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Homage to Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006April 28, 2006 Jane Jacobs died in Toronto this past Tuesday; Monday, May 1, would have been her 90th birthday. How to describe her? Urban commentator? Student of cities? Not sure. What I do know is that only a handful of books in my life have shown me how to see more deeply and think more clearly, and that her Death and Life of Great American Cities was one of them. I read it for the first time as a college student, probably in 1972 or 1973, not long after I transferred from Georgetown University to the University of Pennsylvania. How did I come to Death and Life of Great American Cities? Don't know that either. It wasn't in the syllabus for any course I was taking. My friends and colleagues weren't reading and buzzing about it: Death and Life had been published in 1961, so it wasn't new, though it certainly was still alive and in print. I'm inclined to blame the encounter on my father, an architect involved in Boston city planning -- and a Jacobs admirer. In the years just preceding my arrival, Penn had constructed the Superblock, an area at one end of the campus that was built to house undergraduate students. Superblock was dominated by two 26-story buildings that no one ever called by their names (Harrison and Harnwell -- I just looked it up): they were "High-Rise South" and "High-Rise East" or just High South and High East. By the time I showed up, two years after the skyscraping dorms opened, problems were being noted and much discussed around campus: Anonymity. Increased vandalism. Increased violence, including rape and attempted rape. Jane Jacobs told me to look for the public spaces: Where were they? How were they being used? Were they being used? Aha. In the new style of the time, the dorms were organized in apartments. You got to know your roommates well, without knowing who else lived on your floor. Each building had a rooftop lounge, and both lounges were usually nearly empty. Why? They weren't on the way to anywhere. People didn't pass through them; they had to make a special trip. On the ground floor, true, there were waiting areas off to the side, with chairs and sofas to sit on, but people didn't tarry there either. We passed from the front door to the elevators as if we had blinders on, looking neither right nor left. In practice, the one space that students from all apartments and all floors shared was -- the elevators. Elevators are rarely great fosterers of conversation and community, and those in Penn's high-rises were no exception. The Death and Life of Great American Cities didn't exactly change the way I saw or thought about the world around me. I'd grown up in an alcoholic family, after all, where acute awareness of energy currents -- of what wasn't being said as well as what was -- was a necessary survival skill. More recently I'd been an urban antiwar activist: there, too, what we did often undermined what we said, and vice versa. Death and Life encouraged me to keep looking, and it deepened and expanded my perceptive abilities. Within a few years I was immersed in the grass-roots women's liberation movement, whose greatest contribution to political theorizing has probably been the much-misunderstood principle that the personal is political. Any politics that isn't rooted in personal lives eventually becomes a head game, or a top -> down theory that may change surface behavior but rarely gets to the heart of things. I didn't know much about Jane Jacobs's life or her other books till I read her obituary in Wednesday's online Boston Globe. Belatedly I recognize a kindred spirit: "Neither theorist nor visionary," wrote Mark Feeney of the Globe staff, "Mrs. Jacobs was very much in the American pragmatist tradition, a streetside observer whose preferred modes of urban transit were walking and cycling. Her intellectual method mostly consisted of simply poking around and noticing things . . ." (Jacobs "neither theorist nor visionary"? Is he kidding? Maybe you have to be a feminist to understand that pragmatist, theorist, and visionary are not mutually exclusive, and that theories and visions that aren't grounded in day-to-day reality are often impotent -- or deadly.) Other than a few scattered college courses, Jacobs "did no academic work after graduating from high school. Nor did she ever have any university affiliation." Feeney suggests that after Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, "she was the most important independent intellectual in America." Finally, Feeney quotes from an interview the Boston Globe did with Jane Jacobs in 1993: "Cities -- how shall I put it? -- they're the crux of so many different subjects, so many different puzzles. If you get really interested in them -- not necessarily just our ones now, but the ones that have been, too, you get in a very shortcut way into so many other subjects. . . . There's almost nothing you can think of that cities don't provide some insight into." Strange: cities are huge and obviously diverse; Martha's Vineyard is small and considerably less varied, at least to the incurious or newly arrived eye. But if I substituted "Martha's Vineyard" for "cities" in that short passage, it would eloquently and accurately describe just what I think I'm doing here. Would Jane Jacobs be surprised? I suspect not.
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