The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’ impassioned defense of city life, is often cited as one of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century. For contemporary architects, civic planners and city dwellers, Jacobs’ book is a foundational text of humane urban planning. Her ideas, considered radical when the book was published in 1961, are now settled thought.
Jacobs was not a builder, but she was the architect of the modern city. Her ideas about density (a good thing) and modernist urban planning (a disaster) made her one of the few public critics of the post-war groupthink with regard to urban space. The well-ordered grid of a shiny metropolis was not for her; instead, Jacobs favored a haphazard juxtaposition of everything – industry, leisure time, ethnicity – that insured the vibrancy of the city.
This might sound a little familiar. “There are ‘Jane Jacobs pockets’ sprouting up in cities everywhere,” says Robert Kanigel, who has written a new biography of Jacobs out this month, Eyes on the Street. “There’s a change in the air, and much of it is attributable to her.”
Eyes on the Street traces Jacob’s intellectual development from New York-based freelance journalist to activist who not only wrote groundbreaking books but also took on 1960s political behemoths Carmine DeSapio and Robert Moses. DeSapio was a powerful New York assemblyman and head of the “Tammany Hall” machine that dominated local politics for nearly a century. Moses was the city’s master planner who built New York’s parkways and major bridges. Both were dead set on plowing an expressway through Washington Square Park in the heart of Manhattan’s West Village. Through the sheer power of her will and organizational skill, Jacobs stared them both down and effectuated the demise of the expressway plan – a victory that preserved one of New York’s iconic landmarks.
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to a successful doctor and a nurse, Jacobs found her metier upon her move to New York during the depression. She studied zoology, geology and political science at Columbia University and scratched out a meager living as a stenographer and freelancer. It was her move to Washington DC to work for the influential Architectural Record that radicalized her on the subject of cities.
Having been assigned an article on Edmund Bacon’s masterplan for a middle-income development in Philadelphia, Jacobs decried Bacon’s methods. Kanigel quotes Jacobs as remarking that, “Not only did (Bacon) and the people he directed … not know how to make an interesting or humane street, but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care.” Bacon’s masterplan – to create separate industrial and residential zones, and parcel out impractical and uninviting public space – ran counter to Jacobs’ notion of the city as messy incubator of culture and ideas.
Kanigel is a former professor of science writing at MIT and a frequent biographer, whose work includes The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, about the Indian mathemetician Srinivasa Ramanujan (later turned into the theatre work A Disappearing Number). He had long been fascinated by Jacobs as an outlier, as someone who was championing the city at a time when “white flight” to the suburbs was prevalent. “I felt a little out of place in the city, because everyone was leaving the city, and I loved it,” Kanigel, who has spent most of his adult life in Baltimore, says. “So Death and Life … spoke to me quite powerfully. She was a patron saint who said, ‘it’s OK to like this kind of life.’”
“Every chapter,” Kanigel writes of Jacobs’ book, “offered alternative ways to see: tottering old buildings could be sources of anarchic creativity … a factory near your house need not be unwholesome, but instead a nexus of economic and social renewal.
“The Death and Life of Great American Cities is also about death and life, period,” Kanigel says. “Of civilizations, institutions, economies. That’s what she was interested in. You think about a city like Detroit, basically making one thing forever and not changing. Jacobs found the wellspring of economic health in cities as a constant bubbling forth of ideas. We are of course now seeing that borne out in places like Brooklyn and Baltimore.”
When Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, city planners were genuflecting to modernist architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, architects who wanted to level the pre-existing urban landscape with sleek, minimalist high-rises. Jacobs’ crusades didn’t lead to a total pushback. But 40 years after her book, it’s clear that the notion of the city as an economic and cultural locus has firmly taken root.
Jacobs was not content only to write about her ideas. She often took to the streets to fight back against civic encroachment of her beloved West Village neighborhood, as in the Washington Square Park incident. “She had a lot of guts, but there was a battle within her,” said Kanigel. “She primarily saw herself as a writer and thinker, and the activism got in the way of that, but she felt it was necessary to protect the soul of a place that she loved.”
