An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity | Hacker News Reader

An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity

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40 pointstintinnabula17 comments

Death and Life of Great American Cities is a book that everyone should relocate to the top of their reading lists, of they've not already tackled it. It's still perfectly applicable to every US town or city I've ever visited or lived in. The mistakes she laments are still being made. She mentions that what she writes about cities may not be applicable to smaller towns, but it mostly is (I believe she was just pointing out the limits of her own experiences.)

There are many, many social issues worth reading about right now. This book is important not because its issue is more pressing, per se, but because its issues are so foundational to many others we struggle with in our cities and in the whole country.

Completely agree. Jane Jacobs the person is also worth examining as an exemplar for the 'public intellectual'. She wrote seminal books, but also got her hands dirty doing effective work with and for the communities she lived within.

I'm in the middle of Death and Life right now. I'm enjoying it for sure, and I find myself nodding my head at a lot of what she says, particularly stuff about border vacuums and mixed-usage areas, both of which have figured into my own past decisions about where to live.

One thing I do find lacking is a discussion of assessing tradeoffs, particularly when her design principles bump up against natural pressures (i.e. driven by the market, not by fiat city planners). For example, she advocates a mix of new and old city buildings. Enforcing this may generate housing and office shortages, if a neighborhood becomes attractive at a rate exceeding that which we can maintain the desired old-new mix. How do we trade that off; at what price do we value incremental old-new mix?

She does cover some of this in her chapter on self-destruction of diversity, but her solution of zoning for diversity was a little tautological for me, just stating that diversity should be enforced. What I'm interested in is how we weigh that against the lost utility of individuals and businesses who would prefer to move to the neighborhood in question.

It's definitely a tough question! While I'd prefer some more head-on discussion of tradeoffs, I think (unfortunately, decades later) that there's still plenty of room for the ideas she advocates to be recognized at all.

Yeah, making her ideas systematic are definitely a sticking point. In so much as she suggests anything, the more prominent idea to me was the influential neighborhood association. That wasn't so much a policy as a recommendation to have a standing public opinion "army", if you will.

I'm not sure that there is a way to put a system in place to save us from ourselves if we fail to be well informed, but the book definitely points out a lot of ways you can notice things going wrong. Jacobs also does a great job of explaining the mechanism of the many traps that we plan ourselves into.

My favorite non-profit, Strong Towns, also frequently mentions how difficult it is to give a formulaic solution to these problems. Furthermore, as the founder likes to put it, what we're often asking for are "ways other people can change what they do so I don't have to change what I'm doing." Until I can figure out a better way to make change, I'm at least determined to be informed and well-versed enough in the lingo so that urban planners can't make their dumb ideas look good in conversation with me just by dressing the ideas up in jargon.

She was certainly a fox, not a hedgehog. We need both.

In this article, the opening paragraph actually tells us why Jane Jacobs is culturally relevant. without all the irrelevant digressions. I mean what the heck does her boss being unable to attend a conference got to do with urban architectural planning.

https://www.pps.org/reference/jjacobs-2/

It's not an article about 'urban architectural planning'. It's about Jane Jacobs, a sui generis, unschooled, bottom-up thinker in a field then dominated by inhumane abstractions. That she appeared as a public intellectual somewhat accidentally seems like a fair introduction to that narrative.

It's long form writing, in this case taking the form of a narrative. It gives texture and context, which some people certainly appreciate. Having said that, it's also nice to have a summary version like the one you've offered, though I tend to go straight to Wikipedia if that's the mood I'm in.

I do appreciate long form writing, but not when it's done badly, as in all the salient details are scattered about the page. That article would be good as part of a biography. Having never heard of Jane Jacob, I too had to consult wikipedia. They should do what Time Magazine does and have a separate info-box with a brief synopsis of the salient details.

"They should do what Time Magazine does..."

Sorry, but you have really made a blunder here. The magazine you're critiquing is the foremost American journal of left political thought. It has been publishing weekly since the Civil War. Its editors, writers, and readers expect to read difficult, complex pieces there. It wants nothing to do with Time, which, being an upstart Luce rag, is the opposite of it in so many ways.

Anyway. Doubtless, Jacobs excites some contradictory impulses in the Nation readership. As a small article in another leftist journal (http://inthesetimes.com/article/2743/jane_jacobs_reconsidere...) put it:

"Jacobs’ iconoclastic ideas raised questions about her political beliefs. Her opposition to the Vietnam War and her role in organizing movements for urban social justice seem to mark her as a woman of the left. And yet, conservatives also embraced Jacobs’ wars with City Hall, joining her on the barricades to stop federal urban renewal policy. They found comfort in her cantankerous individualism and her attack on planners and government bureaucracy. Her economic ideas–which locate the roots of productivity in ingenuity rather than class struggle–attract libertarians."

This is the reason a short article on Jacobs in this magazine, especially, makes no sense.

That's a pretty good summary based on what I know of Jacobs. She has a lot of fans in the circles of city living advocates who are particularly opposed to car-centric cultures. On the other hand, I suspect that based on her record in NYC she'd be equally critical of those who would like nothing better than for the city (e.g. SF) to just bulldoze blocks of low rises and build, build, build.

That's the trouble with a lot of people who think of themselves as Jacobs fans. They like the sorts of outcomes that she liked, but then they ignore almost the whole of her analysis and basically come up with ideas for Master-Planning the Jane Jacobs City.

That's a good way to put it. I think it's also the case that Jane Jacobs wanted outcomes for cities that make them attractive and vibrant living places in the eyes of many. However, she was far less interested in then making, say, NYC easy and affordable for more people to live in--especially if doing so ran counter to goal #1.

Very true. It's hard to just look to her for a plan out of our current problems. In my own city (LA), we've got to make up our mind on whether to encourage big projects such as: high-rises along transit corridors in Hollywood and elsewhere, wide busways and big metro stations along major streets, small-lot subdivisions of 1920s homes that sit on 10k sq. ft. lots, etc.

There is considerable overlap between her own "cantankerous individualism" in the face of City Hall and that of NIMBYs in my own city.

Exactly. Controlled, organic growth that preserves the existing mixed use culture of a neighborhood through political activism is pretty much the definition of NIMBYism to the transplant who thinks their well-paying professional job should give them a right to live in their favored city with affordable rent.

I'm pretty much a fan of Jacobs but, as the article even notes, she wasn't generally viewed as much of an advocate for affordable housing. I think it's generally fair to say that she was far more focused on the quality of life and aesthetics of the city than necessarily making it possible for the maximum number of people to live there.

One thing that I think people miss about the book is its profound disappointment that there are so few cities that even begin to approach her ideal. I think she would agree that you don't need to get the maximum number of people to live in a particular city; in fact, I recall that the book lists actual a goal range of densities. What we should do is learn the basics so that if more people want to live in urban environments, we can more easily build those environments. America has not built a "new" city in the style of NYC or SF in a very long time.

I voted you up at first because I, too, get really annoyed at "long form" magazine writing in which it seems the author is paid by the word and encouraged to wander all over the rhetorical landscape, only occasionally circling back to the supposed point of the article.

But then I actually read the article... and, well, that's what the 'unvote' button is for, I guess.

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