Any usefulness that this Image of the city will have will depend first, on how true it is (on this I will try my best), and second, on whether it exerts any influence on the things that are done deliberately to shape the city and its life. I hope it will, but of course I do not know.
—Jane Jacobs, 1958
ON FEBRUARY 21, 1961, three weeks after she sent off the manuscript for Death and Life and returned to Architectural Forum, Jacobs opened the New York Times to find that her neighborhood and another in the East Village were the first two “anchor points” of a cross-island urban renewal area proposed to include as many as fifteen project sites. Walter Fried, the vice chairman of the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board—an organization formed in 1960 to replace Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance—was quoted as saying, “We’ve asked the Planning Commission to make a study of the entire area between Fourteenth and Canal Streets, river-to-river, to determine what it should look like forty years from now.” Other project sites, the Times reported, would not be announced “until plans are firmer, it was explained, since a mere announcement sometimes causes great anxiety in the affected neighborhoods.”1
The anxiety was warranted, and Jacobs’s fight to save her neighborhood began immediately. Within two days of the announcement, the Housing and Redevelopment Board—which had made a preliminary study in advance of the City Planning Commission’s direct public involvement— would request $350,000 from the city’s Board of Estimate for a formal survey of the neighborhood and additional planning. From her work covering urban redevelopment, Jacobs understood that renewal plans initially presented to the public as “studies” were well developed and that the survey and funding request was a standard step in a typical Title I urban renewal project. A few days later, she was quoted in the Times as the chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village, stating, “The aim of the committee is to kill this project entirely because if it goes through it can mean only the destruction of the community. Then we will look for an alternative. We want enforced conservation of the buildings, not their destruction.” Jacobs devoted most of 1961 to fighting the renewal plan, later observing, “The city’s selection of the area and its schemes for converting it into inane anticity were about as neat a case study as could well be imagined of the intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about.”2
The Save the West Village organization, spearheaded by Jacobs, her husband, her close friend Rachele Wall, Gloria Hamilton (an owner of the local White Horse Tavern), and others, fought back with every tool at their disposal: petitions, leaflets, newspaper advertisements, letters to the editor, press conferences, publicity stunts, technical and legal strategies, art auctions, Christmas wreath and book sales for fundraising, politicking, and coalition building. They quickly learned that the opposition was steps ahead of them. The Housing and Redevelopment Board had requested the Board of Estimate’s hearing as early as February 15, preempting the mayor’s announcement, and a select group of individuals and local organizations had already been prepared, in advance of the public announcement, to support a West Village renewal project. These included the Citizens Housing and Planning Council (directed by Roger Starr, who wrote a scathing review of Death and Life in January 1962) and a number of other important city and civic organizations, including a local settlement house, a charitable organization, a church and pastor with personal connections to Moses, local politicians, and a number of what Jacobs and others called “fronts” or “puppet” organizations. “Mi-Cove,” the Middle Income Co-Operative Village, Jacobs later explained, was “what we came to know as a puppet organization set up by the City … created by the City to be, in effect, the representative of the citizens of the West Village.” Others were the “Neighbors Committee” and “West Greenwich Village Site Tenants’ Council.”3
With support from Bill Passanante, a local assemblyman, the Board of Estimate’s vote was postponed until March. Soon thereafter the Manhattan borough president Edward Dudley requested a postponement until April, although he predicted that “virtually all of Manhattan would eventually be studied for urban renewal action.” After the March meeting, when no action was taken, the Times reported that “a group of militant residents of Greenwich Village” was unsuccessful in persuading the board to kill outright the proposed urban renewal project.4
In the meantime, Rachele Wall had convinced another friend, Lester Eisner, the regional director of the federal Urban Renewal Administration, to visit the neighborhood, and his advice and information about Title I procedures, process, data, and law helped the neighborhood shape a counterattack. Despite Jacobs’s knowledge of urban renewal from her work at Forum and in East Harlem, she did not have the procedural knowledge necessary to fight a specific renewal project. From Eisner and their own research, the group learned to avoid citizen participation in the planning process (a legal requirement), and they produced their own door-to-door questionnaire and slum designation survey, which documented every building in the fourteen-block subject area and included such aspects as comparisons of soot and noise pollution (from sound recordings) in the West Village with those in areas not considered slums. “We all had jobs and some of us who were working mothers had two jobs,” Jacobs later recalled. “Everybody was in on this. Either their second job or their third job was saving the neighborhood.” Working late into many nights, they produced a remarkable neighborhood study. Eisner told them it was an extraordinary job, one that would have cost the government $50,000. “It showed that, by all the legal criteria, the West Village was not a slum—could not legally be designated for urban renewal,” Jacobs said later. “But that made no difference to the City Planning Commission. It wasn’t interested in our information. It had already—they had already made up their minds. They totally disregarded it.” Despite Eisner’s help, massive forces were aligned against them.5
In early April, the Times discussed the West Village renewal proposal in the context of a larger congressional effort to increase federal funding for urban renewal by $2.5 billion over four years and “for a broader range of urban renewal projects than has so far been attempted.” The paper reported that, by the end of the month, James Felt, the chairman of the City Planning Commission, would make public a comprehensive proposal of middle-income housing and renewal projects throughout the city and that all projects before the Board of Estimate, including the controversial West Village proposal, would be referred to the City Planning Commission for review and inclusion in its master proposal. Mayor Wagner was quoted as stating that “1961-62 will be a banner year in our continuing battle to turn back blight and deterioration and to create wholesome, productive communities.”6
A few weeks later, around eight hundred people attended the twelve-hour-long Board of Estimate hearing on April 27, where an attorney for Save the West Village served a court order to Mayor Wagner. The order claimed that the commission had failed to hold public hearings and make its case for designating the neighborhood for renewal, and it ordered the mayor, the planning commission, the Board of Estimate, and the Housing and Redevelopment Board to show why they should not be restrained from designating the area as blighted. As spokesperson, Jacobs charged that city authorities were using Mi-Cove as a puppet organization to give the impression that residents approved of renewal and had practiced deception in their procedures. She asserted that the West Village was in the process of private rehabilitation and was not a slum.7
