In an interview given to Bill Steigerwald in the June 2001 issue of Reason magazine, Jane Jacobs warns of the danger of change being held back, “when people don’t overhaul and rethink”1. Studying and critically examining what went before us and permanently reassessing the pertinence of the legacy we orient our practice and structure of thought on is what makes it possible for us to sustain change, to reposition ourselves or to legitimise our position.
This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the mythical The Death and Life of Great American Cities2 by Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential and pioneering manuals on understanding how the city functions and a milestone in the history of criticism and theory in urban planning. Fifty years on, more than half of the world’s population is now urban, and the city, as an organism, is currently undergoing a process of rapid mutation and growth, making imperative a revision of our planning instruments and the principles that stimulate our thinking at the rate of the transformation.
Jane Jacobs was, first and foremost, an enthusiastic dweller in, and attentive observer of, the city. Ignoring the distant abstraction of architectural designs, preferring instead the simple understanding and description of her habitat – the Greenwich Village neighbourhood, first of all, and then the city of New York, amongst other American cities – she demonstrated that we only had to “look closely at real cities” and “also listen, linger and think about what you see”3 to understand how they function and to reveal to ourselves the ideas manifested in her book. She described – colloquially, in minute detail and with a sharp sense of humour – the various constitutive elements and actors involved in urban structure and life, in the “the ballet of the good city sidewalk”4, and their web of relationships, captivating us in the interpretation and rediscovery of the city, which we, naively, thought we already knew.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jacobs skillfully characterises the big city as a space of co-existence shared by people who don’t know each other, highlighting this as the main difference to the suburbs and small towns and, accordingly, highlighting safety as an indispensable attribute for having comfort in that coexistence. She stresses the importance of the street – or the sidewalk, the part reserved for pedestrians – as a primary, structuring element that reflects the upsides and downsides of the city, arguing that “if a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull”5. To the network of diverse users of the street Jacobs attributed the mission of “do-it-yourself surveillance”6, the natural maintenance of safety and security, reinforcing the importance of a mesh of relationships that generates mutual respect and trust – a neighbourhood – where the understanding of the public identity of each person, the feeling of belonging and the recognition of an active role in this network and in the public space are decisive for its success. Jacobs argues that a street that is equipped with infrastructures that attract more strangers and is, therefore, busier will always be safer than a deserted street, and our efforts should focus on concentrating this urban social capital on combating homogeneity and the “Great Blight of Dullness”7, which are the main culprits in the failure and decline of our cities. To this end, Jacobs stresses the urgency of the production of diversity, proposing four pillar measures that are still extraordinarily topical: a combination of primary uses, attracting different types of users at different times of the day who people the streets and stimulate economic activity; a mixture of buildings of different ages and in diferent states of conservation, establishing different scales of rents; the existence of small-sized blocks, avoiding isolation and offering multiple trajectories and visual perspectives; and densification in terms of population and land occupation to achieve a greater concentration and, consequently, greater proximity between people, thus furthering interaction and a diversity of social experiences. With these “generators of diversity”, Jacobs sought to boost what is “natural to big cities”8, what attracts us and what we seek in them – the urban promise of opportunity, a mixture of people, facilities and scenarios in a dense and vibrant mesh, offering a place for spontaneity, evolution and the happy occurrence of the unexpected amongst its strangers: “serendipity”.
Jacobs audaciously and completely condemns the principles governing urban planning in the 1950s and 60s, many of which are still in force today. She intelligently deconstructs the socially accepted dogmas and clichés that reign in the field of urbanism, launching a ferocious attack on the discriminating effect of the labelling of communities that are organised in housing complexes on the basis of their financial income and social status. She criticises urban regeneration operations that patronisingly rehouse the residents of run-down neighbourhoods in new developments that extend and aggravate the perverse effects of segregation and destroy neighbourhood relations. In opposition to this Jacobs advocates, whenever possible, the regeneration of run-down neighbourhoods and proposes a guaranteed rent financing model for buildings inserted in the consolidated city, be they new or already existing, in line with her maxims of diversity and mixture of users and densification of less inhabited areas of the city. She repudiates the uncritical and opportune way in which open or “green” spaces are venerated and their existence defended, in and of themselves, in all circumstances, arguing that, where parks are concerned, quantity not equal quality. She warns of the threat of the sentimental praise of nature, bucolically expressed as the antithesis of the artificial city, but which destroys and suburbanises itself in impulses of domestication. She likewise refuses to gratuitously blame motor vehicles for all urban problems, highlighting the relevance of their existence and use, but nevertheless drawing attention to their destructive capacity for erosion and the need to invest in public transport.
In her controversial and incisive critique, Jacobs singles out Ebenzer Howard’s Garden City, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and the City Beautiful movement, behind which the driving force was Daniel Burnham (a trilogy she ironically calls the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful”9), as illustrating the antithesis of her thought. She identifies most public and private urbanists and governors of her day – most particularly Robert Moses, her historic rival – as the malignant effects of the influence these aforementioned trends. She condemns the cult of the architectural design, as being introverted and detached from the city, given the cult of social reform and the ideological emptiness of the incessant search for progress that goes hand in hand with the hygienist vision that fails to grasp the complex, stratified and diverse genesis of a city that is in a process of constant mutation.
