w2/ubrs

Jane Jacobs notes for Urban Theory

Jane Jacobs, who is she?

1. Journalist, parent, activist

2. Works for architecture journal and sees projects come through office

3. Used as great counter to Robert Moses’ reorganization of urban fabric in New York post-WWII. Moses:

   1. Used Title X to eminent domain and federal funding to clear old building stock and create tower in the park housing projects.

   2. “Clean up” what looked messy but functioned well

   3. Expressways—connect city to suburbs

   4. Just saw city as a “traffic problem”—very simplistic, doesn’t take complexity of cities and how they function into account.

   5. Wanted highway through city

   6. Go through Greenwich Village, enter Jane Jacobs

INTRO

1. Purpose of book (p. 19)

   1. To adventure into the real world and look at communities that work. Try to learn from them through direct engagement.

2. What doesn’t she like?

   1. Vast civic and cultural centers

   2. Tower in the park public housing projects

   3. Lots of grass

   4. Single use zones

   5. Ego in design—projects that scream “look what I did” without doing anything good

      1. p. 17 Calls this “bloodletting”—need fortifying, not draining

      2. p 18 Medical analogies applied to social organisms are farfetched

      3. A cancer, clean out the lungs, clogged, diseased, etc.

   6. Orthodox ideas part of the urban design canon

      1. Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City

      2. Patrick Geddes

      3. Decentrists: Stein, Wright, Mumford, Bauer

      4. Le Corbusier/Radiant City

         1. People who are trying to kill city—ironically their ideas are adopted by city planners for big cities themselves.

      5. City Beautiful

1. What does she like?

   1. THE GENERATORS OF DIVERSITY (CH 7)

1. What does Jacobs mean by diversity?: Combinations of uses

2. Must have:

   1. Districts with 2 or more uses

   2. Short blocks with frequent opportunity to turn corners

   3. Mixed age of building stock: mixed economic class

   4. Dense concentration of people

1. Main critique: Cities have been victims of orthodox city planning ideas that are actually anti-city.

   1. None of these planners/architects actually liked cities or studied what made them vibrant, functioning spaces

   2. Principles:

      1. Intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially

         1. Organized complexity

      2. Four things needed to generate this diversity (planners/designers alone can never achieve these things, but we should try to implement them):

1. 1. 1. Most important part is economic behavior of cities. Second is social behavior.

2. Not a book about how a city should look. Futile to design a city’s appearance. (20)

   1. Functioning order should be focus of study

Important terms or processes alluded to but not explained directly in our texts

• Deinvestment (p. 15)

• Slum: term used politically

• Title 10 and eminent domain

• Clearance

• Urban renewal, revitalization

• Red lining

• Rezoning/Zoning R1 R2 etc.