In May, Felt countered with his own public relations campaign. He admitted that the housing board’s attempt to shortcut a hearing had been a mistake, but he argued that Jacobs and the Save the West Village group were “fighting the ghost of Robert Moses.” Seeking to allay fears about a new package of eighteen urban renewal projects, Felt reiterated that there would be public hearings on each one and that the “backbone of renewal is in conserving and improving our existing structures and relating new developments to the character and needs of the community.” At a time when New York had no preservation laws, Felt promised to establish a “Committee for the Preservation of Structures of Historic and Esthetic Importance,” and he asserted that the commission had renounced Moses’s “bulldozer approach.” Within the West Village battle, Jacobs later explained, could be found the origins of the city’s historic preservation movement: “We in the West Village were supposed to be thrown to the wolves, so to speak, as a sacrifice for the city giving people the preservation measure.” But Jacobs and her allies were delighted about this, she recalled, because the neighborhood believed in the preservation measure and they were pleased that their efforts had pushed Felt into it.8
With each postponement of a hearing, the Save the West Village membership grew and its organization strengthened. Active members organized into subgroups that studied the legal issues related to urban renewal or the workings of city government, while others translated documents into Spanish or handled public relations. Children collected signatures for petitions and delivered leaflets to shopkeepers who allowed their storefronts to be used as bulletin boards for the quick dissemination of information. Although the organization put forth some theoretical arguments—such as the writer Erik Wensberg’s criticism of the functionalist city planning belief in the segregation of industrial and residential land uses in a Times editorial—in order to unify diverse interests, the message was kept simple: Kill the proposal.9
In early June, as the City Planning Commission met, Jacobs and other committee leaders delivered a petition to the mayor’s office demanding the removal of Felt as commissioner and Clarence Davies as chairman of the Housing and Redevelopment Board. Although this did little more than fragment sympathetic forces who didn’t support the tactic, by August, with his reelection looming, Mayor Wagner began to signal his opposition to the Village renewal proposal. In mid-August, Wagner declared that the “bulldozer approach” was off the table. With his mayoral opponents promising to scrap the project if elected, on September 6, on the eve of the primary election, Wagner spoke the words Jacobs and others were waiting to hear. The Times reported that Mayor Wagner “would ask the City Planning Commission to kill the highly controversial plan for renewing a fourteen-block section of Greenwich Village.”10
Nevertheless, on October 18, 1961, the City Planning Commission determined that the West Village was suitable for urban renewal. Coming just a few days after “How City Planners Hurt Cities,” the first widely read excerpt of Death and Life, was published in the Saturday Evening Post, the commission declared the neighborhood “a substandard area by reason of the large number of structures therein that are deteriorating or dilapidated, the mixture of incompatible land uses, the lack of open space for active and passive recreation, the unsatisfactory traffic conditions,” and other factors. While recognizing the “charm of diversity … so typical of Greenwich Village,” the commission stated that the West Village’s “kind of mixture, however, is of an entirely different quality from mixtures of residential uses with industrial warehousing and automotive uses, which have a completely different physical aspect—the creation of noise, dirt, traffic and other conditions incompatible with residences.”11
The West Village battle was ultimately about more than the West Village neighborhood—it was a struggle for the enterprise of city planning. In its formal report, the commission argued that public intervention for renewal was not necessarily destructive or harmful and that it absolutely did not believe in “the laissez faire theory of urban renewal”—the idea that “local residents, if left to their own efforts without the interference of government, can bring about the renewal of the City.” The commission rejected the pressure to stop trying to renew cities. “The problems of the 20th century urban revolution will never be solved by a modernized version of laissez faire. To accept this is to abandon our cities to the very process which created the slums of the past and necessitated housing and urban renewal programs to bring about their elimination.” Thus, despite recognizing that a substantial majority of the local community was opposed, the commission determined that it would be “derelict in its responsibility if it blindly accepted the argument that community opposition to a proposal was by itself sufficient grounds for rejecting that proposal.” It ordered that the city’s master plan be changed to show that West Village was “characterized by blight and suitable for clearance, replanning, reconstruction or rehabilitation for predominantly residential use.”12
A “near riot” ensued. The Times reported that the “Villagers, led by Mrs. Jane Jacobs, chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village, leapt from their seats and rushed forward. They shouted that a ‘deal’ had been made with a builder, that the Mayor had been ‘double-crossed’ and that the commission’s action was illegal.” They shouted “Down with Felt!” and “Felt made a deal!” Policemen escorted several from the room and carried one man out by his feet.13
Interviewed after the meeting, Jacobs declared, “It’s the same old story. First the builder picks the property, then he gets the Planning Commission to designate it, and then the people get bulldozed out of their homes.” She reported, moreover, that in a meeting with Mayor Wagner a few days before, she and five other West Village committee members were offered a “deal” where, if they acquiesced, the mayor would kill the project a week after its designation. They rejected the deal, threatening legal action. Moreover, she claimed to have “documentary proof” that a deal had been made with a developer prior to the public announcement in February.14
On the following day, October 19, Jacobs held a press conference at the Lion’s Head coffee shop—a neighborhood institution mentioned in Jacobs’s “Hudson Street ballet”—where she presented documents showing that an architect had been hired as early as October 1960 by a construction company’s urban renewal department to produce schemes for the redevelopment of the West Village. Other documents, studied by a forensic analyst, showed that the same typewriter that had been used by the architect and the construction company was also used to create petitions and other documents for the neighborhood organizations that worked with the developers and city officials. “We have all turned into detectives, and are finding out amazing facts about relationships between the builders and the Planning Commission and the Housing and Redevelopment Board,” she wrote the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. On October 24, the Housing and Redevelopment Board announced that it would drop its West Village renewal proposal.15
FIGURE 48. Jacobs at the Lion’s Head coffee shop, where she held a press conference to present evidence showing that schemes to redevelop her neighborhood had been prepared before the required public hearings had taken place. (On Jacobs’s right is Erik Wensberg.) Getty Images.
