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- City neighborhoods -

Jacobs criticizes orthodox urbanism for viewing the city neighborhood as a modular, insulated grouping of roughly 7,000 residents, the estimated number of persons to populate an elementary school and support a neighborhood market and community center.

Jane Jacobs:

The "Street Smart" Designer

Orthodox Urbanism

Legacy

Jacobs is credited with inspiring the New Urbanist movement.

  • Jane Jacobs Days

After her death (April 2006) NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that June 28 was Jane Jacobs Day.

The City of Toronto proclaimed her birthday, May 4, as Jane Jacobs Day.

  • Jane's Walks

By 2016, Jane's Walks were taking place in 212 cities in 36 countries, on six continents. The interpretive walks typically apply ideas Jacobs identified or espoused to local areas, which are explored on foot and sometimes by bicycle.

  • Jane Jacobs Medal

As a tribute to Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had awarded grants to Jacobs in the 1950s and 1960s, announced on February 9, 2007, the creation of the Jane Jacobs Medal,

  • Exhibitions

- The significance of sidewalks -

Jacobs frames the sidewalk as a central mechanism in maintaining the order of the city.

America

She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the U.S. State Department.

  • She met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman
  • They married in 1944
  • Family: they had a daughter, Burgin, and two sons, James and Ned
  • They bought a three-story building at 555 Hudson Street

The Jacobs rejected the rapidly growing suburbs as "parasitic", choosing to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house, in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area, and created a garden in the backyard.

Politics & Beliefs:

  • Jacobs was anti-communist and had left the Federal Workers Union because of its apparent communist sympathies
  • She was pro-union and purportedly, appreciated the writing of Saul Alinsky; therefore she was under suspicion
  • On 25 March 1952, Jacobs delivered her response to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer, she said:

"The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe..."

Architectural Forum

Jacobs left Amerika in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, D.C.

She then found a well-paying job as an associate editor at the Architectural Forum, published by Henry Luce of Time Inc.

After early success in that position, Jacobs began to take assignments on urban planning and "urban blight".

In 1954, she was assigned to cover a development in Philadelphia designed by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project:

  • reacting against the lack of concern for the poor African-Americans who were directly affected

When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that "development" seemed to end community life on the street. When Jacobs returned to the offices of Architectural Forum, she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.

In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came to the Architectural Forum offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.

In 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University.

  • She addressed leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford)
  • Speaking on the topic of East Harlem
  • She urged this audience to "respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order."

Contrary to her expectations, the talk was received with enthusiasm, but it also marked her as a threat to established urban planners, real estate owners, and developers. Architectural Forum printed the speech that year, along with photographs of East Harlem.

Jane Jacobs' Street Smarts

Legacy

Rockefeller Foundation & Death and Life of Great American Cities

After reading her Harvard speech, William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article for Fortune magazine.

The resulting piece, "Downtown Is for People", appeared in a 1958 issue of Fortune, and marked her first public criticism of Robert Moses.

The Fortune article brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation.

  • The foundation had moved aggressively into urban topics, with a recent award to the MIT for studies of urban aesthetics that would culminate in the publication of Kevin A. Lynch's Image of the City.
  • In May 1958, Gilpatric invited Jacobs to begin serving as a reviewer for grant proposals.
  • Later that year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Jacobs to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the U.S. (From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the foundation's Humanities Division sponsored an "Urban Design Studies" research program, of which Jacobs was the best known grantee.)
  • Gilpatric encouraged Jacobs to "explor[e] the field of urban design to look for ideas and actions which may improve thinking on how the design of cities might better serve urban life, including cultural and humane value."

Affiliating with The New School (then called The New School for Social Research), she spent three years conducting research and writing drafts. In 1961, Random House published the result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Struggle for Greenwich Village

During the 1950s and 1960s, her home neighborhood (Greenwich Village) was being transformed by city and state efforts to build housing, private developers, the expansion of NYU, and by the urban renewal plans of Robert Moses.

