An Urban Visionary Speaks Out

Active Living Network (AL): What are some of the challenges we face as we strive to make our cities more pedestrian-friendly?

Jane Jacobs (JJ): In cities you can see where time has worked for an area and where it has been very destructive. Something that is elementary—I’ll get into the question of what city heart is. If people get fond of their district, their neighborhood, and stay there, and if the city is working the way it should, they begin to get connected. The next generation gets better education and so on. All of this is reflected in the neighborhood. This is what we owe the successful China Towns and Little Italy’s.

So one very important thing is to get people attached to their neighborhood before it is too late. If getting more prosperous and better connected and so on means that one should leave, you are just going backwards faster than you are going forwards. So you have to pay attention to what the people in the neighborhood want. One thing they want—I think this cuts across every ethnic group in every city—they don’t want to live in an undignified place that brands them as second or third class to be living there.

There are quite not expensive but thoughtful things that can be done to show it isn’t a second or third class place. And it is very important to listen to what people want done.

AL: Specifically, what kinds of things can be done to improve neighborhoods?

JJ: Tree planting, traffic taming, putting in markets at the right time. And according to what [residents] want. I can remember people in Dallas telling me about a Vietnamese settlement that they had there, and that people wanted a market. They had their eye on a vacant lot that was owned by the city, and that was what they requested. Can we use that as a market? The Dallas people were good people, but they decided that their planning department should help make it right. Well this is ridiculous. These Vietnamese know more about putting together a market than everybody in Dallas or Texas or probably the U.S. as a whole knows. They are the world’s authority on how to set up a market.

So the planning department got a grant from the federal government and it planned a market and in a year they were all ready, and in a year all the Vietnamese had moved away. They couldn’t put their lives on hold. All that was needed was, ‘yes you must clean up after yourselves,’ but this is a symptom of lack of trust that people know what’s good for them and are able. As long as that holds, you’re not going to get people to stay and want to stay in their neighborhoods and improve them as a byproduct of improving their own lives.

AL: You mentioned that city hearts, or neighborhood centers, are elementary. Can you elaborate?

JJ: A heart is not a disembodied thing that you just sit down arbitrarily like choosing a shopping center site. It has to have an anatomy that runs into the neighborhood. And the anatomy, the clue to it, is what you always hear when people talk about a hang out. Oh it’s the corner store, or, it’s the corner bar. There’s always that word corner. What does that mean? Well actually it means that there is an intersection, and this corner is a powerful place. If that intersection is of two or more pedestrian paths that go into the community, this is the anatomy that a heart has to have. It can be a ‘Y’ intersection. In lots of traditional towns it was where two highways came together as a fork. It can be an X, a regular crossing it can be a T…If you try to evade that you are not going to have a heart that will beat.

It seems very tempting to planners, including New Urbanist planners, to pick where they are going to have a heart or how nice it will look in photographs or how scenic it is, but that doesn’t matter.

Now over time if the heart is successful it is going to change. It is either going to flourish and increase what is there. It is going to be where the action is, and if you want that to work nicely you have to anticipate that. There are lots of examples in the real city of how it can be done well, what can be converted from one sort of use to another use in a pleasant way without making it look as if the neighborhood is going to the dogs. That’s why people are so scared of zoning changes, because that is what often happens. You have to think of convertible buildings, whether they are going to be converted from commercial use into residential use, or vice versa. That is part of that heart and that corner.

It is the very essence of, is this place going to be interesting to walk in, is it going to be useful to walk in, is it going to get more so, is it going to get less so, is it going to get down at the heel. And in fact, you also have to think about that it may get down at the heel. It may not turn out to be a very good place. So all the more reason to think about convertible space instead of empty storefronts; you want places that can convert into residence or something else in the unwanted storefronts. All those things are part of the consideration of time, which is not considered in planning.

AL: Some people say we have engineered human activity out of our cities—Is that how you see it? Why do you think this happened?

JJ: It is particularly understandable for anybody who lived through the great depression, which I did…it was such a strange thing. People weren’t prepared for it. And they didn’t know what had happened. And this is not so strange because economists today are still arguing about what caused it. But anyway, this mysterious, meaningless fog settled. And after we came out of it, after the war, and after the euphoria of victory and the mild economic boost that came with the Marshall Plan and Korean War, there was a kind of consensus that had formed and solidified across North America, United States and Canada. If it could be put into words it would be something like this: We can endure and overcome disasters, but we will never again let ourselves be trapped into that meaningless fog of unemployment. And what happened next, and still shapes our culture, is a legacy of the great depression.

In 1956 I think it was, Eisenhower signed the interstate traffic highway program. The ostensible reason for it was so that cities could be evacuated fast in case of emergencies. But everybody knew what it was really for, and Eisenhower said it himself at a ceremony when he started the program in the speech at the George Washington Bridge in New York. He said that the automobile industry was the backbone of the American economy and we had to keep the people working. And that was why mayors all over the country accepted this even when their constituents were yelling that is was ruining their communities. Jobs, full employment, this was the most important thing. Now that’s politics.