Whether or not the renewal project was dropped because of Jacobs’s revelations of corruption, the news coincided with the release of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In addition to the excerpts in Forum and the Saturday Evening Post, other excerpts, and reactions to them, were published in Columbia University Forum (“City Planning: The Victory over Vitality,” October 9), The Reporter (“How Money Can Make or Break Our Cities,” October 12), and the Wall Street Journal (“Plans Against People,” October 19). The first reviews of the book appeared within days of the Housing and Redevelopment Board’s announcement.16
In November, with the release of Death and Life, stories of Jacobs’s battles against Moses over Washington Square Park and with the City Planning Commission over the West Village spread across the country and overseas. Felt held his ground against Mayor Wagner and the wayward Housing and Redevelopment Board, but, following a leak of letters between him and the mayor, the planning commissioner finally capitulated, announcing on January 16, 1962, that, at its next meeting, the commission would remove the “blight” designation from the West Village neighborhood. With the designation removed, Jacobs was quoted stating, “Our sympathy goes out to other areas that are now being victimized by the Planning Commission.”17
In February 1962, on the one-year anniversary of the West Village renewal announcement, Jacobs spoke at the University of Pittsburgh, giving the first of many talks that year. She spoke of the recent fight and what she had learned from it with a paper entitled “The Citizen in Urban Renewal: Participation or Manipulation?” She spoke at length about the tactics used to satisfy urban renewal legal requirements for citizen participation. That provision, she explained, is “partly an acknowledgement that the cooperation of the people concerned is needed, and it is partly an acknowledgement that the United States is a democracy. It goes against the national conscience not to observe the forms of democracy—and perhaps most so when the substance itself is authoritarian.”18
Jacobs detailed the way “the city officials were, to all intents and purposes, manufacturing citizens’ organizations to rubberstamp its plans,” not only in Greenwich Village, but also in East Harlem and the Lower East Side, where the fabricated groups were sometimes called “cuckoo committees” after birds that take over others’ nests. She told of a “citizens’ meeting” where planning officials ran the slide projector in a room containing only one neighborhood resident, the appointed neighborhood committee chair. “We learned that if the cuckoo committee or its successors had succeeded only slightly, had gotten together so much as a presentable handful of membership, the city officials could have chosen to consult with this creature of their own purposes, and to recognize it as the ‘responsible citizens’ organization’ of the area,” she said. Adding that private firms were also enlisted to this end, she related, “We learned that non-governmental organizations were frequently the middlemen for this operation of participating the citizens into urban renewal, courtesy of urban renewal money.” As she later described it in Systems of Survival, urban renewal was a “monstrous hybrid.”
Apart from direct manipulation, Jacobs remarked on the subtler but incessant sales pitch for urban renewal that was being broadcast to the public. Taking up questions of whose plans were being served in city planning and urban renewal, from Death and Life and earlier writing like “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment,” Jacobs argued that citizens were being exhorted to serve interests that were detrimental to them. “At bottom,” she declared, “the urban renewers try to cry up citizen participation to save their programs and solve their problems, not solve the citizens’ problems.”19
Despite objections from those invested in the urban renewal regime and critiques of her arguments and implications of who and what was to blame for city problems, Jacobs’s vision of the city was quickly and widely discussed. Or, stated more accurately, parts of Jacobs’s inclusive vision of the city were quickly embraced by an ideologically broad spectrum of readers. Both conservatives and liberals could find ideas in Death and Life that resonated with their points of view.
Based on their particular local experiences, New Yorkers, whether liberal or conservative, were especially inclined to agree with Jacobs, familiar as they were with the fights against Moses, the failures of mass housing, and the corruption of urban renewal. William F. Buckley Jr.’s New York City-based National Review praised the book in December 1961; the columnist Ernest van den Haag, an ex-communist turned conservative and public advocate for segregation, praised Jacobs’s advocacy for cities that were being “planned to death by the people supposed to preserve and renew them.” Despite van den Haag’s politics, this was a point many people could agree with by 1961. As Eric Larrabee, who worked as an editor at Harper’s Magazine before becoming editor at Horizon, put it, “The clearing of slums, and their replacement with aseptic modern structures, is no longer the liberal’s utopian objective that it once was. Urban renewal, beginning as a banner of enlightenment, has become a watchword for a mixture of destructiveness and exploitation, mildly flavored with profiteering.” As noted in a May 1962 review in American City Magazine (also based in New York), “It is the only book that we know of which is quoted in context both by liberals and conservatives.”20
In 1969, around the time Jacobs’s next book, The Economy of Cities, was to be published, Jacobs’s friend Leticia Kent wrote, ‘‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities was first panned by liberals, then hailed by liberals and conservatives alike.” Kent’s statement about a broad rejection by liberals is an exaggeration. Charles Abrams, who is credited with the expression “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor,” celebrated Death and Life as “an abattoir for sacred cows”—including some liberal sacred cows. In this regard, economic and social conservatives found immediate validation in Jacobs’s writing, especially the rural and suburban conservatives who had never seen any reason to support federal funding for urban redevelopment and other conservatives who saw federal funding for public housing as socialistic or collectivist. For liberals, abandoning well-intentioned social aspirations was a more difficult process, partly because it required admitting that those who had opposed liberal policies, for whatever reasons, had been right. Within a few decades, in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), a book that drew its title from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, Marshall Berman (a New Yorker whose neighborhood was partially destroyed by Moses) could hold out Death and Life as the “one work that perfectly expresses the modernism of the street in the 1960s.” Some years after that, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson offered similar praise, noting that Jacobs’s observations about the productive capacities of cities, particularly “handicraft” cities, “is comparable only to that of Marx himself.” It took some decades of the proliferation of what Jacobs described as “suburban” chain stores, and the monopolization of cities (and suburbs) by corporate retail, for Jacobs’s enthusiasm for the local mom-and-pop store and nonprofit storefront organizations to be understood as a radical critique of the new economy.21
