Not many people have the imagination, intellectual depth and sheer courage to take on an entire profession and demonstrate that it is wrong. Jane Jacobs did. The renegade author, autodidact and activist — who died on Tuesday at age 89 — not only took on many such “impossible” challenges, she often prevailed. In her devotion to humanistic, small-scale solutions to big problems, Jacobs can be rightly understood as an early champion of what we now call the commons.
Jacobs’ landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, offered a damning critique of traditional urban planning and the anti-social effects of monumental towers and abstract aesthetic principles. She celebrated something far more homely but more vital — the urban neighborhood. Jacobs showed how a neighborhood of short blocks, varied buildings, dense population and multiple uses is far more likely to serve the needs of people than a sweeping urban renewal project.
Jacobs never finished college and was not a credentialed professional in urban planning. She was a committed amateur. This is surely a key reason that she was so visionary and insightful. She was not entangled in the deeply rooted assumptions and habits of the professionals. She could give full rein to her common sense and humanism, and build the world anew on a base of observed particulars.
This truly was what made Jacobs’ vision so powerful: it was informed by a rich sense of humanity and lived experience, and not by ideological abstractions. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote: “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
Jacobs cast her lot with the “real order that is struggling to exist and to be served,” which is why we commoners should be grateful for her work. She realized that community is not as an abstract design principle; it’s an everyday experience. Community is not linear and orderly, but dynamic and relational. Moreover, community is not something “off to the side,” but rather a central animating force. For this, Lewis Mumford criticized her for peddling “home remedies for urban cancer.”
But Jacobs’ vision has survived and expanded over the past 42 years precisely because she understood what the professionals ignored. Urban planners of the 1950s were supremely uninterested in the social dynamics of successful urban neighborhoods. Jacobs showed why this was misguided. Today’s New Urbanists — who favor smaller-scale, mixed-use neighborhoods that foster social interaction — trace a direct lineage to Jacobs.
Jacobs was subversive because she recognized that power often resides in unexpected places. In the conformist Fifties, she saw diversity as a source of strength. At a time when the male-dominated profession of urban planning favored the monumental and grand, Jacobs realized that important things occur in small-scale social settings. In her later years, Jacobs challenged the abstract, quantitative focus of the economics profession and insisted upon the importance of morality in the behavior of markets.
It is perhaps not surprising to learn that as a young woman, in attempt to work through her ideas, Jacobs carried on imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. As a method for refining a vision of civic and community life, it would be hard to pick two better mentors.
I salute Jacobs because she was a pioneer in developing ideas that are central to the commons today: informal social norms, the bottom-up dynamics of change, the power of diversity, the limits of professionalism and officialdom. What thrills me about Jane Jacobs was not just her deep insights, but her fierce passion to advance her ideas. She once got arrested for disrupting a public meeting about building a freeway across lower Manhattan. “We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around,” she said. Let us remember a great champion of the commons who refused to get pushed around.