Memories of the great depression have faded, but these attitudes have worked their way very deeply into the culture. Politics in America now is very largely a matter of people who think come what may we must have the jobs, and on the other side people who are anticipating social and environmental disasters in the future as a result of that, and are opposing this.

You know there is a Gilbert and Sullivan play—I can’t remember which one—that says every little baby is born a liberal or a conservative. Well in America, every little baby is born as jobs first or the environment first, and they don’t change. This is really hardcore stuff. It affects the culture in other ways too…Now North American culture as far as I can see is “full employment,” so that’s why people allow this to happen I think. Does that make sense to you?

AL: How might modern planning and design transcend this “jobs first,” car-centered legacy?

JJ: I think a good place to begin is two things I already mentioned. Taking neighborhoods that exist already. Maybe they aren’t very attractive and maybe they only have poor people in them and maybe they only have immigrants in them, but thinking what can you do to keep these people here, and to make them feel that they are valued. That’s one thing that would be meaningful and hopeful for the future.

The other thing is to try to make neighborhood hearts where the action is. But not imagining that you just decide that arbitrarily. It’s a much harder thing to do than site a shopping center. You have to study where the action is in other places, and see how the arteries lead from that heart into the community and where they go. That’s the kind of work that hasn’t been done.

AL: What are culture myths guiding people in terms of design and planning today? How might they be reshaped?

JJ: Well, you notice how the roads and streets look the same everywhere? Well, they are done to regulations in some cases and recommendations in more cases of traffic engineers. And presumably most of us assume when we hear of some professional, like traffic engineers, that they know what they are doing from real life experience. I used to suppose that too. But its not so.

You should get a hold of a wonderful book by Allan Jacobs who is no relative of mine. Allan B. Jacobs. He’s been a principle planner in San Francisco. And Elizabeth [Macdonald]. It was published this year by MIT Press and it’s called The Boulevard Book. It’s a beautiful book. They wanted to track [boulevards] since there are lots of regulations and rules they don’t believe in against boulevards in America, whereas they work very well in many foreign countries. They tried to track down the data on which the boulevards got their bad name in America. Well it was impossible to track down. It doesn’t exist. These are not scientifically derived things.

There is an architect in Boston named Campbell, yes Robert Campbell, very good. A long time ago, more than a decade ago, he wrote a piece about his own street and how successful it was. And how under the regulations existing thereafter, that street could not exist that way. It would have to be one of these sterile, cookie cutter streets. You talk about why do they all look alike in America. Well I thought it was heartening when he wrote this. I thought people would pay attention. Well I don’t know if anybody paid attention except me. Certainly nothing changed. So it’s what you were talking about earlier. You have to have something happen, actually have something change to make any difference, and examples of change are far more important than talk about it.

AL: What is the proper role of citizen observers/critics in shaping the way cities develop? Of professionals?

JJ: I don’t know. I don’t think it can be done by rote or formula. These are all individuals and how they work with others. They are all unique. One of the glories about individuals—they aren’t interchangeable cogs. If you have Robert Campbell as one of your citizens, it’s not the same as if you don’t have Robert Campbell. No use kidding yourself that you can do it by some sort of x-ography.

AL: You’ve written that cities evolve organically. If that’s so, what is the balance between planned and unplanned expansion and redevelopment?

JJ: I don’t know. But I think if you want some overall thing, the hatred of waste is a powerful one. And the feeling that we are not rich enough to throw away. We can convert things and reuse them in other ways, but not waste them, and if you get that ethic imbedded in the culture I think it would have a great effect on not throwing away the baby with the bath water. And I think people are prepared for understanding that. Waste not want not.

Somebody back in the 40s I think, when this determination to let jobs trump everything, pointed out—it was somebody who worked for the federal government believe it or not—pointed out that you could make apparently a wonderful prosperous economy by knocking everything down and building up other things in its place, and you wouldn’t have any more in the end than you had had. I think that was a person who saw what was happening. Even if what you are destroying is farmland and you are building up what is ostensibly city or suburb in its place, it’s just as true. You don’t want to waste farmland either. Certainly the whole urban renewal notion, which is slum-clearing and bulldozing, which was modified later but not very much, was about wasting a lot of things and a great halo was put over.

And I don’t want to sound to gloomy. There are so many good people in our culture and so many thoughtful ones and there are always the young people who are the hope.

AL: How do you encourage young people to affect change?

JJ: I worry somewhat about what the universities fail to do and what they do do. Now that universities their primary business is credentialing it has made a lot of the students cynical. They know very well what is happening. They aren’t there to be educated they are there to get those passports. That’s not a good start in life, but I don’t know how that will change. Probably not until there are big culture changes elsewhere. Such as waste not want not.

AL: What are the precursors of change that you see today?

JJ: Bicycling has increased enormously here. I remember when we came here in Toronto in ’68 the only people that rode bicycles were kids with those big balloon tires. Now there is just no end of adults using them to go to work, to go shopping. If you came in the evening, or maybe even when you did come, at that second cup coffee place you see a lot of bikes tethered there. This has only happened with a lot of encouragement from the city itself, with bicycle paths and bicycle racks and arrangements for people taking them on transit, and always opposed by automobile clubs and the usual suspects that want the roads entirely for cars. But I get hope when I see that bicycling has burgeoned.

