Urban Dynamism
Urban critic Karrie Jacobs (no relation) finally gets around to reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities and finds that Jane Jacobs's classic doesn't say what people think. Her column in Metropolis is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt:
Like many people, I'd made plenty of assumptions based on second- or thirdhand readings. For instance, because Jacobs is repeatedly cited in Suburban Nation, the New Urbanist tract by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, I assumed that she would have been a willing accomplice to that movement. It seems logical that Jacobs--with her reputation for advocating "close-grained" detail and mixed use--would support the calibrated street life meted out by Duany and his ilk. But as I read Jacobs it became clear that she never intended her ideas to be applied to smaller suburban settlements. She was writing only about big cities, with all their native grit and mess. Moreover, she consistently ridiculed the Garden City movement of the nineteenth century, the clearest precursor to New Urbanism, attributing to it the notion of "harmony and order imposed and frozen by authoritarian planning."
The Jacobs I thought I knew--an advocate for small-scale thinking and an opponent of large-scale projects--is not the one I discovered when I actually began to read her text. Her main argument was quite different: she used the example of her own Greenwich Village neighborhood to make the case that all planning and development should "generate city diversity"; but she did so to contrast the rich detail of urban life with the bold strokes then typical of planners. "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises," Jacobs wrote.
Karrie Jacobs concludes on a note that echoes The Future and Its Enemies (which cites Jane Jacobs):
The mistake made by Jacobs's detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis--to believe she was advocating the world's cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960. Admirers and opponents have routinely taken her arguments for complexity and turned them into formulas. But the book I just read was an inspiration to move forward without losing sight that cities are powerful, dynamic, ever-changing entities made up of myriad gestures big and small. The real notion is to build in a way that honors and nurtures complexity. And that's an idea impossible to outgrow.
Speaking of classics on urban dynamism, I've finally gotten around to reading Reynar Banham's brilliant Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Written in 1971, when Los Angeles was still a notably mobile city, it's somewhat dated but still relevant to thinking about L.A. in particular and 20th-century urban forms in general. (L.A. is the quintessential 20th-century city. As for this century, who knows?) And it's full of great insights--how the vernacular of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture supports modernism, for instance--and set pieces. Here's a riff on Disneyland:
The greatest of these ironies has to do with transportation, and this underlies the brothel comparison. Set in the middle of a city obsessed with mobility, a city whose most characteristic festival is the Rose Parade in Pasadena, fantastically sculptured Pop inventions entirely surfaced with live flowers rolling slowly down Colorado Boulevard every New Year's Day--in this city Disneyland offers illicit pleasures of mobility. Ensconced in a sea of giant parking-lots in a city devoted to the automobile, it provides transportation that does not exist outside--steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tram-trains, travelators, ropeways, not to mention pure transport fantasies such as simulated space-trips and submarine rides. Under-age children, too young for driver's licences, enjoy the licence of driving on their own freeway system and adults can step off the pavement and mingle with the buses and trams on Main Street in a manner that would lead to sudden death or prosecution outside.
But more than this, the sheer concentration of different forms of mechanical movement means that Disneyland is almost the only place where East Coast town-planning snobs, determined that their cities shall never suffer the automotive 'fate' of Los Angeles, can bring their students or their city councilors to see how the alternative might work in the flesh and metal--to this blatantly commercial fun-fair in the city they hate. And seeing how well it all worked, I began to understand the wisdom of Ray Bradbury in proposing that Walt Disney was the only man who could make rapid transit a success in Los Angeles. All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
They are also at diametrical variance with the special brand of 'innocence' that underlies the purely personal fantasies of Los Angeles. Innocence is a word to use cautiously in this context, because it must be understood as not comprising either simplicity or ingenuousness. Deeply imbued with standard myths of the Natural Man and the Noble Savage, as in other parts of the US, this innocence grows and flourishes as an assumed right in the Southern California sun, an ingenious and technically proficient cult of private and harmless gratifications that is symbolized by the surfer's secret smile of intense concentration and the immensely sophisticated and highly decorated plastic surf-board he needs to conduct his private communion with the sea.
Aside from teaching me new things about a city I love, Banham made me want to reread The Martian Chronicles, which I didn't get at all the first time--when I was maybe 9 years old.