Around 1961, however, commentators had difficulty seeing beyond prevailing wisdom, and, in this regard, the reaction of the architect-planner Percival Goodman was perhaps characteristic. Goodman—who had worked in East Harlem on plans for slum clearance and designs for public housing, imagined a new Master Plan for New York (1944), and cowrote the utopian book Communitas: Ways of Livelihood and Means of Life, with his brother Paul in 1947 (revised in 1960)—said of Jacobs, “When she is right, she is very, very right; but when she is wrong, it is horrid.”22
In Communitas, Goodman also criticized Moses, Ebenezer Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s Garden Cities, the dull suburbs and their petite bourgeoisie, and the planner’s ideal of “fitting the man to the plan,” as well as Frank Lloyd Wright’s anti-urban Broadacres and Buckminster Fuller’s “Universal Architect” uber-planner concept, both of which had escaped Jacobs’s wrath in Death and Life. Goodman was also a critic of the notion of “housing,” which he called “the reductio ad absurdum of isolated planning” for the practice of excluding all other city functions. Already in 1947, he had criticized “housers,” in Jacobsian terms, for being more concerned with “sociological abstractions” than with local interests, as well as housing projects that resulted in hygienic ghettos with “the segregation of income groups, in government and subsidized projects.” In 1960, after the passage of the federal housing acts, he added that connecting housing to slum clearance was a dubious social policy and, perhaps with a nod to Jacobs and her neighborhood battles, he added that “housers do not inhabit ‘housing,’ “ they live in “technically substandard” homes in places like Greenwich Village. Such critiques led Goodman to other points of agreement, including a philosophy of “neofunctionalism,” in which he criticized, just as Jacobs later did, the streamlined “machines whose operation is not transparent,” in favor of a deeper and more humane understanding of modernist functionalism. Neofunctionalists, Goodman wrote, “take exception to much that is universally accepted, because it doesn’t add up; they stop to praise many things universally disregarded, such as the custom of sitting on slum stoops and sidewalks, with or without chairs.” Goodman’s emblem was the ailanthus, the elegant weed that sprouted from many New York City backyards, and his Camillo Sitte-inspired proposal for a prototypical town square also wove together living and working spaces in a tight orbit with a similar combination of dignity and informality. “Everything is mixed up here,” he wrote. His ideal city had much in common with Jacobs’s.23
However, Goodman, like others, interpreted Jacobs’s attack on flawed social policies and her respect for local knowledge and decision making as a laissez-faire approach and a tacit defense of the status quo. Similar to Commissioner Felt’s comment that quitting current efforts at urban renewal and housing development was a capitulation to the laissez faire theory of urban renewal, Goodman observed, “Jane Jacobs’s book suggests we leave everything pretty much as it is except we paint the walls.” Like Felt and other critics, Goodman threw back at Jacobs charges of wishful thinking. According to Goodman, Jacobs’s city was one where “slums in [her] ideal city ‘unslum’ themselves” and landlords don’t raise the rent. Her “essential weakness is in her anti-utopianism,” he said, explaining that “she believes only what is in front of her nose. So, no planning is required, just the strategy and tactics involved in immediate situations. The problem is to win the battle not the war. In rough and tumble politics such a method applies and in fact is the statesmanship of our time. Thus this book [Death and Life] is bound to be popular.”24
In a stunningly condescending review, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” Lewis Mumford made similar comments about Jacobs’s “mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers,” and her praise for the city’s “higgledy-piggledy unplanned casualness,” “mishmash of functions and activities,” and “random community.” Unable to accept her idea that “a city cannot be a work of art,” Mumford asserted, “Mrs. Jacobs has no use for the orderly distribution of [social and civic] activities or the handsome design of their necessary structures; she prefers the hit-and-miss distribution of the present city. … Mrs. Jacobs’ most original proposal, then, as a theorist of metropolitan development^] is to turn its chronic symptom of disorder—excessive congestion—into a remedy, by deliberately enlarging the scope of the disease.” Seeing great cities themselves as a symptom of a disease caused by cataclysmic technical and financial powers, Mumford argued that “order-making forces, not the dynamic ones,” needed cultivation and, to that end, reaffirmed, “If our urban civilization is to escape progressive dissolution, we shall have to rebuild it from the ground up.”25
At the same time, advocates of a truly laissez-faire approach argued that Jacobs was not liberal enough, and they would go so far as to hijack her ideas to support the opposite of what she endorsed: suburban automobility and greenfield suburban development. Following Jacobs’s analysis of cities as organized complexity, in 1964, around the time that the architect Robert Venturi was writing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), the planner Melvin Webber observed, “We have mistaken for ‘urban chaos’ what is more likely to be a newly emerging order whose signal qualities are complexity and diversity.” Seeing the advocacy for dense, centralized cities as an “ideological campaign” (and helping to turn it into one), Webber made the case that personal mobility and telecommunications enabled “community without propinquity” and rendered “the unitary conceptions of urban places” as anachronistic. “We would do well,” he argued, “to accept the private vehicle as an indispensable medium of metropolitan interaction—more, as an important instrument of personal freedom.” His example was Los Angeles, which was then building its freeway system. Webber concluded that the task of the planner was not to defend open space or city form against the evils of urban sprawl: “This is a mission of evangelists, not planners. Rather, and as a barest minimum, the task is to seek that spatial distribution of urban populations and urban activities that will permit greater freedom for human interaction.”26
Echoing Webber’s argument, in 1969, the British critics Reyner Banham and Paul Barker, the geographer Peter Hall, and the architect Cedric Price observed, “The irony is that the planners themselves constantly talk— since the appearance of Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities—about the need to restore spontaneity and vitality to urban life. They never seem to draw the obvious conclusion—that the monuments of our century that have spontaneity and vitality are found not in the old cities, but in the American West.” In “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” they made a case for an experiment in laissez-faire development inspired by Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the American commercial strip, and they argued that “physical planners have no right to set their value judgment up against yours” and that “people should be allowed to build what they like.” They concluded, “The notion that the planner has the right to say what is ‘right’ is really an extraordinary hangover from the days of collectivism in left-wing thought, which has long ago been abandoned elsewhere.” Exactly twenty years after The Architectural Review launched the Townscape movement, “Non-Plan” became “Man Made America’s” countermanifesto, soon followed by Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas.27
