An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity

https://www.thenation.com/article/jane-jacobss-radical-vision-of-humanity/

by tintinnabula • 9 years ago

40 17 9 years ago

Shalhoub2• 9 years ago

In this article, the opening paragraph actually tells us why Jane Jacobs is culturally relevant. without all the irrelevant digressions. I mean what the heck does her boss being unable to attend a conference got to do with urban architectural planning.

https://www.pps.org/reference/jjacobs-2/

crispinb3• 9 years ago

It's not an article about 'urban architectural planning'. It's about Jane Jacobs, a sui generis, unschooled, bottom-up thinker in a field then dominated by inhumane abstractions. That she appeared as a public intellectual somewhat accidentally seems like a fair introduction to that narrative.

tbihl3• 9 years ago

It's long form writing, in this case taking the form of a narrative. It gives texture and context, which some people certainly appreciate. Having said that, it's also nice to have a summary version like the one you've offered, though I tend to go straight to Wikipedia if that's the mood I'm in.

Shalhoub2• 9 years ago

I do appreciate long form writing, but not when it's done badly, as in all the salient details are scattered about the page. That article would be good as part of a biography. Having never heard of Jane Jacob, I too had to consult wikipedia. They should do what Time Magazine does and have a separate info-box with a brief synopsis of the salient details.

CamperBob2• 9 years ago

I voted you up at first because I, too, get really annoyed at "long form" magazine writing in which it seems the author is paid by the word and encouraged to wander all over the rhetorical landscape, only occasionally circling back to the supposed point of the article.

But then I actually read the article... and, well, that's what the 'unvote' button is for, I guess.

tbihl3• 9 years ago

Death and Life of Great American Cities is a book that everyone should relocate to the top of their reading lists, of they've not already tackled it. It's still perfectly applicable to every US town or city I've ever visited or lived in. The mistakes she laments are still being made. She mentions that what she writes about cities may not be applicable to smaller towns, but it mostly is (I believe she was just pointing out the limits of her own experiences.)

There are many, many social issues worth reading about right now. This book is important not because its issue is more pressing, per se, but because its issues are so foundational to many others we struggle with in our cities and in the whole country.

crispinb3• 9 years ago

Completely agree. Jane Jacobs the person is also worth examining as an exemplar for the 'public intellectual'. She wrote seminal books, but also got her hands dirty doing effective work with and for the communities she lived within.

andy_wrote• 9 years ago

I'm in the middle of Death and Life right now. I'm enjoying it for sure, and I find myself nodding my head at a lot of what she says, particularly stuff about border vacuums and mixed-usage areas, both of which have figured into my own past decisions about where to live.

One thing I do find lacking is a discussion of assessing tradeoffs, particularly when her design principles bump up against natural pressures (i.e. driven by the market, not by fiat city planners). For example, she advocates a mix of new and old city buildings. Enforcing this may generate housing and office shortages, if a neighborhood becomes attractive at a rate exceeding that which we can maintain the desired old-new mix. How do we trade that off; at what price do we value incremental old-new mix?

She does cover some of this in her chapter on self-destruction of diversity, but her solution of zoning for diversity was a little tautological for me, just stating that diversity should be enforced. What I'm interested in is how we weigh that against the lost utility of individuals and businesses who would prefer to move to the neighborhood in question.

It's definitely a tough question! While I'd prefer some more head-on discussion of tradeoffs, I think (unfortunately, decades later) that there's still plenty of room for the ideas she advocates to be recognized at all.

tbihl3• 9 years ago

Yeah, making her ideas systematic are definitely a sticking point. In so much as she suggests anything, the more prominent idea to me was the influential neighborhood association. That wasn't so much a policy as a recommendation to have a standing public opinion "army", if you will.

I'm not sure that there is a way to put a system in place to save us from ourselves if we fail to be well informed, but the book definitely points out a lot of ways you can notice things going wrong. Jacobs also does a great job of explaining the mechanism of the many traps that we plan ourselves into.

My favorite non-profit, Strong Towns, also frequently mentions how difficult it is to give a formulaic solution to these problems. Furthermore, as the founder likes to put it, what we're often asking for are "ways other people can change what they do so I don't have to change what I'm doing." Until I can figure out a better way to make change, I'm at least determined to be informed and well-versed enough in the lingo so that urban planners can't make their dumb ideas look good in conversation with me just by dressing the ideas up in jargon.

crispinb3• 9 years ago

She was certainly a fox, not a hedgehog. We need both.

An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity

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