Women's History Month: Honoring Jane Jacobs
(1916 – 2006)
COREY JOHNSON (pictured left)
In March, we celebrate Women's History Month and recognize the incredible contributions of women to our society. This year, I am reflecting on the legacy of Jane Jacobs.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Walking the streets of downtown Manhattan today would undoubtedly be an
entirely different experience had it not been for Jane Jacobs.
Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs began her career as
a journalist; she was an unpaid assistant to the women’s page editor
at the Scranton Tribune. After a year, at the height of the Great Depression,
she moved to New York City. It wasn’t until 1952 when Jacobs assumed
the position of Associate Editor at Architectural Forum that her interests
in urban planning and urban renewal peaked.
In 1958,
Fortune Magazine published her article entitled “Downtown is for People”. She
wrote of the future development in downtown Manhattan, similar to the
new, shiny Park Avenue:
“What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, parklike,
and uncrowded… They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly.
They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the
attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery. And each project will look
very much like the next one… These projects will not revitalize
downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the
city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its
variety. …There are, certainly, ample reasons for redoing downtown–falling
retail sales, tax bases in jeopardy, stagnant real-estate values, impossible
traffic and parking conditions, failing mass transit, encirclement by slums.
But with no intent to minimize these serious matters, it is more to the
point to consider what makes a city center magnetic, what can inject the
gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to
come into the city and to linger there. For magnetism is the crux of the
problem. All downtown’s values are its byproducts. To create in
it an atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance is not a frivolous aim.”
The Rockefeller Foundation then funded Jacobs to write
The Death and Life of Great American Cities , which was published in 1961. The book introduced ground-breaking concepts
about the inner workings and failings of cities that first shook the fields
of architecture, urban planning, politics and activism to their core and
are now regarded as fact. Jacobs had no formal training in urban planning.
The expertise she brought to the field was based on the notion that a
city is only as good as its people; its streets should intuitively reflect
the lifestyle and makeup of its population. She believed this accurate
reflection of a city’s people could and should be achieved by incorporating
local expertise into urban planning.
A longtime Greenwich Village resident, Jacobs sparked community-based
urban activism within her neighborhood that is alive and well today. In
the 1960s, she led efforts to protest the neighborhood clearing and highway
building imposed on downtown neighborhoods by government officials such
as Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. She served as the Chairperson of the
Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which –
if successful – would have built a highway through Washington Square
Park and the West Village. Her successful campaign to block the construction
of such a freeway set a new precedent for community involvement in urban
planning in New York City, and discouraged the car-centric approach with
which urban planning in New York City had long operated.
Her outspoken critique of high rise, bland buildings being constructed
in such areas of the City was also influential in shaping what would become
zoning height restrictions. However, to say she was opposed to change
would be untrue; Jacobs was a staunch supporter of mixed-use development
in that she thought all different types of buildings – regardless
of age – should be fully integrated with one another. This abides
to her mentality that a city’s streets should be reflective of its
people over the course of time. In her eyes, the urban ecosystem of New
York City should be physically evident of and reactive to New Yorkers’
diversity.
Though her original roots were in a coal mining town, Jacobs was a New
Yorker and a city person through and through. She understood that urbanites
are drawn to and comforted by other people. In fact, she often declared
that the key to a successful urban landscape is dependent on its population
density, with a higher concentration of people living amongst one another.
To her, it was this concentration that contributed to the true vitality
of a city – as well as its economic growth and wellbeing.
By the end of the 1960s, Jacobs moved to Toronto in opposition to the
Vietnam War. She continued to advocate for grassroots city planning for
the rest of her life and wrote more books that are championed in the field today:
The Economy of Cities ,
The Question of Separatism ,
Cities and the Wealth of Nations ,
Systems of Survival and The Nature of Economies .
It is important to know our history. During Women’s History Month,
I remember Jane Jacobs. Who do you remember?