Despite its different geographical and political manifestations, the nonplanning movement, in which Death and Life played a part, can be traced to ideological debates of the 1940s and 1950s. As a world war against fascism turned into a cold war against communism, antitotalitarian philosophies—such as those of the libertarian political philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek and Hayek’s friend and debating partner, the philosopher of science Karl Popper—sought to explain the roots of totalitarian thought and defend against its proliferation. In an epoch defined by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), people on both the left and the right were increasingly repelled by the repressions of Marxist-Leninist states, fearful of their imitation in Western welfare states, and generally suspicious of social engineering. Jacobs, who was intimately involved in the war efforts of the Office of War Information (OWI) and the State Department, was unquestionably affected by these debates, and she found intellectual allegiances and sympathies among their spokesmen.
In this context, there are indeed many points of agreement between Jacobs and Hayek. Both were drawn to basic principles of Western liberal thought and the ideals of a broad base of social powers. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), whose title was a reference to de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, shared themes with Jacobs’s Constitutional Chaff, her writings for the OWI and Amerika about the American ideals of tolerance and local self-government, and the spirited defense of her beliefs in response to accusations of un-American activities. Both were suspicious of nationalism and aware that democracies could suppress minorities through majority rule. Both opposed top-down, paternalistic, utopian, and statistically driven social and economic planning, and both broadly criticized “planners” of all kinds. In contrast, both favored smaller-scale organizations where local knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place could be respected and leveraged, arguing that modern society was characterized by multifarious individual efforts, complex interrelationships, and unpredictable outcomes that no individual or groups of politicians and planners could completely survey, understand, or anticipate.28
A shared lack of faith in the rational powers of an individual or group to design complex social systems, including cities, led Hayek and Jacobs— and others in the 1950s and 1960s—to see complex systems as the evolutionary results of the trial and error of human actions. This, in turn, led both to an interest in complexity science’s explanations of spontaneous order and its relevance to social science and economics. In a 1964 essay, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” Hayek presented a discussion of complexity theory similar to Jacobs’s in the last chapter of Death and Life, with similar points about the difficulty of planning and predicting outcomes in complex systems. In The Nature of Economies, Jacobs extended the discussion to parallels between the complexities of ecosystems and economic systems, expanding on her ideas in Death and Life.29
Hayek and Jacobs also shared some similar ideas about the city, city planning, and housing. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek wrote, “Civilization as we know it is inseparable from urban life,” while recognizing that, due to its density and complexity, the price mechanism was “an imperfect guide” for solving the interrelated problems and allocating the communal costs of city life. Like Jacobs, Hayek deferred to individual decision making wherever possible in housing decisions. “The issue is therefore not whether one ought or ought not to be for town planning, but whether the measures to be used are to supplement and assist the market or to suspend it and put central direction in its place,” he wrote. “The practical problems which policy raises here are of great complexity, and no perfect solution is to be expected.” To this end, both recognized the need for zoning regulations, but also advocated performance zoning as an alternative to use zoning and specification codes.30
Despite these points of agreement, Jacobs rejected the libertarian ideology and label for various reasons and in various ways. Whereas Hayek described “social justice” as being equivalent to socialism, Jacobs did not follow his slippery-slope logic. Hayek’s contradictory rationalism led him to warn against the “ ‘middle way’ between ‘atomistic’ competition and central direction,” but Jacobs was less dogmatic. In Death and Life and her prior work, she attended to a far wider range of planned and unplanned failures of the market and self-segregation, including, for example, racism, sexist wage discrepancies (the primary reason for her union organizing and support of the Labor Party in the 1940s), social segregation, economic redlining and blacklisting, the problems of private car ownership and use, and the consumption of rural land. She recognized the virtues of the public realm, including public education and public transportation, and the larger social significance, beyond market value, of public sidewalks, streets, and city spaces. She saw that a city required flourishing public and quasi-public institutions. Public life was an important element of civilization and liberty, according to Jacobs, and it required a spatial infrastructure to thrive. The self-policing eyes on public streets were an anti-panopticon, the urban opposite of an architecture of institutional control, providing resistance to the police state, but only with the cooperation of a society and government embodying these values.31
A robust public realm was, in turn, essential to a free and open society through its diversity. In ways that Hayek ignored, Jacobs understood that the spontaneous self-organization was not always positive. She associated “price-tagged populations” with planned lower-income and middle-class housing projects, but she also observed that self-segregated urban and suburban “turfs” were also unplanned. As compared to the suburbs, however, cities were naturally more diverse, and the public realm of the city was therefore vitally important in breaking down turf psychology. She observed, “Sidewalk public contact and sidewalk public safety, taken together, bear directly on our country’s most serious social problem—segregation and racial discrimination.”32
