PPS responds to New York Times op-ed on Jane Jacobs

By on | 4 Comments

Jane Jacobs’ ideas about how to create great cities are more popular and important than ever. Her death last week at age 89 has drawn even more attention to her wisdom that basic observation of what a makes neighborhoods work is the best guide to good urban planning, rather than the grandiose but often mistaken aesthetic and social theories foisted by so-called experts.

We’re in the midst of a Jane Jacobs revival right now as part of a reaction to the recent infestation of cold, lifeless “look-at-me” architecture and landscape architecture in cities all over the world. Design-fetish architects and the critics who love them are distressed at Jacobs enduring influence. And rightly so, because she undercuts all their pretentious justifications for a rash of ugly new projects that the vast majority of people intensely dislike. Her books give us the vision to see why this new “starchitecture” is wrongheaded, just as she showed us in the 1960s what was foolish about urban renewal schemes.

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp complained in 2003 that her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was “one of 20th Century architecture’s most traumatic events”, because she made a foolproof case that the life of neighborhoods is more important than the design of buildings.

The current Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff took the occasion of Jacobs’ passing as an opportunity to challenge her thinking and her legacy, declaring “her death may also give us permission to move on…” He then implies that Jacobs, and Jacobsism, is to blame for not preventing the gentrification of New York’s SoHo district (which she helped save from Robert Moses’s bulldozers) and the proliferation of autos and suburban sprawl. This is preposterous, akin to blaming to Frederick Law Olmstead for a mugging in your local park.

Jane Jacobs made a brave and important stand against the gutting of our cities and offered a profound contribution to restoring energy and life to New York, Toronto and many modern cities. We all owe Jacobs a great debt, even the New York Times architecture critic who has a much more interesting and inspiring city to write about thanks to her.

Tagged with →  

Keep your finger on the pulse–sign up for Placemaking News today! subscribe

  • Bill McNeal

    fantastic
    Fantastic rebuttal Mr. Walljasper. I think that the thing that most of these critics miss about Jacobs is that “it’s the context, stupid.” It’s only about design and architectural style insofar as it relates to the life of the people on the street who inhabit and use the space. They mischaracterize JJ as someone who was against style, but in my mind, she was in defiance of the substance that the mainstream style always brought with it.

    She was always about the impact that the buildings had upon people at the place where the two intersected, not neccesarily the style of the buildings themselves.

    Why would anyone expect an architecture critic to embrace function over form?

    Bill McNeal

    http://www.whiteknuckledwanderer.blogspot.com

  • Sean Sweeney

    Gentrification of SoHo
    You did not get it quite right. The Times critic states that Jacobs’ view could not prevent the turning of SoHo into an outdoor mall, not its being gentrified. Big difference.

    Surely, there is nothing wrong with turning a neighborhood with a high commercial vacancy rate into a neighborhood of residents, some millionaires some old time artists. After all, there is a housing shortage in NYC.

    The SoHo Alliance did a survey with Columbia University’s Grad School and found that over 50% of the residents are in the arts. (A survey of NoHo had similar figures.) The myth that only millionaire solely live her is just that: a myth perpetrated by lazy and uninquisitive reporters from the NY Times Real Estate and Style sections.

    And although retail uses dot the ground floor, the floors above are chock full of families and working residents. Many ‘starving’ artists still reside here for two reasons: they are paying cheap rents under the Rent Stabilization/Loft Laws or else they do not want ot move out of huge lofts that they bought inexpensively decades ago. Indeed, it is a neighborhood noted for the activism of its residents.

    Just look at its sister neighborhoods to the north and south, NoHo and TriBeCa. They are gentrified but not crowded open-air malls. SoHo happened first, and got the brunt of the retail stores.

    SoHo has become a crowded mall, not becasue of Jacobs, but because of its unique zoning, history, and narrow streets.

    Sean Sweeney

  • Judi Francis

    Jacobs Was Right in Every Way
    Bravo for taking on the NY Times and their cynical view of Jacobs. I guess she was supposed to have cured the common cold, too. She was and continues to be an inspiration for any urban dweller who sees “new” in old industrial architecture, waiting to be re-purposed; who wants to live in a multi-generational, multi-socioeconomic community where ideas remain fresh and food stores varied; who wants to live on shorter streets with less traffic, where people are encouraged to know each other and therefore, look after each other. I feel privledged to live in such a neighborhood in Brooklyn and while dominated by wealth, it also contains one the the city’s oldest public housing buildings. We work together on community projects as a community – regardless of ethnicity or class. It is a wonder and we owe it to Jacobs for giving a generation of planners -and more importantly, urban residents – the courage.

  • Katie Salay

    Kunstler on Ouroussoff
    James Kunstler calls Ouroussoff’s piece “a load of vicious and stupid fashionista crap”.