On Jane Jacobs (2017)

It was an enormous cost, but given that there was an elevated highway there before, I don't think "remove the highway entirely" was a real option; it'd be like trying to delete I-5 from Los Angeles. Burying it was the next best option. as part of the environmental mitigation for this, several good public transit projects were legally required to be built. Only some of them have actually been built, mostly very late and to a lower standard than was promised (e.g. bad fake BRT instead of light rail). If they actually built what they were legally required to build it would've been a huge win for transit too; as it is, it's a minor win for transit too. It's a real shame they didn't do the north-south rail connector at the same time.

The Big Dig was probably at least as much about aesthetics and reuniting neighborhoods as it was about improving driving. And indeed it succeeded in the former more than the latter though the elevated central artery was pretty much a disaster on both counts. But no one could say that out loud. There were some minor transit improvements though that was already pretty good in the area and cycling was pretty much not on anyone’s radar at the time.

It's hard to stay on that razor edge (except in aggregate)..

There's another hidden razor edge in the call to download accountabilities. (The other side advocates for only distributing resources, for good reason: local centers of power are also ripe for abuse)

Crucially, it's the abstractions themselves that need to be fine-tuned. Jacobs had her own blunt ones-- I'd even say that yours sharpens the (overly-)general prescriptions that came out of Systems of Survival :)

It won't be a bad idea to fixate on oxymorons, because that's what these "life-giving razor edges" shall look to like to us mortals, for now. An older one is festina lente, due to Augustus. A center of power handing out .. Something

I think it's reductionist to the point of disrespectful to label her with any sort of ideology. What I remember from her books was some really good ideas. My favorite was gradual money vs cataclysmic money.

I see that 'conservatives' and 'libertarians' are claiming her. I'm not sure she'd claim them. She was anti-ideology.

But this conservativism you speak of, it's such a squishy term. Respect for existing institutions, places and organizations fits when it fits and then doesn't when it doesn't. Right now, it doesn't.

Buckley (oh so nobly) said A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. But then he also said that he'd be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. So much for standing athwart history.

AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.

If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.

So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.

I wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast.

I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?

Horseshoe.