The Death and Life of Neighborhood Activists

The City Journal (see link at right) has an older book review from July 31, 2009, on two books about Jane Jacobs, community activist and author of, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."  Jane Jacobs and her book have lent a politically-correct credibility to current urban planning philosophies and is a standard text used in most urban planning curriculums. The book review points out what I have said before - that Jane Jacobs was a NEIGHBORHOOD activist, not a lover of central planning that assumes a superior ideology is better than the wisdom of the people.  What she fought for was not a certain style of "vibrant," "mixed-use," city structure, but that city planning was best left to its inhabitants, not for a elite class of planners to impose on the public.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, 

and only when, they are created by everybody.” 

― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

HOWARD HUSOCK 

Jane Jacobs’s Legacy

Excerpts:
Still, few appreciate the extent to which Jacobs’s personal experience in Greenwich Village helped forge her influential ideas. It’s not only the remarkable fact that her study of the street outside her window at 555 Hudson Street sparked key insights about the preconditions for safety and neighborhood vitality. The same deeply local experience led to the development of another, less understood side of Jacobs—her role in shaping, for good and ill, the tactics of what has come to be called community activism. Anthony Flint’s book makes a significant contribution here, smartly built as it is around the perfect foil: New York’s brilliant, high-handed, take-no-prisoners modernist planner-in-chief, Robert Moses, whose plans to crisscross lower Manhattan with highways and housing projects, as he’d previously done throughout the city, were thwarted by Jacobs and her band of Greenwich Village mothers.

Flint describes how Jacobs and a powerful coalition of Village citizens and officials (including the young Ed Koch) successfully led what we would now call a neighborhood-preservation movement. A turning point was the defeat of Moses’s plan, first announced in 1952, to run a four-lane highway through one of the city’s landmarks, Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. Over the course of the fifties and early sixties, Jacobs helped stop two other disastrous projects: the replacement of 14 blocks of the West Village to make way for apartment towers, and the construction of a Lower Manhattan Expressway linking New Jersey and Long Island. The tactics that helped defeat Moses have become commonplace. Children marched with banners for the benefit of newspaper photographers, and activists got the word out in editorials in the fledgling Village Voice.

But none of this might have mattered had Jacobs not made the intellectual case against high-rise housing, neighborhood clearance, and highways that ran through cities—indeed, against the profession of city planning itself. She was untutored except in the way celebrated by the Yogi Berra aphorism: You can see a lot just by looking. 

It’s tempting to see Moses chiefly as a public front man for private interests; real-estate developers and contractors certainly got rich through his “slum clearance” and highway projects. But the bohemian quality of Jacobs and her allies can obscure crucial facts. Moses was a classic progressive who used eminent domain to wipe out minority-owned small businesses and to displace thousands of residents of modest means. Jacobs, despite her start in the Village, and despite leaving New York for Toronto during the Vietnam War so that her sons could avoid the draft, was more libertarian than leftist. (Flint notes that Death and Life was praised at its publication by William F. Buckley.)

Moses thought that expert guidance and planning could create an environment that fostered enjoyment and fulfillment. Jacobs demurred: “To approach a city or even a city neighborhood as if it were capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art is to make the mistake of substituting art for life.” Her struggle, then, was not just about neighborhood preservation; it pitted individualism and liberty against regimentation imposed by a benevolent despot.

It’s difficult to imagine her having a kind word to say, for instance, about the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, where eminent-domain power is to be used for massive clearance and the construction of subsidized high-rises and a sports arena. It’s classic old-style urban renewal, dressed up with plans to use a big-name architect.