In Memoriam: Jane Jacobs

The day after her death in April, newspapers across North America eulogized Jane Jacobs. Reporters and op-ed writers praised her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as the most important book on cities in the 20th century. Planners, architects, critics, developers, and government officials in every major North American city spoke about how Death and Life changed the way they looked at cities, and changed their lives.

Revolutionary when it was published, Death and Life has since become settled doctrine. The book has spawned a cottage industry of planners dedicated to advancing the ideas that Jacobs set down almost 50 years ago. They took her notions of mixed-use neighborhoods, 24-hour street life, and walkable downtowns and condensed them into hard formulas - a fixed prescription for mixed-use developments of shops, offices, and apartments, clustered around downtowns, oriented towards walking, and ideally, connected to a transit station. 

Some of these planners call themselves New Urbanists. Others stand for Smart Growth or Transit-Oriented Design, and some don’t bother with labels. But one and all, these apostles reverently sprinkle quotations from Jacobs throughout their writings. Their work, indirectly, is Jacobs’s great legacy, writ large across the landscape of North America.

Yet their approach to planning misses the fundamental point of Death and Life. Jacobs’s great power as a writer and thinker was rooted in her tremendous talent as an observer, and Death and Life is a work of reportage. Her critique of contemporary planning rested upon a simple premise: the planners of cities did not understand how cities worked. More precisely, they did not understand how people actually lived in cities because they had not bothered to observe city life.

Her approach was scientific, not in the sense of formulas and statistics, but in the classic mode of the scientific method: she observed, developed hypotheses, tested hypotheses, modified them, and drew conclusions based on what she had seen. “Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design,” she wrote. “This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories.” She also stressed that her observations were site-specific: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban,” she warned. “Towns, suburbs, and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities.”

Too many of her would-be followers have ignored this precaution. They have adopted Jacobs’s conclusions without applying her careful methods. They build according to models for how neighborhoods and towns and suburbs should work, and how people should live, rather than how people do live. Just as the conceivers of modernist towers-in-the-park wrongly assumed that tenants would stroll through the grass because it was there to be strolled through, contemporary planners too often believe that if a place looks like a 19th-century town, it will function like one.

The contemporary visions of Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and town centers are not so much rooted in Jacobs’s work as they are superficial readings, mixed with elements of late-19th- and early-20th-century urban centers. Architects have criticized these movements for being stylistically retrograde. The problem is not their style, however, but that they are in a sense nothing but style. Today’s planners believe they can plop down a visual model of town centers and shopping villages just about anywhere on the map. But appearances don’t dictate function, nor do they create markets from thin air. 

Jacobs wrote Death and Life specifically to attack this way of planning. Instead of dreaming up imaginary cities, she observed real cities, and from those observations arrived at her own model for how cities work. Now some of her adherents have reverse-engineered her observations to create just another set of visual models. Fifty years ago, the planners’ doctrine was light and air and grass. Today, the doctrine is bustling streets and front porches and community. Both are simply visual styles - design masquerading as planning.

Jacobs wrote, “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” The living spaces of today are admittedly a confusing jumble - people own cars, shop online, have jobs in far-away office parks. But the most complex living spaces are precisely the ones that should be our laboratories. These are places to observe and learn, rather than mere problems in need of prescriptions. Honoring Jacobs’s legacy means uncovering the order beneath the disorder in cities and suburbs. All this digging may not produce a pretty picture, but it will be a critical step in developing livable spaces that are honest about the needs of markets, geography, and - most of all - the people they are created to serve.