Time for Some Jane Jacobs Revisionism? - City Room - Metro - ...

Jacobs’s admirers, Dr. Klemek said, are equally vociferous: He noted a recent article in Time Out New York magazine that asked “What Would Jane Jacobs Do?” as if the urban theorist were a Christ-like figure.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, emphasized Jacobs’s appeal to people from different political positions. “It’s very striking about Jane Jacobs that such a wide range of views can be found in her writings that people along the entire political spectrum admire,” she said. “She relies on stories and anecdotes for much of what she says, and then it’s incumbent on the reader to try to figure out what the story says and what the story means.”

What emerges from her straightforward prose, she argued, is a deep respect for the principles of density and complexity in urban design. But those ideals can be misinterpreted, she suggested, if one receives priority over the other.

“In practice, she disapproved equally of self-isolating large development, like public housing for low-income people, and luxurious towers for high-income people,” she said, adding later, “She admired a certain kind of active integration, of people of different races, incomes, educational levels. She admired the presence of work in neighborhoods. She had a romantic attachment to manufacturing work and certain small enterprises — retail, commercial — on the street. She liked everything mixed up together.”

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Ms. Vitullo-Martin offered perhaps the most provocative argument of the evening: “If Jacobs were looking at New York today, she would regard the most serious self-isolating projects as the projects that are being developed by large powerful nonprofit institutions.” Universities like N.Y.U. and Columbia and hospitals like Sloan-Kettering and NewYork-Presbyterian are building huge developments that do not necessarily fit in well with the streetscape, she said.

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Samuel Zipp, an urban and cultural historian at Brown University, argued that Jacobs needed to be understood in the context of the 1960s.

“Jane Jacobs is not often included in media or historical accounts of that time, but she belongs there — just the same, I think — as much or even more than familiar icons of that time,” he said.

In some ways she left a “confusing legacy,” he said. On the one hand, she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and eventually moved from New York to Toronto, with her draft-age sons, in protest.

On the other hand, her strongest arguments against urban renewal were embraced by conservatives, like Martin Anderson, who believed that urban renewal was a “big-government boondoggle” and later went to work in the Nixon administration. Her ideas about individuals and organizations thriving outside of a formal framework of municipal governance appealed to libertarians.

“Jacobs had very little patience with attempts to pin her down politically, to put her on one side of the political spectrum or the other,” Dr. Zipp said. He argued that Jacobs’s legacy was similarly nuanced.

On the one hand, “it’s true more community-oriented structures have been put in place to give ordinary people more say” in planning decisions, he said, “but at the same time, the imperatives of the private market – dominated by corporate developers,” seem more influential in shaping cities’ future than ever.

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The last panelist was Roberta Brandes Gratz, a writer, preservationist and founder of the Eldridge Street Project.

Ms. Gratz argued that Jacobs’s ideas were intimately connected with Greenwich Village, the neighborhood most closely associated with Jacobs. Ms. Gratz said that people tend to assume that Jacobs’s ideas were overly based on the Village — when in fact they are applicable to neighborhoods and cities everywhere. Ms. Gratz also said that people incorrectly assume that Jacobs would have disliked today’s Village.

“The Village, as gentrified as people may think, is as dense, diversified, quintessentially urban today as it was in Jane’s day,” Ms. Gratz asserted. “Families, singles, elderly, immigrants, small shopkeepers and large — all still populate the district, as reflected in the great variety of children’s clothing stores, or adult single hangouts. What is wrong with the Village today is wrong with the whole city and in fact the country. The squeezing out of the working lass and the rising costs of housing and other essentials are a fact of American life, not just Village life. This is totally in keeping with Jacobs’s writing.”

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Ms. Gratz, who knew Jacobs, added:

Jane’s ideas are not frozen in time. She never expected change not to occur. The process of change – the process of change – is what concerned her most, how it was managed and how intimately involved in shaping that change were the citizens affected by that change. Furthermore her ideas were never static. She loathed ideology and bristled at any suggestion that her ideas added up to a theory. Sadly, she was in the process of writing a new book on economics that would undoubtedly reflect some adjustments to hear earlier thoughts. And yes, she was embraced by the left and the right and she was totally amused by that, b/c she hated ideology of any stripe and she didn’t deny the embrace, because she was conservative economically, yes. She did not believe in big federal funding programs, which is where she shared with Martin Anderson.

Ms. Gratz argued that the role of West Village Houses — a moderate-income development consisting of 42 five-story walkups, two units per floor — has “never been properly acknowledged.” It was a “community-designed alternative” to an urban renewal scheme that would have destroyed 14 blocks of the West Village.

The talk was entitled “Can One Woman (Still) Make a Difference?” and Ms. Gratz attempted an answer: “Can someone like Jacobs have singular impact on the city today? Maybe not on the whole city, but the city, after all, is only the sum of its parts, i.e., its neighborhoods.”

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Professor Klemek noted that two criticisms of Jacobs have emerged — from people “who accuse her of being handmaiden of gentrification” and from people who accuse her of being “the patron saint of NIMBYism.” Neither view is accurate, he argued. Jacobs was not opposed to change and growth, but believed change was most destructive when it occurred in cataclysmic bursts. And, he added, she opposed projects that were bad for any neighborhood, not just her own.

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