Jane Jacobs passed away today in Toronto. She was 89 years old.
As a married mother of two in the 1950s, Jacobs wrote what has become probably the single most influential book on urban planning — The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book is famously “bottom-up” and pragmatic. Jacobs carefully observed her neighborhood in Greenwich Village, as well as other neighborhoods and other cities, and tried to figure out why they succeeded (or failed) on a most fundamental level. The answer was, basically, diversity. Diversity of use, diversity of lifestyles, diversity of income, and diversity of design. The book assaulted and eventually buried the foundations of then-ascendant modernist ideals of “urban renewal” — razing the ghettoes in favor of high rise public housing, aggressive highway building, and single use districts. And the new urbanist ideals that have taken hold in the last few decades — live/work; dense, walkable urban neighborhoods; increased public transit; public housing integrated with private housing — are direct descendants of Jacobs.
But beyond her intellectual achievements, Jacobs’ greatest success was saving lower Manhattan and contributing to the demise of Robert Moses’s stranglehold over the development of New York City. At the height of Moses’s power in the early 1960s, he determined that three vast freeways were necessary to cross Manhattan — one in Harlem, one in midtown, and one right through the heart of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park. As chair of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Jacobs organized the community, protested, and eventually defeated Moses’s plan. The quote in the title of this post is Moses’s remark at a public hearing on the proposed highway. Moses continued on with other projects, but he was forever discredited in the eyes of many New Yorkers. Jacobs’ views, in contrast, are now seen as common sense.
So what does all this have to do with Mormonism? Not much, I guess. But if we are serious about thinking of Zion as a city, rather than a sprawling, gated set of suburban cul-de-sacs, then it is worth trying to figure how cities actually function, and how we can foster the kind of cities we want. The work of Jane Jacobs is a great place to start.
