expense of tens or hundreds of people that leads to the self-destruction of many promising cities.
After reading all these readings it should be clear to everyone that a city is a very complex system. Sometimes it works and at some points It doesn’t. What may seem ideal could very well be just another flop. Although a person may think that a city should have a utopian structure and that each city if made with the same blue prints should be successful, it is the individual that the city must complement. Jacobs was right when she disagreed with the old thinkers of the standard city makers. I would not expect to put some arty “hipster” person in the middle of down town Wall Street. The city is a very volatile creature that must be handled with care in order to take in all the needs of the inhabitants; even then, success is impossible to predict.
