Reading Questions:

1
Reading Questions

• Jane Jacobs, Life and Death of Great American
  Cities

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Introduction (pp. 3-25)
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1. At what group of professionals is Jane Jacobs
taking aim in this book? (p. 3)

• Jacobs is at war with professional urban
  planners, especially those involved with urban
  renewal projects that involve tearing down large
  sections of established cities and replacing them
  with public housing projects, high rises, and
  other forms of modern development. She was also
  opposed to free ways that cut through traditional
  neighborhoods, affected pedestrian patterns, and
  required destruction of buildings and dislocation
  of people. She names almost none of her
  adversaries by name. Some of the contemporaries
  whose ideas or policies she is opposing include
  Lewis Mumford, an urban reformer and
  intellectual. Another is Robert Moses, the
  planner responsible for the modernization of New
  York . Architect Le Corbusier was still alive
  when Death and Life appeared.

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Links

• On Le Corbusier
• On Robert Moses
• On Lewis Mumford

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2. What do towns, suburbs, tuberculosis
sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities
have in common, and how are they different from
great cities? (pp. 6-7)

• Whats a sanitorium?
• These are all utopian communities, forms of
  unurban urbanization, which try to master the
  complexity and diversity of cities by sorting out
  their functions and populations into tidy zones
  and neighborhoods.

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3. What is the one principle that emerges from
Jacobs adventuring in the real world of
American cities? (pp. 13-14)

• A recurrent theme of the book and now a
  commonplace of contemporary urban theory is the
  importance of many forms of diversity in
  successful cities. This includes economic
  diversity among inhabitants different heights,
  sizes, and ages among buildings and the
  concentration of different types of activity
  within a small area (housing, shops, light
  industry, recreation, culture). Although race is
  not an active category in the book (a topic for
  possible discussion), she certainly means
  something like ethnic and racial diversity as
  well, and occasionally refers to it.

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4. Why dont the inhabitants of the East Harlem
housing project like their lawn? (p. 15) What,
according to Jacobs, is the pretended order and
what is the real order in this episode?

• The lawn was put in without tenant input.
  Although there is plenty of grass in this and
  other public housing projects, there are few
  third places where one can buy coffee or get a
  newspaper.

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5. Distinguish the following types of modern city

• The Garden City
• The Towns of the Decentrists
• The Radiant City
• The City Beautiful

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The Garden City (pp. 17-19)

• The Garden City was the brainchild of Ebenezer
  Howard, an English reformer who also spent time
  in America and knew Emerson and Whitman.
  Horrified by the living conditions in London and
  other large cities, he wanted to design better,
  more suburban living arrangements for the poor.
  These planned communities would located be
  outside the city, surrounded by agricultural
  green belts, and financed and run by the people
  living in them. Not so bad, in theory at least

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The Towns of the Decentrists (pp. 19-20)

• The Decentrists were the American adapters of the
  ideas of Ebenezer Howard and Sir Patrick Geddes.
  They included Lewis Mumford (who gave Jacobs
  book a negative review when it appeared, after
  writing her a positive recommendation for the
  Rockefeller Foundation Grant that allowed her to
  compose it). Mumford was architecture critic for
  The New Yorker and author of The City in History,
  which received the National Book Award in 1961,
  the same year that Death and Life appeared. The
  Decentrists applied the Garden City idea to
  regional planning, with the idea of
  decentralizing cities by spreading their
  functions and populations out over a large area.
  Their ideas had more impact on suburban
  development than on regional planning per se.

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The Radiant City (pp. 21-23)

• The Radiant City is associated with the
  Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Like Mies Van
  der Rohe, whom Bob Moeller introduced in
  connection with the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier
  (sometimes referred to as Corbu) was a
  modernist architect who believed that modern
  design could lead to cleaner, more rational
  living for workers and other urban inhabitants,
  largely in the form of high-rise housing. Jacobs
  describes the Radiant City as a vertical version
  of the Garden City, a stacking of housing units
  on top of each other, surrounded by parkland and
  accessed by highways. High density in the
  vertical dimension allowed for plenty of open
  space below. Many upper- and middle-income
  housing projects are designed on the Radiant City
  model as are low-income projects. Unlike the
  Garden City and the regionalism of the
  Decentrists, the Radiant City is a form of
  development really designed for use inside cities
  and it has had a major impact on the skylines
  and housing patterns of Chicago, New York, and
  other great and not-so-great American (and
  global) cities.

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The City Beautiful (pp. 24-25)

• The City Beautiful is the Worlds Fair approach
  to urban planning. It eschews the clean modern
  lines of Corbu in favor of decorative, thematic
  architecture. Think Disneyland and the kinds of
  developments inspired by it, as well as downtowns
  focused on large, embarked, cultural destinations
  (the Mall in Washington, Balboa Park in San
  Diego, Museum Mile or the Getty in LA, the Great
  Park in Irvine) rather than high-density
  shopping, walking, and gazing.

