City Lights: A Personal Assessment of Jane Jacobs

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City Lights A Personal Assessment of Jane
Jacobs Contribution to Urban Planning Thought

• Pierre Desrochers
• Department of Geography
• University of Toronto

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New York City (1935-1968)
White Horse Tavern (1961)
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NYC Highlights

• Greenwich Village, Robert Jacobs (1944)
• Architectural Forum (1952-1962)
• William Kirk (Union Settlement) (1955)
• William H Whyte (Fortune) (1956)
• Death and Life (1961)

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Main foe Robert Moses, a.k.a. Big Bob the
Builder
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(Background) Le Corbusier Modern Architecture /
Planning

• Key components
• Vertical garden cities"
• High-density super-towers, parks highways

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• Early Critics
• Urban renewal Negro removal
• Neighbourhood/community destruction
• Collusion/corruption (politicians developers)

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• Jacobs true contribution
• Most articulated opponent of modern urban
  planners
• Core concepts ideas
• Mixed primary uses (housing, shops, offices)
• Higher population densities shorter blocks
• Mixture old new (New ideas need old
  buildings)
• Social capital, eyes on the street,
  sidewalk ballet
• Cases against public housing cataclysmic money
• Diversity natural to large cities essential
  for growth

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Toronto (1968-2006)

• Spadina Expressway
• Our Jane (Peter Gzowski, CBC)
• Torontos imprint
• Economic Development Theorist

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Legacy?
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NIMBYsm, BANANAs Incumbent Club?
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Against Both Downtown High Rises Suburbia
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Supply Demand

• 555 Hudson St
• 1900 built
• 1947 7,000
• 2009 3.3 million
• (Using CPI 67 000)

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Glassybaby sells only 45 glass cups
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Annex (Toronto)
2006 Bargain price - 850 000 GTA Median
house price 290 000
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Conclusion

• Perhaps greatest observer/theoretician of
• ordinary urban life
• cities as engines of economic development
• But never quite grasped / understood
• prices supply/demand
• needs of people not born in community
• suburbia