As early as 1945, when she wrote a very honest propaganda piece on the history of the United States for the OWI, Jacobs was concerned about these issues. In her essay’s conclusion she observed, “The nation’s 13,000,000 Negro citizens do not yet have full economic equality and opportunity. Under the leadership of the national government and of many private organizations their position is being improved but much progress must still be made. … Though Americans have built a united and productive country with a great degree of freedom, education and economic opportunity for its people, there are still many ways in which it can be improved.” Years later, housing projects—particularly in private projects, where racial discrimination was commonplace prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964—not only exacerbated segregation, but also literally destroyed the public space of the street, compounding the city’s segregation. “Overcoming residential discrimination comes hard where people have no means of keeping a civilized public life on a basically dignified public footing, and their private lives on a private footing,” she wrote. She added that, if African American slums were prevented from unslumming by redlining and segregation, “the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.” If not corrected, Americans’ “tendencies toward master-race psychology” would destroy the country.33
Years later, in 1987, Jacobs explicitly distanced herself from “libertarianism.” By this time libertarianism was associated, as it remains today in the United States, with a capitalistic free-market ideology and a critique of state powers. By comparison, Jacobs stated that she was “highly in favor of helping the poor and giving everyone as good an education as they want and can use—not what they can pay for.” She continued, “I think health care, not tied to money, is terribly important. One of the reasons I care about a developing economy is that it can underpin things like this.” She similarly questioned the anarchism of abandoning laws in favor of an ideal of personal responsibility, stating, “Libertarians would say, ‘Look, we shouldn’t even have laws about drugs. That’s up to people to be responsible about themselves. We shouldn’t have lots of laws about things that aren’t harmful to people.’ I’m not so sure about that. I think people do need help of various kinds.” For Jacobs, “social capital”—a term she popularized in Death and Life—and various forms of “abeconomic” behavior (like love and friendship) were more important than financial capital and economic behaviors. As she remarked in an interview about economics and moral philosophy, “We must recognize that the best things in life have nothing to do with economics.”34
Jacobs understood the destructive power of capital. Her theory of the “self-destruction of diversity” recognized that the demand and competition for popular business and residential districts would eventually destroy them. Giving examples in Death and Life of the gentrification of Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and the monopolization of the four corners of a “100 percent location” by four banks in Philadelphia, Jacobs showed how capital and competition could destroy the diversity of cities. Describing the destructive forces of spontaneously leveraged capital, not just those of large privately and publicly held capital, she explained, “The cataclysmic effects in such cases arise, not from vast wholesaling of credit at all, but from the aggregate of many individual transactions which happen to be heavily concentrated in one locality in one period of time. Society has produced no deliberate stimulants to this destruction of outstanding city success.” But, unlike free-market libertarians, Jacobs did not believe that this spontaneous process be left to its own devices. She continued, “But neither has society done anything to hamper or divert this form of city-destroying money flood. Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. … If and when we think that [a] lively, diversified city, capable of continual, close-grained improvement and change, is desirable, then we will adjust the financial machinery to get that.” Borrowing the idea of “feedback” from cybernetics and new discoveries in biology (such as DNA), she argued, “In creating city success, we human beings have created marvels, but we left out feedback.” While she didn’t believe that a true or perfect feedback system could be created, regulations and incentives were imperfect but necessary substitutes to maintain diversity and prevent cities, or parts of cities, from destroying themselves. To further counterbalance such market effects, Jacobs proposed regulation in the form of “zoning for diversity,” the use of public policy to strategically locate public facilities and incentivize the location of private ones, and urban development, ostensibly through both public and private means, to get “the supply of vital, diversified city streets and districts into a saner relationship with demand.”35
FIGURE 49. Jacobs with her husband (right foreground) and son (standing) at the Lion’s Head coffee shop at a planning meeting for West Village Houses in May 1963. On the table behind them are brochures for the proposed low-rise, subsidized housing development, which was designed in place of a massive urban renewal project with apartment towers for middle- and upper-income tenants. Courtesy of Bob Gomel.
These anti-laissez-faire ideas were consistent with Jacobs’s activism in the West Village, where the focus of the fight, apart from the designation of her neighborhood as an urban renewal district, was against the middle-class and luxury housing projects that were eliminating and being planned to replace the affordable housing and mixed uses of Greenwich Village and her neighborhood. Another endeavor, which built on Jacobs’s experiences in working to improve public housing in East Harlem, was her ten-year fight for West Village Houses, a 420-unit low-income and middle-income housing development developed by a nonprofit corporation with public funds, completed in 1974, which also sought to push back against the forces of gentrification.36
If, in these ways, Hayek’s antiplanning ideas can be seen as a more extreme model than Jacobs’s, a better comparison might be found in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty ofHistoricism (1957). In these, Popper also analyzed the overestimation of abilities to predict the outcomes of planning in complex systems and rejected wholesale “utopian social engineering” with arguments that ranged from the practical need to keep imperfect systems in place while they were being improved to the desire to avoid violence. Just as Jacobs attacked utopianism and spoke of her idea that a city cannot be a work of art because of the heavy-handed authorship or homogeny that this requires, Popper criticized the utopian’s and aestheticist’s aggressive tabula rasa approach. Similar to Hayek, Popper observed, “The view that society should be beautiful like a work of art leads only too easily to violent measures,” and he argued that planners and engineers of this kind “will not start work on a city nor on an individual, nor will they draw up laws, unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves.” However, while Hayek acknowledged that “everybody who is not a complete fatalist is a planner,” Popper—like Jacobs—had a higher tolerance for incremental “piecemeal engineering” based on experience, induction, trial and error, and improvisation. Popper’s critique limited planning in scale and to contexts where it was openly discussed, where it could be criticized, and where failed plans could be acknowledged and ended. Thus, as compared to the cataclysmic approach of urban renewal—whether by idealists or profiteers—Jacobs, following Popper, advocated an incremental approach to city change. She wrote, “City building that has a solid footing produces continual and gradual change, building complex diversifications.”