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5b. The end results of these different cities may
look very different. According to JJ, what do
they all have in common?

• Each of these models is at war with the mixed
  use, high density, pedestrian landscape of cities
  that have not undergone modern planning and
  rebuilding processes. Each assumes that lots of
  open space and parkland will make for healthier,
  happier living environments, whether inside
  cities or in the areas around them. Each tends to
  segregate residential areas from commercial and
  industrial functions. There is also a tendency to
  separate out economic classes from each other as
  well, for example, by restricting public
  transportation into wealthy areas or by promoting
  cul de sacs..

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Chapter Two the uses of sidewalks safety (pp.
29-54)
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6. According to JJ, what is the essential
difference between a city and a town? (p. 30)

• Cities are full of strangers, and have developed
  means for strangers to live together.

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7. Why does life in housing projects (both low
and middle-income) resemble the story of the
three little pigs? (p. 31)

• According to Jacobs, large housing projects,
  turned away from the street and in towards
  courtyards as well as up into the sky, have given
  up the life of the street and the sidewalk that
  allows strangers to interact and neighbors to
  supervise the neighborhood. Their corridors and
  courtyards are not visible. There is very little
  commerce to encourage a steady flow of
  pedestrians whose presence would deter crime and
  encourage active looking by neighbors and
  passers-by. There are no passers-by because there
  is nothing to do in these residential tracts.
  Thus, if a stranger comes to the door, he just
  might be the big bad wolf.

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8. What does JJ mean by the Great Blight of
Dullness? (p. 34, pp. 40-42)

• JJ uses this phrase to describe large residential
  areas that lack commerce and pedestrian traffic.
  These places are boring to walk around in, so
  nobody does. And because they are often deserted,
  they tend not to be safe. Yet they appear to have
  the physical attributes of good neighborhoods
  largely residential, lots of trees and grass, not
  densely populated. Many of these areas were built
  recently, as attractive suburbs for people
  leaving the city centers, and then decline
  quickly.

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9. According to JJ, what are the three
characteristics of a safe street? (p. 35)

• On a safe street, you know whats public and
  whats private.
• On a safe street, there are eyes on the street
  people walking around, proprietors of
  businesses checking out the action, neighbors
  looking out their windows.
• On a safe street, sidewalks are in almost
  continuous use, thanks to a mix of businesses
  that open at different times of day and serve the
  needs and wants of different kinds of people,
  some from within the neighborhood, some from
  outside.

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10. How does JJ use the narrative about the man
struggling with the little girl to demonstrate
her point about safety and sidewalks? (pp. 38-9)

• This is a nice example of JJs skills as a
  writer. She builds up some drama we think the
  man is going to abduct the little girl. The
  neighbors gather, but dont quite intervene.
  Tension mounts. It turns out that the man is the
  girls father (and not a father under a
  restraining order, we presume). Although the
  story is deliberately anticlimactic, it
  illustrates not only the vigilance of the people
  on the street, but also the relative safety of
  the street itself.

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11. How is Los Angeles like a wild animal park in
Africa? (p. 46)

• People observe the life of the city from the
  safety of their cars.

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12. Explain Jacobs axiom, Wherever the rebuilt
city rises the barbaric concept of Turf must
follow. (p. 50)

• Turf is a principle that develops in gang
  warfare. JJ analyses a situation in 1956 in which
  the New York City Youth Board brought provisional
  security to an area torn by gang violence by
  capitulating to the turf principle. The police
  used their force and authority to support rather
  than challenge the rule of the gangs. The real
  irony, however, is that official institutions,
  such as hospitals, upper income housing towers,
  and universities also assert the principle of
  Turf when they gate and fortress their campuses.
• Gated communities as we know them hadnt been
  invented yet, but we see their origins in these
  high rises for wealthy Manhattanites,
  high-security affairs with fences, doormen, and
  (perhaps) underground parking. It is interesting
  to note that gating begins in the cities, as a
  way of creating a kind of pastoral suburb within
  the city. As urban patterns have deteriorated and
  the great blight of dullness has seeped into
  posturban America, gating has now become a
  feature of suburban life as well. The irony for
  JJ is that gated communities make cities less
  safe rather than more safe, by destroying the
  fabric of trust and the life of sidewalks that
  deters crime from the ground up.

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13. How does JJ use the image of the intricate
sidewalk ballet to organize her account of a
typical day on Hudson Street in New York City?
(50-54)

• This is the most famous passage in the book. JJ
  uses the metaphor of the ballet to choreograph
  the different traffic patterns and interactions
  that vitalize Hudson Street in 1960.