Over the last 50 years, Jacobs has also been the target of harsh criticism, which, in my view, has more to do with a distortion, radicalisation or incorrect interpretation of her ideas than with what one can read in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her vision was frequently and opportunely adapted by her followers as they needed it; and later, those diverse and fanciful interpretations were criticised as being Jacobs’ creation, giving rise to much discussion on false premises. Amongst other things, Jacobs was accused of being responsible for the emergence of gentrification, conservation movements and the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) phenomenon.
As far as gentrification is concerned, it would be worthwhile noting that the development and prosperity of certain urban areas can give rise to cultural changes, attracting speculation and inflating rents, thus leading to the expulsion of the residents and traders and eliminating those who were initially responsible for their success. To quote Jacobs herself: “Gentrification is, like so many other things, a double-edged sword. It can work well, but at its extreme, it works badly.”10 Jacobs may well be held responsible for incentivating the occupation of downtown urban areas, to the detriment of the suburbs, and for advocating measures that revitalise consolidated urban areas, i.e. she may be linked to the beneficial process of gentrification. But as for the flip side, we ourselves are responsible for monitoring gentrification and introducing measures that would shape the transformational power of this phenomenon to our own benefit. Jacobs’ vision was romanticised and her general guidelines converted to specific, universally applicable formulas, particularly by conservation movements that oppose any change in the historic structure of a city. Such movements used her arguments, even though her work focused precisely on a process of change that respected the social and historical context and pre-existing values, while nevertheless favouring the transformation and development of those principles and values. Although their legitimacy is at times questionable, NIMBY movements – organised groups of citizens who protest publicly against decisions the directly affect them – did indeed take inspiration from Jacobs and one of the most important aspects of her legacy: the democratisation of the discussion on the city.
Without any academic training in architecture or urbanism, Jacobs challenged the established power and ideas, claiming the right of citizens to be involved in decision making processes, as she believed that these were enriched and validated by the inclusion of the residents: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”11.
Notwithstanding the relevance and surprising topicality of her aforementioned ideas, in considering Jacobs’ legacy it is essential to highlight, for their contemporaneity and their modern-day pertinence, a final group of reflections:
• Jacobs recognises the importance of capital as a source of financing as a decisive element in determining the decline or success of cities, questioning the way in which the money is spent, in particular as far as public funds are concerned, i.e. speculatively and in large-scale, power-wielding operations instead of in a “continual, gradual, complex and gentler change”12. She suggests that the financial machine was adapted to creating anti-city images because that’s the way our society had determined thing and that we could use private investment to the benefit of a lively and diversified city if we really wished;
• Jacobs identifies the city as “problem of organized complexity”13 for which there are no generally applicable analyses or solutions. There is nothing accidental, irrational or chaotic about the way in which the diverse elements that make up the city relate to each other and influence each other;
• In all her thinking Jacobs incorporates a development system with a bottom-up structure – from her support of grassroots democracy to her defence of the strategic planning that provides the root conditions necessary for progress without a predefined goal, thus giving rise to the unexpected.
In a period characterised by globalisation and consumption, in which the new quickly becomes old hat, the search for the unexpected, Jacobs’ serendipity, would seem to be once again on the agenda. The visionary of the digital universe, Ethan Zuckerman, references the work of Jacobs, the city and urban planning as primary supports in the study of serendipity, with a view to its virtual application as “one of the tools that can help combat homophily”14, in the restructuring of digital infrastructures, reiterating that “serendipity isn’t just luck, but something we can analyse, understand and get better at”.15
The designers of the virtual city are now rethinking and re-implementing Jacobs’ legacy; it remains to be seen if the designers of the real city will do the same.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities looks set to enjoy a long life. |
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[N.A.] A tradução das citações, a partir do inglês, é da responsabilidade da autora.
1 Jane Jacobs. City Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism and her legacy. Reason. Washington : Reason Foundation. (Jun. 2001). Jane Jacobs interviewed by Bill Steigerwald.
2 Id. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York : Vintage, 1961.
* [N.E.] Há tradução em português do Brasil: Morte e vida de grandes cidades. São Paulo : Martins Fontes, 2009. 2ª ed. 528 p. ISBN 9788578271732.
3 Ibid. Introductory note to the illustrations.
4 Ibid., p. 50.
5 Ibid., p. 29.
6 Ibid., p. 39.
7 Ibid., p. 144.
8 Ibid., p. 143.
9 Ibid., p. 417.
10 Jane Jacobs. Godmother of the American City. Metropolis. New York. (Mars 2001). Jane Jacobs interviewed by Jim Kunstler
11 Id. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 238.
12 Ibid., p. 317.
13 Ibid., p. 438.
14 “I’m interested in serendipity as one of the tools that can help combat homophily.” Ethan Zuckerman. The architecture of serendipity. My heart’s in Accra (blog). [Online]. (9 June 2008) [Consult. 13 Nov. 2010]. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/06/09/the-architecture-of-serendipity/
15 “Serendipity isn’t just luck, but something we can analyse, understand and get better at.” Id. John Hagel on Serendipity. My heart’s in Accra (blog). [Online]. (7 Mar. 2009). [Consult. 13 Nov. 2010]. http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/07/03/john-hagel-on-serendipity/