  • Moses' plan, funded as "slum clearance" by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, also called for several blocks to be razed and replaced with upscale high-rises.
  • The plan forced 132 families out of their homes and displaced 1,000 small businesses—the result was Washington Square Village.
  • As part of his efforts to revitalize the area, Moses had proposed the extension of Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park in 1935. In the face of community opposition, Moses had shelved the project, but revived the idea in the 1950s.
  • Moses argued that the Fifth Avenue extension would improve the flow of traffic through the neighborhood and provide access to the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which would connect the Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge with the Holland Tunnel.

In response, local activist Shirley Hayes created the "Committee to Save Washington Square Park": a coalition of dozens of local neighborhood groups that opposed the roadway extension. Raymond S. Rubinow eventually took over the organization, changing its name to the "Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic".

  • Jacobs had joined the committee under Hayes, but she took a more prominent role under Rubinow, reaching out to media outlets such as The Village Voice, which provided more sympathetic coverage than The New York Times.
  • The committee gained the support of Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lewis Mumford, Charles Abrams, and William H. Whyte, as well as Carmine De Sapio, a Greenwich Village resident and influential Democratic leader.
  • De Sapio's involvement proved decisive. On 25 June 1958, the city closed Washington Square Park to traffic, and the joint committee held a ribbon tying (not cutting) ceremony.

Plans for LOMEX expressway continued despite growing community opposition in areas such as Little Italy. In the 1960s, Jacobs chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

  • The New York Times was sympathetic to Moses, while The Village Voice covered community rallies and advocated against the expressway.
  • Jacobs continued to fight the expressway when plans resurfaced in 1962, 1965, and 1968, and she became a local hero for her opposition to the project.
  • She was arrested by a plainclothes police officer on April 10, 1968, at a public hearing during which the crowd had charged the stage and destroyed the stenographer's notes.
  • She was accused of inciting a riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration. After months of trials conducted in New York City (to which Jacobs commuted from Toronto), her charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.

Other honors

  • Jane Jacobs Way, West Village, New York City (Hudson Street and Eleventh Street, New York, New York)
  • Jane Jacobs Park, 11 Wellesley Street West, Toronto (construction began in 2016)
  • Jane Jacobs sculptural chairs, Victoria Memorial Square (St. John's Square), Toronto
  • Jane Jacobs Toronto Legacy Plaque, 69 Albany Avenue, Toronto
  • Jacobs' Ladder, rose bushes dedicated by Grassroots Albany (neighbors) in 1997, Toronto
  • Jane Jacobs Street, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
  • Jane Jacobs Street (Village of Cheshire) Black Mountain, North Carolina
  • a Google Doodle marked the 100th anniversary of Jacobs' birth, on May 4, 2016, and was featured on Google's homepage in 15 countries on four continents
  • a conference room at the offices of the New Economics Foundation in London is named in honor of Jacobs

Jacobs received the second Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in 2000.

Jacobs is the subject of the 2017 documentary film Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, which depicts her victories over Robert Moses and her philosophy of urban design

1. Safety

Jacobs argued that city sidewalks and people who use sidewalks actively participate in fighting against disorder and preserving civilization.

2. Contact

Sidewalk life permits a range of casual public interactions, from asking for directions and getting advice from the grocer, to nodding hello to passersby and admiring a new dog.

3. Assimilating children

Sidewalks are great places for children to play under the general supervision of parents and other natural proprietors of the street.

Orthodox Urbanism

Jane Jacobs asserts in her work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", that the sources of orthodox urbanism are:

Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Ebenezer Howard

The Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford

Cities in Evolution, Sir Patrick Geddes

Modern Housing, Catherine Bauer

Toward New Towns for America, Clarence Stein

Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, Sir Raymond Unwin

The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, Le Corbusier

Notable Work

Jacobs advocated the abolition of zoning laws and restoration of free markets in land, which would result in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and she frequently cited New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" remains one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning.