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Chapter Five the uses of neighborhood parks (pp.
89-111)
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14. What conventional idea about parks does JJ
want to turn around in this chapter? (p. 89)

• One of the truisms of orthodox planning that JJ
  takes on in this book is the idea that parks and
  open space are in and of themselves healthy,
  positive additions to urban and suburban life
  genuine and inarguable improvements over the
  asphalt and concrete of urban streets and
  sidewalks. She turns this idea around by
  suggesting that it is cities (their activity,
  their density, the interest that they bring in
  the form of foot traffic, the enclosure they
  provide by way of buildings and streets) that
  make parks successful. The lack of sufficient
  city life renders parks both dull and dangerous.
  It is not quite fair to say that Jane Jacobs
  loves sidewalks and hates parks, but its a good
  place to start, since one can read her project as
  an attempt to restore dignity to streets and
  sidewalks by understanding the kinds of activity
  they support, while reevaluating the salutary
  role of parks and open space especially their
  dependence on streets and sidewalks if they are
  to succeed in pulling neighborhoods together.

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15. Explain JJs statement, Parks are not
automatically anything. (p. 92)

• This claim is key to JJs new approach to urban
  planning, which looks at systems and patterns of
  use, rather than at the absolute value or meaning
  of any one item in the urban landscape. To
  paraphrase Hamlet, There is no good or bad, but
  living makes it so. JJ is interested in
  discovering the reality of parks (how they are
  really used, why so many fail, how we might make
  them better) rather than the myth of parks
  (that they are in and of themselves a boon to the
  neighborhoods where they are placed). This
  concern with parks runs through the entire book,
  beginning with her analyses of the Garden City,
  the Radiant City, and the City Beautiful, and
  ending with her critique of Nature in the final
  chapter. Alll of these moments take a certain
  pastoral myth of the park as their founding image
  for the rebuilt modern city. One might argue,
  however, that JJ substitutes a certain urban
  pastoral for the rural pastoral of the planners.

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16. What exactly is blight anyway? (p. 97)

• Blight is a term taken from biology and
  horticulture, where it refers to the symptom of
  chlorosis (browning) in plants as a response to
  infection. In urban theory, blight refers to the
  process by which a neighborhood loses its
  vitality and appeal, exhibiting such symptoms as
  depopulation, vacant buildings, crime, and empty,
  inhospitable urban vistas. (Fans of The Wire may
  recall the the vacantsabandoned stretches of
  row houses in inner city Baltimore. This setting
  could be contrasted with the low rises and The
  Towers, two forms of public housing where much
  of the drug trade occurs in the series. The first
  is an example of blight, the second of failed
  urban renewal.)

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Blight

• In American cities, blight tends to afflict urban
  centers first, and then spreads to the rings of
  suburbs that first sucked population out of the
  center. In cities in other parts of the world,
  blight tends to be associated with the great
  slums that form around them, leaving the city
  centers relatively vital and prosperous.

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Blight

• A review of the word blight in the OED reveals
  that the plant meaning stems from the 17th
  century. The first use in relation to urban
  contexts is attributed to none other than Lewis
  Mumford. Part of the import of JJs use of the
  word blight may be to assign it to regions
  other than unreformed urban centers, to show how
  blight can characterize suburban developments and
  new urban projects. In other words, the war
  against blight as waged by Moses, Mumford, and
  others itself causes new forms of blight, both
  inside urban neighborhoods that have been
  bulldozed and rebuilt, and in the suburbs
  designed to produce alternatives to blighted
  urban living. To call dullness blight is to
  take the solution to urban blight (redevelopment
  and suburbanization) and diagnose it as itself a
  form and cause of blight.

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Blight in the OED (selected)

• PLANT LIFE
• 1. gen. Any baleful influence of atmospheric or
  invisible origin, that suddenly blasts, nips, or
  destroys plants, affects them with disease,
  arrests their growth, or prevents their blossom
  from setting a diseased state of plants of
  unknown or assumed atmospheric origin.
• 1669 WORLIDGE Syst. Agric. viii. 3 (1681) 159
  Spoiled by the various mutations of the Air, or
  by Blights, Mildews, etc.

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Blight in the OED (selected)

• URBAN LIFE
• b. spec. An unsightly urban area (cf. BLIGHTED
  ppl. a. 1b).
• 1938 L. MUMFORD Culture of Cities 8 We..face the
  accumulated physical and social results of that
  disruption ravaged landscapes, disorderly urban
  districts,..patches of blight, mile upon mile of
  standardized slums. 1952 M. LOCK et al. Bedford
  by River i. 23/1 Blight clearance will affect
  another 4,100 people who will be displaced from
  the main clearance areas.

