Jane Jacobs's Legacy

Abstract

Sometimes a book can change history. Books often influence ideas, but only rarely do they catalyze activism. In the 1960s, a handful of books triggered movements for reform. These include Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which inspired the war on poverty; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which helped galvanize the environmental movement; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the manifesto of modern feminism; Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), which made its author a household name and precipitated the rise of the consumer movement; and Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power (1967), which signaled the civil rights movement’s transformation toward black separatism. Jane Jacobs’s 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, belongs in this pantheon. Perhaps more than anyone else during the past half century, Jacobs changed the way we think about livable cities. Indeed, it is a mark of her impact that many people influenced by her ideas have never heard of her. Her views have become part of the conventional wisdom, if not always part of the continuing practice of city planning. The 1950s was the heyday of urban renewal, the federal program that sought to wipe out urban “blight” with the bulldozer. Its advocates were typically downtown businesses, developers, banks, major daily newspapers, big-city mayors, and construction unions— what John Mollenkopf would later call the “growth coalition” and Harvey Molotch label the “growth machine.” Most planners and architects at that time joined the urban renewal chorus. It was, after all, their bread and butter. Moreover, they convinced themselves that big development projects would “revitalize” downtown business districts, stem the exodus of middle class families to suburbs, and improve the quality of public spaces. Jacobs, a journalist, was self-taught. She had no college degree. This may have been liberating, because she was unencumbered by planning orthodoxy, although she carefully read and thoroughly critiqued the major thinkers in the field. Had she studied architecture or urban planning when she was college age (in the 1930s and 1940s), she would have been taught the value of top-down planning and modernist mega-projects. Instead, she learned about cities by observing and doing. In the 1950s, she wrote a series of articles in Fortune magazine (later the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities) that said, essentially, cities are for people. When Robert Moses, New York’s planning czar and perhaps the most powerful unelected city official of the 20th century, proposed building a highway bisecting Jacobs’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, she sprung into action, mobilizing her neighbors to challenge and