But it’s still not as safe as it ought to be and not as frequent…Toronto has just, the council has just adopted a pedestrian charter that states that walking is the most sustainable form of transportation and it should be everybody’s right, and that everything that is done and every planning decision and so on should take into account what it does for pedestrianization. And again, this was the volunteer work of a couple of people who did a lot of research on this, and a then took on their backs all the effort of getting it politically accepted, which is a big job. So it has been now. We’ll see if that makes a difference.

AL: What is your vision for cities of the future? What does a healthy city look like?

JJ: I don’t think you can learn by looking at them as some kind of macro destination. That has been the trouble with the limited access highways with their ramps. They lead into downtown as a macro destination. But people don’t go into downtown that way. They go for lots of micro destinations.

The question has not been asked of how can people more expeditiously reach all these micro destinations. You look at all the things that block them. All of the no left turns and one-way streets and send them as soon as they get off the ramps. Send them all around blocks that they don’t want to go around in order to reach their destinations. And these are all calculated by traffic engineers to make traffic move fast, to speed things. That’s their purpose. There is no other reason for one-way streets or no left turns. What a dream world they live in. The traffic is not being speeded with all these expedients.

You began this with what is my vision with the future. Well we’ve gotten in a lot of trouble with our visions instead of finding out how things work. I stay away from visions of the cities of the future. Any city at all that’s worth learning from and considering has parts that work and are good and admirable, and parts that don’t. So what should we study? We should study the parts that work and the parts that people use. And the proof of the pudding is how the people use them, or do they use them. You learn what you can from those, and there is a lot to be learned.

AL: Is it possible for cities to model each other? How applicable are the experiences in Portland to Pittsburgh?

JJ: You don’t have answers in advance and one size doesn’t fit all. And the greatest asset that a city or a city neighborhood can have is something that’s different from every other place. But one thing leads to another in cities—that’s how it is organic, that’s how it is with all organic things. And spontaneous. I guess spontaneous is another name for self organized. Goodness, you would think that in the last couple of years that there is enough experience with central planning and its failures to give people some faith in self organization. Which is what there is instead of centralized direction. But of course, if you have self organization by pirates it’s not going to help either.

AL: Cultural myths are powerful forces. At what point is change possible?

JJ: The public is very poorly educated on how cities actually work. We’ve been through this amalgamation fight here and this was a big push to centralize things that were not centralized, under the rubric of economies of scale that was going to save so much money. But it has been terribly expensive and chaotic. And there was much waste involved in it. And it was pointed out beforehand that that would probably happen because of all the [past] examples. But still in all people were led to believe that it was very backward to have a patchwork of different counties, villages, cities, so on. I don’t remember anyone pointing out in all the thousands of words that I read about this that Boston and San Francisco, which were currently two of the most prosperous places and most successful cities in many ways, were patchworks. They had never amalgamated. These things are not talked about. We are poorly educated.

So one thing that I think could be done is begin to look very suspiciously at all these supposed verities, and really try to bring out what is the actual circumstances. You don’t have to make them up because there they are. All hypotheses get tested in the real world. There’s Boston and San Francisco, and nobody making anything out of what do these mean.

AL: How can we revitalize urban neighborhoods while maintaining their indigenous diversity?

JJ: Well we are back to waste not want not. Reusing. Not turning our noses up to all the little businesses and little things that are going on in cities. [They] are living off each other. In nature things are living off each other. It’s what makes a good ecology, and I think it makes good economy…Nature keeps reusing things and one thing keeps leading to another.

The second thing has to do with development. You think about originally the earth was a very barren hunk of rock, and look at all the life it has on it now. How did that happen? It didn’t happen in a day. One thing built upon another. Many things build on each other and made networks where they work together, and that’s the way our cities do. And that was recognized many years ago when people said Rome wasn’t built in a day. Everybody needs networks of other people…It’s impossible to make community without networks.

AL: What kinds of communities support healthy children?

JJ: Well, in a community where you don’t have to put children into cars for everything, to transport them. Where they can go to school in groups on their own. Or on bikes. It becomes the freedom that goes with that for everybody concerned, it becomes evident as a real thing. And when children or youths latch on to something active or free like skateboarding this shouldn’t be automatically disapproved of, or attempts made to shoo them out of here or there. No this is a healthy thing and there are some places where this has been recognized, and places provided for them to do their weird skateboarding things. That is part of freedom.

AL: What would you say to individuals out there who want to help stimulate change?

JJ: Don’t think it can be done with wishful thinking or free words. I have been trying to rely on free words for a long time. Think of how to get examples done and then don’t hide them under a bushel. Trot them out use them for public education. Show what they mean.

"Any city at all that's worth learning from and considering has parts that work and are good and admirable, and parts that don't," said Ms. Jacobs. "We should study the parts that work and the parts that people use"
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