Review of the classic work by Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs, Vintage Books, New York, 1961, 448 pp.
Review

Sincere efforts to invigorate the declining areas of cities have been foiled by conventional planning. The idea of the city as an evil, a megalopolis of pollution, poverty, and disease has obscured the view of the city as what it actually is—a space that facilitates the economic and social interdependence of people with independent goals. The city is a place where enough people are concentrated so that very specialized avenues of interest and of employment are opened. It is a place full of economic opportunity and cultural diversion, where public life and private life can blend and enhance the quality of each other. Cities are not inherently evil, they are the haven of all that makes human social life possible and good. The mutually supporting diverse activities, public and private, necessary to social life, however, are being eroded by bad city planning. Jane Jacobs takes these planning faux pas to task in this classic work, what she called “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Obviously, the attack was rebuffed quite readily, for the unfortunate trends that Jacobs so clearly identified still are apparent today, and her criticism is as timely now, as when it was written, over two generations ago.
Part One, “The Peculiar Nature of Cities,” describes the social life of the city, concentrating on the street. “Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs,” Jacobs begins, “if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear.” Indeed, feeling safe to walk the streets is the criterion that can distinguish between economic vitality and depression. Jacobs makes the point that “the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police,” but by people themselves. Crimes occur in areas where the opportunity for discovery does not exist, what Jacobs calls “lonely places.” The solution is to have “more eyes on the street.” Jacobs compares tenement housing in places like Boston’s North End to public housing projects (unnamed) in New York. The important difference being street activity. In tenement housing there are more “public characters” who perform, in an unofficial capacity, the job of policing. These public characters take a variety of specific forms: street vendors, pedestrians, shopkeepers, children at play and the mothers who watch the children from their open apartment windows. There is constant activity on the street, much of it foot traffic. The foot traffic is prevalent because of the mixed use of the street; it is not merely a thoroughfare to travel from one area to another, it is the destination point for residents and workers, for diners and for customers, even patrons of the arts. On Jacobs’s street “in front of the tenement, the tailor’s, our house, the laundry, the pizza place, and the fruit man’s, twelve children were playing on the sidewalk in front of fourteen adults.”
The streets are a public forum wherein people may experience limited social contact. Familiar faces need not become intimate acquaintances to serve social functions like security. Jacobs illustrates the idea with two contrasting anecdotes. In Jacobs’s neighborhood, it was then a common practice to leave spare keys with a local shopkeeper. Guests could pick up the key from—in Jacobs’s case—the local deli, the proprietor serving as doorman in this capacity. It is safer than leaving the key under the mat, but less socially intrusive than leaving the key with a neighbor. The deli-man is one such public character who can be on rather intimate terms with his customers but not intrude on their private lives, as would the neighbor who shares the private space of the apartment building. As Jacobs put it, he “considers it no concern of his whom we permit in our place and why.”
This is contrasted by the story of Mrs. Kostritsky, who lived on a street near a public park, where mothers brought their children to play. The street was, save for the park, entirely residential. Lacking public amenities like coffee shops with public restrooms and public telephones, Mrs. Kostritsky found herself entangled in an accidental social world which she resented, as park users dropped in to use her telephone or bathroom or to get out of the cold. “If only we had a couple of stores on the street,” she complained, “then the telephone calls and the warming up and the gathering could be done naturally in public.”
In Part Two, “The Conditions for Diversity,” Jacobs gives the main thrust of her argument. In her own words, it is the most important part of the book. The economics of the city are broadly outlined as the author addresses this most salient point: “How can cities generate enough mixture among uses—enough diversity—throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilization?” The chapters that follow specifically develop the four “indispensable” conditions that will generate such diversity: mixture of primary and secondary uses, short blocks, varied economic yields of buildings, and a dense concentration of people.
Why these conditions are important is the premise on which Jacobs’s entire argument is predicated. They afford different levels of opportunity for work, housing, and diversion. A mixture of opportunities helps to assimilate immigrants, and also allows upward social mobility for native citizens. The mixture means greater variety for all, for survival is not a function of volume business.
Smaller operations are possible only in great cities, where a population is concentrated densely enough to support its limited appeal or specialty. Having multiple primary and secondary uses in a district attracts more customers as passersby stop in on their ways to other errands. The passersby may notice a specialty theater, for instance, and return later for the show. When all four conditions are present, Jacobs says, the combination will “create effective economic pools of use.” But, she admonishes: “All four in combination are necessary . . . the absence of any one of the four frustrates a district’s potential.”
“Forces of Decline and Regeneration” are discussed in Part Three, the beginning of which contains Jacobs’s most astute observational point that—
most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop . . . cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish.