Popper’s “piecemeal engineering,” in other words, was like piecemeal redevelopment, the approach once advocated in “The Philadelphia Cure”—before the approach was effectively overruled by Berman v. Parker, which explicitly stated that urban renewal, enabled by eminent domain and police powers, “need not, by force of the Constitution, be on a piecemeal basis, lot by lot, building by building.” Following Berman v. Parker, Jacobs was, of course, not alone in her criticism of the wide use of state powers to take private property. Like Popper, she argued that revolutionary effects could result instead from an evolutionary process. Although a policy’s “cumulative effects should be revolutionary, like any strategy aimed at keeping things working, it has to be engaged in as a form of evolution.” In contrast to Hayek’s Darwinian emphasis on competition, Jacobs emphasized the mutual support found in nature and the cooperation found in human societies, which she saw as the foundation of law and trade. The ideas of mutual aid and symbiosis, which can be found throughout her work, were also a foundation of her activism, where she understood the need to develop broad, bipartisan alliances to advocate for local concerns.37
Like Popper, Jacobs was criticized for being anti-utopian, insufficiently utopian, and for being utopian in the wrong way. In a review of The Economy of Cities, the socialist Michael Harrington wrote, “The future will be unlivable unless it incarnates the values and passion of a Jane Jacobs.” But, he noted, “To think that local organization, even with risk capital, can accomplish these sweeping changes is utopian in the worst sense of the word.” In terms of local organization, Harrington was ostensibly alluding to Jacobs’s work as an activist and implicitly to her admiration for her friend Saul Alinsky, author of Reveille for Radicals, and for planner-organizers like Chester Hartman, author of Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning, for which Jacobs wrote the foreword. Harrington was also critiquing the limits of localism in terms of political and financial power, which could be overcome by nonlocal governmental intervention, and he was right to point out these issues. One of the great dilemmas of Death and Life is Jacobs’s simultaneous love for the great city and her recognition of how difficult a great city is to govern properly. In Death and Life, in the chapter “Governing and Planning Districts,” Jacobs discussed the failures of the democratic system—the ignorance and disinterest of politicians and planners, and the time wasted by citizens valiantly arguing the fates of predetermined decisions. But in a passage of notable graciousness to the officials she was fighting, she wrote, “Their energy, wits, patience and human responsiveness are, on the whole, creditable. I see no reason to expect great improvement from finding better. These are not boys sent on a man’s errand. These are men sent on a superman’s errand.”38
The underlying problem of our cities, Jacobs concluded, “is a most understandable failure by our society to keep abreast of demanding historical changes.” These historical changes, she explained, “are not only an immense increase in the size of great cities, but also the immensely increased responsibilities—for housing, for welfare, for health, for education, for regulatory planning—which have been taken on by the governments of great municipalities.” New York, she added, was “not unique in failing to match such profound changes in circumstances with appropriate functional changes in administrative and planning structure. Every great American city is at a similar impasse.” Here she acknowledged the social criticism of Lewis Mumford, whose first book was a treatise on utopias. “When human affairs reach, in truth and in fact, new levels of complication, the only thing that can be done is to devise means of maintaining things well at the new level,” she wrote. “The alternative is what Lewis Mumford has aptly called ‘unbuilding,’ the fate of a society which cannot maintain the complexity on which it is built and on which it depends.” Despite her other criticisms of Mumford, she believed that he was right about this. Not only could “supermen” not manage the great city, planners’ acts of “unbuilding” were an almost inevitable outcome of societies’ inabilities to maintain complexity in the face of massive, historical change. “Insensibly and gradually, as city administrative organization has failed to evolve suitably along with city growth and complexity, city ‘unbuilding’ has become a destructive but practical necessity for planning and other administrative staffs, whose members are also being sent on supermen’s errands,” Jacobs reasoned. “Routine, ruthless, wasteful, oversimplified solutions for all manner of city physical needs (let alone social and economic needs) have to be devised by administrative systems which have lost the power to comprehend, to handle, and to value an infinity of vital, unique, intricate and interlocked details.”39
Jacobs went on to explain that, to cope with new realities and new complexities, planning needed a new focus and a new mantra—“planning for vitality”—a phrase she repeated six times to emphasize points made in Death and Life’s previous chapters. Recognizing that institutions and their systems had not evolved in ways that were up to the task, she acknowledged that this new form of planning would require the reinvention of systems. Although planning for vitality required specific knowledge of the precise and unique places in a city with which they are dealing, planners should gain knowledge and learn only from “the people of the place, because nobody else knows enough about it.” She admitted that city planners “do not even have the means of gathering and comprehending the intimate, many-sided information required, partly because of their own unsuitable structures for comprehending big cities, and partly because of the same structural inadequacies in other departments.” As a consequence, she acceded, “It is futile to expect that citizens will act with responsibility, verve, and experience on big, city-wide issues when self-government has been rendered all but impossible on localized issues, which are often of the most direct importance to people.”40
Jacobs’s solution to this daunting problem was a substantial horizontal and decentralized restructuring of municipal administration and governmental intelligence that cynics might call wishful, utopian, and well beyond piecemeal engineering, though not anarchistic. In fact, she went on to propose that a broader metropolitan government, which was necessary for addressing such nonlocal matters as pollution, major transportation problems, and land and water conservation, could be built on the foundation of a reorganized and decentralized municipal government. Repeating points from her 1957 article “Metropolitan Government,” Jacobs offered that “there is great need for common and coordinated action (and financial support) on many metropolitan area problems, and still more need for localized coordination here and there among different governmental units within a metropolitan area.” Her solution to the governmental “crazy quilt” was to federate local polities “into a super-area government which would have extensive planning powers and administrative organs for carrying the plans [for addressing metropolitan concerns] into action.” Taxes would fund the work of metropolitan government and spread out the expenses of great city amenities. She explained, “Part of the taxes from each locality would go to the Metropolitan Government, thus helping also to relieve great cities of part of the financial burden they carry, unrecompensated, for major central city facilities used by the hinterland.” In this scheme, great cities would work more closely with the “welter of overlapping, duplicating, strangulated, town, county, small-city and township governments” and “barriers to joint planning and joint support of common metropolitan facilities, would thus, it is reasoned, be overcome.”41
