56 pages • 1 hour read
Jane JacobsThe Death and Life of Great American Cities
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1961A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Role of Community Activism in Urban Planning and Development
Jacobs is a key figure in urban studies, despite her lack of formal training as an urban planner. Like conventional planners, she is well-versed in urban theory, but her work as a community activist distinguishes her from others in the field, giving her a unique perspective on the myriad issues confronting cities. She champions a fresh, community-oriented approach to city planning. Her method emphasizes embedded participation, anthropological observation (of city dwellers and their daily activities), and objective empiricism (statistics and facts about cities derived from empirical tools for documentation and analysis). Through the lens of activism, Jacobs seeks to expand the understanding of city life, inspire civic engagement, and engender creative responses to urgent urban problems.
Jacobs argues that urban planners should continuously question their methods and practices, addressing the ever-changing issues facing cities through trial and error. Her pragmatic, anti-essential approach is firmly rooted in her work as an activist in Greenwich Village, in particular, her campaign to protect Washington Square Park from the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The plan, devised by Robert Moses, called for the extension of Fifth Avenue through the park. In the 1950s, Jacobs joined the Committee to Save Washington Square Park, a coalition of local neighborhood organizations opposed to Moses’s plan. Her public profile grew when she reached out to media outlets that were sympathetic to the cause, notably The Village Voice. Jacobs continued to fight the expressway when plans resurfaced in the 1960s. She was arrested at a public hearing in 1968 and charged with inciting a riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public administration after a crowd of protesters stormed the stage and destroyed the stenographer’s notes.
Jacobs’s aim is not to ban all urban projects, but rather, to prevent fundamental errors in their drafting. As a vocal opponent of top-down planning, her solution for preventing mistakes rests on community engagement and on redefining urban planning as people-oriented. She also urges civic authorities to adopt a non-deterministic approach to planning, encouraging them to learn from their successes and failures.
Major Urban Movements and their Shortcomings
A critical problem with conventional planning is its grounding in theory, rather than direct observation. Two movements in the field of urbanism, the Garden City and the City Beautiful, exemplify the shortcomings of traditional planning practices. The former grew from ideas put forth by Ebenezer Howard in 1898. The latter flourished in the United States starting in the 1890s. Garden City practitioners sought to replicate the benefits of country living in urban environments by designing concentric cities, each with approximately 30 thousand inhabitants. The ideal Garden City comprises low density buildings, open spaces, and radial boulevards. Although no city precisely adheres to this ideal, planners drew on the Garden City notion of decentralization as a basic guide for dealing with cities. By contrast, City Beautiful planners sought to imbue cities with monumental grandeur through the construction of axial streets, imposing buildings, and vast green spaces. Beauty was not just an issue of aesthetic importance for City Beautiful practitioners, but also of moral and civic significance.
According to Jacobs, the decentralization of the Garden City Movement makes sense on its own terms. Relatively small, low-density towns appeal to those who value privacy and who do not mind having to rely on automobiles. Her critique stems from the movement’s anti-urban bias, which became the norm in planning circles throughout the United States. Planners began designing cities along the lines of Garden City ideals, valorizing small communities, low density, and the creation of open spaces for their own sake. Jacobs points out the irony of planners finally considering city planning from a different perspective while simultaneously “undermining [city] economies and killing them” (21).
The City Beautiful Movement, which promotes monumentalizing the urban fabric, similarly fails to address the problems facing cities, such as the lack of safety, the lack of diversity of uses and users, and blight. The great civic centers designed by City Beautiful planners often fail to bring in visitors, attract loitering, and are prone to decay, thereby hastening urban demise. Jacobs refers to the City Beautiful Movement as an “architectural design cult” (375) grounded in ideals, rather than real city uses.
The Negative Impact of Conventional Planning on New York City
Jacobs’s emphasis on local communities as agents of urban change contrasts starkly with conventional approaches to city planning. Using examples from cities across the United States, she provides a compelling critique of the top-down approach to urban design. The example on which she draws most frequently is her long-time home of New York City, where traditional planning policies have negatively impacted both the city and its residents.
Urban blight was an urgent challenge facing New York City in the mid 20th century. Planners generally addressed the problem by razing slums and erecting public housing projects. Robert Moses, the so-called master builder of New York City, favored this approach. (See Caro, Robert A. Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Penguin. 1975). Although Moses was never elected to a public office, he led a number of public-benefit corporations that gave him control of millions in tax-payer money, which he used to finance major public works. During his tenure as head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance (1948-1960), Moses spearheaded the construction of many housing projects, most in the modernist, tower-in-the-park type. His first housing project, financed by the Housing Act of 1949, was built in the Rockaways section of Queens in 1950 to accommodate returning veterans and African Americans migrating from the South. This project opened the floodgates to intense government construction in the area, with thousands of mass-produced units rising near the shoreline.
Moses’s aggressive approach to slum clearance and development, made possible by an abundance of cheap land, refashioned an old summer resort into a year-round residential community made up largely of poor, disenfranchised residents. In subsequent years, he and other planners erected housing projects across the city, including Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, and various areas lining the Harlem River. These projects quickly became sites of poverty, crime, and urban blight. Moses’s approach did not solve the problem of slums, it simply perpetuated it in a different form.
The negative impact of urban planning on New York City extends beyond housing projects. Jacobs addresses the problem of low-density suburbs around the city, notably on Long Island (309). She also discusses smaller projects that have major repercussions for urban dwellers, including the narrowing of sidewalks to accommodate vehicular traffic (124) and proposals to destroy a vibrant park (360). According to Jacobs, the dismissive attitude of planners toward the opinions of community activists is a leading cause of bad planning projects.