Many well-intentioned building plans and building codes serve to destroy the diversity that is so needed for city vitality. These may seek to provide a scenic consistency of the local structures or to renew an area with the additions of cultural monuments, or to replace slums with middle-income housing. However, by focusing on one type of use these plans eliminate any chance for true vitality.
The most shocking form of this singularization of use is success. Inane competition sometimes leads to duplication of use. Jacobs recounts how a streetcorner that had a good mixture of uses, one of which was a bank, came to be described as a “100 percent location.” Three other banks moved into that same corner, driving out the other ventures that had attracted the wide mix of people to the area originally. Without that mixture, business at the banks trickled away.
The same phenomenon is observable in other cases, such as residential neighborhoods, restaurants, or office districts. Entrepreneurs and investors and lenders focus on what has been shown to be the most profitable ventures in an area. Through repetition, they monopolize the area, eventually eliminating leases of different yields. It is a downward spiral: the more banks that come into an area, the more it becomes profitable only if banks are the lessees. This concentration of use eliminates the cross traffic found when the area had been of mixed uses, and the diminished volume of customers coming into the area cannot support the saturated market. Eventually, the entire area declines. Then people move away.
The pattern of regression and retreat leads to slumming. Jacobs says the “key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.” The residents are trapped there by a lack of affordable choices. When they acquire the means to have greater choice, they choose to move away rather than to invest in the slum area. This leads to slum shifting by means of what Jacobs calls “cataclysmic money.”
Cataclysmic money is used to replace slums with varying types of projects that are assumed will yield higher tax or business revenues. The slum populations are forced to relocate into other areas and the pattern repeats itself. What is needed, Jacobs argues, are programs that encourage slum populations to stay in their neighborhoods, to attract economic opportunities for the residents, and to promote investment in the area. Without investment capital such as mortgage loans or small business loans that stimulate renovation and new construction that will support a diverse mixture of uses, no slum can unslum itself.
The last part of the book, “Different Tactics,” recommends specific methods for generating diversity in the city. Jacobs wisely deals with housing subsidies by suggesting the formation of the Office of Dwelling Subsidies. ODS would be a guarantor or lender, according to needs of individual builders, as well as a kind of planning office for development. The second aspect of ODS would be to act as a liaison between landlords and tenants. Instead of building project housing for the dependent poor, ODS would supplement rents in ODS buildings until such time as the tenants could pay the full amount on their own; when the dependent tenants achieve financial independence, they would not be required to move out of the ODS building. Tenants in residence are thus continuing investors in the neighborhood with strong roots in the community.
Her second tactic is to reduce the absolute number of vehicles using city streets. This would be accomplished primarily through attrition as the city develops diversity. Easy foot traffic and difficult automobile traffic will favor the attrition of automobiles. When combined with changing elements of topography, another tactic for diversity, travel by automobile will become even less convenient. But furthermore, changing topography will enhance the visual stimulation of pedestrian traffic by affording different views of the city. Rather than disconnecting the city dweller from an accurate mental map, landmarks and vistas will become integral parts of his mental map and will help him negotiate travel within and use of the diverse city.
Finally, Jacobs goes into great detail about the possibility for informal government. In her example of Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards Council, Jacobs emphasizes the utility of district coalitions as intercessors between local interests and the larger, formal political bodies of municipal government. Often planners of road systems or city-wide projects are ignorant of local uses and community values. Local residents lack the special influence on government that powerful and affluent developers enjoy. An informal group—one whose composition and domain is not formally ordained and thereby limited—can be more effective at coordinating the efforts of builders, the maintenance of utility services such as water or electricity, and the interests of residents and local businesses.
Jacobs concludes with “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” an overview of the historical thought-processes that have gone into urban planning and Western science. The city is a problem of organized complexity—one with many interconnected variables. The flaw of previous planning has been to treat the city as a simple problem, ignoring the fact that the varied and interconnected economic, personal, and social relationships of a city’s inhabitants are the generators of its vitality.
This book is brilliant. By examining the functional aspects of a living city it does attack the problems of conventional city planning. City plans must be more than artists’ renderings of grand architecture, more than demographic investment risk analyses, more than voting districts. The plans must also incorporate the very lives of its citizens. The plans of cities must allow citizens the freedom of movement through space, time, and finance to build better lives for themselves. It is a recognized axiom that diversity makes us strong; city diversity is no exception, as Jacobs’s insightful book so clearly indicates. I recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities to undergraduate and graduate students of geography and of urban planning, as well as professors and teachers in those fields. I think the book would be of special importance to realtors and developers. If these lessons could be learned by those involved with the physical construction of cities, perhaps the social construction of them also would be enhanced.
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