Jacobs recognized that the idea of metropolitan government was politically unpopular and that “voters sensibly decline to federate into a system where bigness means local helplessness, ruthless, oversimplified planning, and administrative chaos.” In making a case for planning at this level, she understood that people should wonder, “How is helplessness against ‘conquering’ planners an improvement over no planning? How is bigger administration, with labyrinths nobody can comprehend or navigate, an improvement over crazy-quilt township and suburban governments?” However, Jacobs believed the answer was within great cities. “We already have governmental units which cry out for new and workable strategies and tactics of big metropolitan administration and planning, and these are the great cities themselves,” she wrote. “If great cities can learn to administer, coordinate, and plan in terms of administrative districts at understandable scale, we may become competent, as a society, to deal too with those crazy quilts of government and administration in the greater metropolitan areas. Today we are not competent to do so.”42
If one of the great paradoxes of Death and Life was that planning and administration were needed despite the fact that great cities might be too big to govern and beyond the capacities of planners and experts, another was that, despite Jacobs’s criticisms of theoreticians, a new vision and theory of the city was needed. While well aware that there were “pavement-pounding” planners, she nevertheless saw the need for a new intellectual framework, one that would replace ideas borrowed from the physical sciences with a life science-oriented approach to cities. As she explained in the book’s last chapter, a methodology—a new scientific method—would include thinking about processes, working inductively, and being attentive to “unaverage clues.” Once again, despite her criticisms, she understood that planners of Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s generations, and even those of younger generations, could not have been aware of and had not yet recognized what recent advances in the human and life sciences, such as Warren Weaver’s complexity science, suggested for cities. “These advances have, of course, filtered from the life sciences into general knowledge; they have become part of the intellectual fund of our times. And so a growing number of people have begun, gradually, to think of cities as problems in organized complexity—organisms that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.” Reflecting on her own contribution, she explained, “This book is one manifestation of that idea.” However, complexity theory did not necessarily make cities easier to plan or administer—perhaps the opposite. Complexity theory confirmed what Jacobs already knew: that planners’ predictive capacities were greatly challenged by the many interconnected variables embodied in cities.43
While working on The Economy of Cities, Jacobs went so far as to question the nature of New York City as a great city. Thinking about the discrepancies between great cities as productive economic units but problematic administrative units, she observed, “Take New York. Back before the turn of the century, it was five cities. It was probably a mistake to consolidate them into one. Five autonomous city governments are probably not enough for New York now.” With the premise of Cities and the Wealth of Nations already in mind, she was equally ready to question the idea of nations for similar reasons: “I think it is also questionable that large nations are really viable governmental units any longer. They may be obsolete—like dinosaurs. The viable nations of the future may be on the scale of Sweden or Holland, rather than on the scale of the United States, China or the Soviet Union.”44
These comments came soon after Jacobs left the United States. In 1967, she was arrested during a Vietnam War protest march at the Pentagon, and, in January 1968, while still at work on The Economy of Cities, she was a signatory of an advertisement published in New York newspapers protesting the war and supporting a proposed war tax. The protestors, all well-known writers and public intellectuals, quoted Henry David Thoreau, the author of Civil Disobedience (1849), who said then of America’s war with Mexico, “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the States to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” Less than four months later, in April 1968, Jacobs was arrested again and charged with disorderly conduct, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing government administration during a public hearing about plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. A few months after that, she and her husband moved their family to Toronto in protest of the war and to protect their sons from the draft.45
In an interview in 1972, Jacobs was asked if she felt any regret or guilt about leaving New York. “None at all,” she replied. “I did the best I could for twenty years. I fought as long as I could, but I’ve had enough. There’s no virtue in fighting battles and losing. In Toronto you have a chance of winning.” In fact, Jacobs had won all of her major battles, including one against Toronto’s Spadina Expressway only the year before, but she was weary of activism, stating, “It’s absurd to make your life absurd in response to absurd governments.” Her critiques of nationalism in The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty and Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life would follow. Despite her frustrations with government (which she saw as “forever susceptible to barbaric actions”), in Systems of Survival Jacobs would nevertheless seek to understand the symbiosis and mutual support of the exchange and guardian mentalities. “The guardian-commercial symbiosis,” she wrote, “combats force, fraud, and unconscionable greed in commercial life—and simultaneously impels guardians to respect private plans, private property, and personal rights.” Inspired by Plato’s Republic, “the city-state as an allegory of how the virtuous individual should conduct his life,” Jacobs sought to contribute to the great philosophical dialogue about civilization.46
In Systems of Survival, Jacobs observed, “Most of us after our formative years resist revising our views of how the world works.” She did not—even when this took her from “pavement pounding” to “Olympian” heights. On one hand, Jacobs recognized that practical changes would be incomplete without corresponding intellectual changes. On the other, whether she was thinking about city sidewalks or the moral systems of civilizations, Jacobs remained deeply connected to the phenomena and human experiences of the city. “Theories and other abstractions are powerful tools only in the limited sense that the Greek mythological giant Antaeus was powerful,” she wrote. “When Antaeus was not in intimate contact with earth, his strength rapidly ebbed.” As a theorist and activist, this was equally true of Jacobs herself.47