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17. What does JJ mean when she says that you can
neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason
with it? What would be an example of lying to a
park? What would be an example of reasoning with
a park? (p. 101)

• JJ wants to replace myths about parks (as
  promoted by planners) with the reality of parks
  as observed by people actually using them the
  difficulty of creating and maintaining successful
  ones, and their absolute dependence on the
  vitality and diversity of their urban
  surroundings. Lying to a park might include
  brochures and artistic renderings that advertise
  the virtues of a new housing development through
  images of parkland. Reasoning with a park might
  include adding improvements that are supposed
  to make the park nicer (new benches, a play
  structure, a fountain, or -- egads -- more
  grass!!), but which dont really address the
  fabric of the surrounding neighborhood and the
  resulting traffic patterns. For an example of
  reasoning with a park, see the discussion of
  the empty fountain in the middle of Washington
  Square, and the plan to fill it in with grass,
  restoring the land to park use. (p. 105)

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18. What is JJs attitude towards Skid Row parks
(pp. 99-100)?

• Such parks were typically seen as examples of
  urban blight by urban planners. JJ certainly
  does not see Skid Row parks as urban amenities,
  but she does see them as serving important
  functions for the homeless (not a term in use
  when she wrote the book), and she takes seriously
  the forms of social life that she observes in
  them. She also distinguishes Skid Row parks
  (parks for the homeless) from crime parks. Fans
  of The Wire might want to consider the attractive
  character of Bubbles, a largely homeless junkie
  who supports himself through minor theft and
  recyling, and spends much of his days in and
  around city parks, and the drug dealers, who push
  their products in the courtyard of the Low Rises
  (public housing development), and who make
  business plans in a deserted concrete park.

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19a. What according to JJ are the four features
of good park design? (pp. 103-106)

• Intricacy a variety of paths and vistas, perhaps
  exhibited in grading of the site, that lend
  variety to the pedestrian experience of the park.
  It need not be intricate as viewed from above
  intricacy is a ground-level phenomenon.

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Contd

• Centering
• successful parks usually have a center or focal
  point, like the empty fountain shell in
  Washington Square.

35
Contd

• Sun
• sun encourages picnicking and hanging out when
  sun is blocked by tall buildings (think Corbu),
  parks can be adversely affected.

36
Contd

• Enclosure
• a park needs a set of boundaries. Streets,
  sidewalks, and buildings afford visible limits to
  parks, which shouldnt be too big if they are to
  succeed as true neighborhood parks (rather than
  destination parks like zoos, sports parks, or
  museum complexes). What JJ calls with her
  characteristic irony land oozes indeterminate
  chunks of grassland spread out around high rises
  and housing projects lack this bounded
  character, and are thus avoided by picnickers,
  strollers, and other potential park visitors, who
  will, she says, actually cross the street rather
  than walk through their creepy green .

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19b. Is good design enough to make a park
successful? (p. 103-106)

• These four features of good park design are
  necessary but not sufficient causes for park
  success. Design alone is not enough this is one
  message of JJs book. A park is not a thing it
  is part of an urban ecology. These four features
  can encourage its integration into city life, but
  they by no means guarantee it. Put in terms of
  this course, we might say that Jane Jacobs is
  mapping the limits of human making, as expressed
  in modern planning and technology. You cannot
  make a great city a great city is something that
  develops over time, out of the self-organizing
  actions (doings) of human beings. Thinking and
  making can be brought to bear on cities, but they
  cannot replace these self-organizing processes.

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Chapter Twenty-Two the kind of problem a city is
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20a. What, according to JJ, are the three kinds
of problems identified by the history of modern
science? (pp. 429-32)

• Simple Problems
• problems with two variables, as approached by the
  early physical sciences.

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Contd

• Disorganized Complexity
• problems with many, many variables, solved
  through statistical analysis. Important to modern
  physics, actuarial analysis, economics,
  communication and information theory.

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Contd

• Organized Complexity
• developed by the life sciences, especially
  biology and medicine, to address problems with
  many variables, which are interrelated. The
  biological organism is an obvious example. so is
  the environment, conceived as an ecological
  system. You might recall some of Martins
  descriptions of aetia / causes in Aristotle, and
  his discussion of ecology as a modern science
  that develops the integrated approach to
  causality first approached by Aristotle.

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20b. What kind of problem is a city? (p. 433-34)

• Jane Jacobs see the city as an example of
  organized complexity, since the many features and
  factors (variables) of urban life, such as
  employment opportunities, population density, the
  size of city blocks, the number and types of
  businesses, and the height and age of buildings
  all act on each other. The word life in the
  title of the book certainly evokes the organic /
  biological model of organized complexity that
  Jacobs develops implicitly and explicitly
  throughout the book.

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FIN