2005-12-28 - 12:19 p.m.
As I�ve said, Nya got me the best holiday present. A near-mint hardcover first edition copy of Jane Jacobs� classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Classic to anyone interested in urban planning, anyway. This book was a large part of what inspired me to go back to school. Jacobs is still alive and living in Toronto. I�m going to send this copy to her and ask her to sign it.
The book was researched in the 1950s and published in 1961. Well, she didn�t so much formally research as go around and observe. My friend�s mom, who lived near her in Greenwich Village at the time, remembers seeing her going around in a wide-brimmed felt hat and just looking at things. Which of course is the best way of getting information about what makes places work.
Let me quote from the book�s opening note on �Illustrations� (there aren�t any pictures in the text): �The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.� Look. Listen. Respond appropriately to the needs you see and hear. Another way of putting this might be: use some common sense.
Common sense was sorely lacking in the urban planning of the time. This was height of the bad old days of urban planning as grand-scale pseudoscientific social experimentation. The dominant urge was to just bulldoze away any area that was problematic (�slum clearance�) and replace it entirely with some hulking, Modernist project that looked �clean� on paper, but made no effort to actually address people�s desires.
Odds are, any large, ugly, barren concrete wasteland in your town was built around this time. Boston�s Government Center is an excellent example of this and the one I�m probably most familiar with. The area had long been Scollay Square, a sort of entertainment district (and where Charlie got on the MTA), but had become rather seedy by the late-40s.
Some of the local theaters became burlesque halls catering to horny sailors on shore leave and area college boys. Prostitution was common. Some of the bars had even become (gasp!) gay bars. The Puritanical Boston city fathers were aghast and declared the entire area was hopelessly blighted beyond saving. So they simply leveled it wholesale and built a vast windswept brick plaza over it, with a brutalist structure for City Hall in the middle.
There was apparently some lip service to modeling the Government Center plaza on an Italian piazza, but it offers nothing to the pedestrian. Sure, they have musical performances there in the summer and the audience fills up the bleak emptiness (and the Jonathan Richman song about the place is pretty great). But mostly, the space is just a giant insult to city occupants and a prime example of not thinking places through.
Jane Jacobs went entirely against this model of planning. Lets look at so-called �slums� and find what works about them, she said. I could go on endlessly about what lessons she drew from her observations, but that�s not the point I want to make. The fact is that reading her book (it was assigned in a planning course I took at Tufts in 2001, sort of on a whim) changed my life. No really. I�m sure she�s changed many lives, but mine was one.
As I worked for a real estate developer, I became more and more intrigued by how space becomes place. What was once an empty lot or abandoned building, often entirely overlooked and unnoticed by the people who pass it every day, is turned into housing or offices. If the process is done correctly and thought through, the buildings become places people care about. Their homes, their workplaces, their lives. The park where they meet their future spouse at lunch. The stores where they buy their kids clothing.
Reading Death and Life made me realize that there were a lot of other people who thought about these issues. In fact, it turned out there was an entire academic discipline devoted to them. It dawned on me that I wanted to go back to school and learn more about this. I have always lived in cities; they�ve always taken care of me. I can�t imagine anything more beautiful than a whole mess of people with their endless differences and hatreds and loves all living their lives in the same place.
Jane Jacobs� book made me understand that this is what I want to study further, this gorgeous human agglomeration and how it works and doesn�t work. I didn�t care that it would cost me a great deal of money (and I�ve managed to get a temporary forbearance on repayment of some of my loans) or years of my life. Life took an unexpected turn and what I�m doing now isn�t really related to urbanism at all.
But I�m looking out my window now at a wonderful city. I certainly can�t fully grasp it entirely, but I understand it better now than before I went back to school. So thank you Jane Jacobs for inspiring me to learn more about what you made me conscious I wanted to know about. She�s very old now (her last book, Dark Age Ahead, was the sort of crotchety tirade written by old folks who fear the world is passing them by, but I think she gets a by on this) and lives in Toronto.
I�m going to mail this copy of the book that Nya�s given me to her (probably via the publisher) with a letter explaining what a difference it made in my life. I�ll ask her to sign it for me and send it back (I should figure out how to package in a return shipment box for this). Maybe she gets requests like this all the time, but I very much hope she�ll do it. At the very least, she�ll know how much she�s meant to me.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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