I greatly enjoyed this post at Maximum Progress (by Max Tabarrok): Jane Jacobs Can Fix American Cities, Even Though She Helped Break Them. Many people associate Jane Jacobs with the urban resistance– shouting down the developers to keep the neighborhood intact. Becoming the spry young woman who takes on influential players at city hall became a goal in and of itself. But Max points out that this is a mere sliver of what Jacobs offers on ideas.
In fact, a careful reading of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” reveals that Jacobs didn’t advocate for preservation and obstruction (at least, not in the book itself)—she advocated for market urbanism and organic development. The solution to our urban problems isn’t a middle path between Moses and Jacobs, but rather a return to Jacobs’ actual ideas, not the distorted version that became embedded in planning practice.
Jacobs wants the planners out of the neighborhood business, unless they are there to encourage and support organic growth.
In “Death and Life” Jacobs argues that urban planners should plan less. They should stop drafting grand visions and bulldozing neighborhoods to rebuild them in their image. “Public policy can do relatively little that is positive to get working uses woven in where they are absent and needed in cities, except to permit and indirectly encourage them.” When discussing a successful commercial district in Nashville she notes that “Nobody could have planned this growth. Nobody has encouraged it.”
Or this. Let everyone go about their lives and find their way. The actors are best at decision making.
In Jacobs’ view, planners should merely set favorable conditions for decentralized, unplanned, and incremental development. Lay out the street grid if you must (though with smaller blocks than Manhattan) and bring the infrastructure to where it’s needed but otherwise refrain from regulating private land use. Let all the uses of the city mingle together and fill each street with eyes and activity at all times of the day. Jacobs is like Hayek (1945) or The Fatal Conceit applied to urbanism. “The curious task of economics [and Jacobsian urban planning] is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
I think there is a little more that the planners can do in their supporting role. That is to keep track of things. Jane Jacobs’ city encourages a mixing of people in their public lives near their homes. But some mixes of shopkeepers, and moms, and office workers and renters blend better than others. What are the civic jobs that various cohorts do? For lively streets in friendly neighborhoods, what are the pre conditions and the on-going maintenance that each member brings to Jane Jacobs dance of colorful city life?
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