[URBAN NOTE] "Jane Jacobs was wrong"
May. 14th, 2016 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldLast weekend was all about Jane Jacobs--the Jane at Home exhibit, the Jane's Walks. This weekend, I'm linking to Noel Maurer's criticism of Jacobs' thought over at The Power and the Money. It is thorough.
("Was Jane Jacobs Right?" is here. Other links are in the blog post.)
What I've long found to be Jacobs' greatest weakness, as a thinker, is a relative lack of detail. There are analyses, but no numbers, just bold extrapolations, jumps into the beyond, failures of imagination. This is the central problem I found with her The Question of Separatism, which has a convincing analysis of the problems of marginality for Québec, acknowledges that an independent Québec may not break through and would in fact incur new costs with sovereignty-association, but recommends a break for it anyway. With cities, even Jane at Home noted that Jacobs did not imagine the possibility that the drift to the suburbs could be reversed.
Thoughts?
Jacobs was truthy. She made claims about social cohesion coming from architecture for which she had no evidence. She refused to acknowledge that the pathologies of American cities in the 1960s were due to racism, not construction. She blasted entirely functional and pleasant “towers in the park” buildings but ignored the way well-intentioned traffic engineers were making suburbs unnecessarily unpleasant.
There's nothing wrong with towers in a park, Poppa!
In fact, you can see how much bullshit she wrote from her defenders. Here is an essay Randy linked to called “Was Jane Jacobs right?” The dude manages to contradict himself. First, he claims that Torontonian neighborhoods have gentrified and become full of retail monocultures because of too much construction. Well, that is the purest form of bullshit: as Randy has documented, rising rents are creating such monocultures in old neighborhoods. Then he confuses typology for hypothesis testing, by showing us that dense districts in Milan are more dense. (No, really. That is what he shows.)
In a normal world, I might like Jane Jacobs. I am by no means ideologically averse to regulations that drive up housing costs. (Frex, requiring first-floor retail on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.) She was right about highway building. (I like that Moses built stuff; I am less convinced that he built the right stuff, although really do wish the Cross-Brooklyn existed.) She was certainly right about most urban planning of the time, and her arguments apply to modern suburban planning quite well.
But we do not live in a normal world. We live in a world where Jacobite (Jacobin?) ideology means that everyone thinks it is entirely okay that the law protects cute streets like mine from the scourge of high rises. (Calling Eric Moore!) Hell, from the scourge of triple-deckers.
This isn't actually our block, but tear it down anyway!
We live in a world where people can pretend that filtering does not exist. (The link goes to a study of the California housing market. Theory here.) And while the worst problems are in fact in the suburbs, where I suspect Jacobs would be fine with replacing quarter-acre plots with “missing middle” construction, the fact that we have decided to preserve our older neighborhoods in amber is creating just as many problems.
("Was Jane Jacobs Right?" is here. Other links are in the blog post.)
What I've long found to be Jacobs' greatest weakness, as a thinker, is a relative lack of detail. There are analyses, but no numbers, just bold extrapolations, jumps into the beyond, failures of imagination. This is the central problem I found with her The Question of Separatism, which has a convincing analysis of the problems of marginality for Québec, acknowledges that an independent Québec may not break through and would in fact incur new costs with sovereignty-association, but recommends a break for it anyway. With cities, even Jane at Home noted that Jacobs did not imagine the possibility that the drift to the suburbs could be reversed.
Thoughts?