  • Published in 1961
  • Widely read by both planning professionals and the general public
  • A strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s, which, she claimed, destroyed communities and created isolated, unnatural urban spaces.
  • She celebrates the diversity and complexity of old-mixed use neighborhoods while lamenting the monotony and sterility of modern planning
  • Argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect

the needs of city-dwellers.

- The role of parks -

She coined the terms "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street", which were adopted professionally in urban design, sociology, and many other fields.

Jacobs painted a devastating picture of the profession of city planning, labeling it a pseudoscience. This angered the male-dominated urban planning profession.

Jacobs was criticized for her characteristics rather than her position/opinion, calling her a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline.

  • One planner dismissed Jacobs' book as "bitter coffee-house rambling"
  • Robert Moses, sent a copy, called it "intemperate and also libelous... Sell this junk to someone else." Later, her book was criticized from the left for leaving out race and openly endorsing gentrification, which Jacobs referred to as "unslumming".

In 1962, she resigned her position at Architectural Forum to become a full-time author and concentrate on raising her children.

In other political activities she became an opponent of the Vietnam War, marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and criticized the construction of the World Trade Center as a disaster for Manhattan's waterfront.

Robert Caro's biography of Moses, The Power Broker, gives only passing mention to this event, however, despite Jacobs's strong influence on Caro. In 2017, Caro told an interviewer about the difficulty in cutting more than 300,000 words from his initial manuscript: "The section that I wrote on Jane Jacobs disappeared. To this day, when someone says: 'There's hardly a mention of Jane Jacobs,' I think, 'But I wrote a lot about her.' Every time I'm asked about that, I have this sick feeling."

Orthodox urbanism defines parks as "boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities."

Beyond the practical lessons in city design and planning that Death and Life offers, the theoretical underpinnings of the work challenge the modern development mindset. Jane Jacobs defends her positions with common sense and anecdotes.

The fundamental rule of the neighborhood sidewalk also applies to the neighborhood park: "liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life."

Orthodox Urbanism

Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

Mrs. Jacobs was a member of the Order of Canada & Order of Ontario.

Who was Jane Jacobs?

Gentrification also was caused, however, by "the completely unexpected influx of affluent residents back into the inner city". The extent to which her ideas facilitated this phenomenon was at the time unimaginable. For example, she advocated the preservation of older buildings specifically because their lack of economic value made them affordable for poor people. In this respect, she saw them as "guarantors of social diversity". That many of these older structures have increased in economic value solely due to their age was implausible in 1961. Issues of gentrification have dominated criticism of Jane Jacobs' planning ideas.

Economist Tyler Cowen has criticized her ideas for not addressing problems of scale or infrastructure, and suggests that economists disagree with some of her approaches to development. For example, although her ideas of planning were praised at times as "universal", they are now thought inapplicable when a city grows from one million to ten million (as has happened many times in developing nations). Such arguments suggest that her ideas apply only to cities with similar issues to those of New York, where Jacobs developed many of them.

The planners and developers she fought against to preserve the West Village were among those who initially criticized her ideas. Robert Moses has generally been identified as her arch-rival during this period. Since then, Jacobs' ideas have been analysed many times, often in regard to the outcomes that their influences have produced.

In places such as the West Village, the factors that she argued would maintain economic and cultural diversity have led instead to gentrification and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Her family's conversion of an old candy shop into a home is an example of the gentrifying trend that would continue under the influence of Jacobs' ideas.

Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from "urban renewal" and "slum clearance", in particular, plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood.

  • She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through an area of Manhattan (known as SoHo), as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown.
  • She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project.
  • She joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.

As a woman and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning, Jacobs endured scorn from established figures. Routinely, she was described first as a housewife, as she did not have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; as a result, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism, however, the influence of her concepts eventually was acknowledged by highly respected professionals.

Controversies &

Criticisms

She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail.

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