Society of Saint Jane

Not surprisingly, no time at all was wasted in beginning the canonization process after Jane Jacobs’ death in April 2006. New York, the city with which she is most closely associated despite having left for good in 1968, has been a center of worship of the patron saint of urbanism — a cult taken up with pronounced urgency and righteousness in light of last year’s attempts to resuscitate the reputation of Robert Moses, Jacobs’ great nemesis in theory if not technically in practice. Leading these efforts was the Municipal Arts Society, with sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, which originally underwrote Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. The society, better known for championing quality of life campaigns against ugly newsracks, took up the Jacobs mantle with named internships, Jane Jacobs medalists, an exhibition, panel discussions, a publication and a Web site, all questioning the status of a rapidly changing city through Jacobs’ large round glasses.

Jacobs’ annus mirabilis was in 1961 — a very different time for the fields of architecture and planning and for the city of New York. Then, urban renewal threatened to remake entire cities following orthodox principles of functional segregation, and a messianic insistence on open space and modernist towers. Such projects profoundly transformed the lives of millions of city dwellers without concern for their preferences, habits and established ways of life. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Jacobs (among other activists and urban thinkers), we have not seen such large-scale urban change since — although for the organizers of this project the carte blanche given to developers and their megaprojects in New York today is not so different. Jacobs posed a great challenge to a hegemonic urbanism and was a gifted observer of the urban scene, but her urban philosophy, as it were, was reactive rather than proactive, valuing what already existed rather than envisioning alternate futures. That’s why historic preservation and the valuation of the city as it used to be have possibly been her most successful and visible legacies. This becomes complicated when such a re-evaluation leads to the gentrification and renewed private development pressures that are remaking the city in the name of all that Jacobs espoused but with questionable results.

In the context of a discussion of New York’s future, Jacobs is retooled and represented as a champion of socioeconomic diversity and citizen participation. In the user-friendly exhibition, filled with videos of ordinary New Yorkers talking about how they feel about their city and peppered with slogans like “you are where you live,” “you are a part of it” or “the city is you,” Jacobs is a model for contemporary urban activism, and neighborhood groups fighting for environmental and social justice are highlighted as her living legacy.

But the question of what kind of city we should fight for is more complicated. Jacobs’ own findings have in turn become orthodoxy as her “four principles” — mixed use, frequent streets, varied buildings and concentration of people — are presented as a recipe for urbanism. Thus the exhibition walks a fine and confused line as to whose interest to champion, intimating that “bodegas” are good while Whole Foods is bad, that the diverse neighborhood of Flushing, Queens is good and the garden suburb of Forest Hills (which most people find quite pleasant and well served by public transportation) is bad. If we were to ask people what they appreciated or desired in their neighborhoods today, we might gather a whole different set of values. To appreciate the quirky charms of the bodega and its hand-painted signs is to overlook the fact that it stocks no fresh fruits or vegetables. At the same time, the High Line, a new park which was brought about by popular demand and is a triumph of adaptive reuse (yet brings green space to one of the few parts of the city that actually has plenty of it already) is touted as a great civic project.

Jacobs’ urbanism (paradoxically, while one of community activism) is also one focused on the individual, on personal choice and taste — a free-market urbanism. For better and worse, Jacobs’ is a city of individuals, of many private goods rather than an overwhelming (if invented) public one. This is reflected in the exhibition’s catalogue, a compendium of many individual takes on Jacobs and New York City. Writers, artists, scholars and designers weigh in with stories of Jacobs, of their neighborhoods, recollections, hopes and fears for the city. Many stories are local and praise small victories or bemoan change. But in the spirit of diversity, many dissenting voices warn that doing as Jacobs would do will come to no good today. As the city’s challenges evolve, the best lesson from Saint Jane is to react to the problems at hand as they really are, without a preconceived set of solutions or best practices. Short blocks without high rises can be nice, but environmental crisis, a prohibitive cost of living and a dearth of affordable housing are challenges that demand new questioning and new thinking.