The Deification of Jane Jacobs

[Keith P.]

Interesting article in the Boston Globe:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2...ne&s_campaign=

Although her greatest triumphs occurred in New York City, where she helped resist freeway incursions and worse into her beloved Greenwich Village, she kept an eye on Boston, too. Jacobs celebrated the North End (“alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking”) in her classic 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and decried the postwar annihilation of our West End to make way for Charles River Park and other development.

Jacobs called 1960s-era Boston planning czar Ed Logue “a maniac” responsible for sucking the life out of our downtown, specifically around City Hall Plaza. I call Logue the Butcher of New Haven — his pre-Boston assignment — but she and I are on the same page here.

OK, she’s a saint — or is she? Jacobs wasn’t stupid, and at the end of her life she witnessed what she called the “oversuccess” of her pro-neighborhood policies, which often resulted in gentrification. Park Slope in Brooklyn, Boston’s South End, and even swaths of Jacobs’s second home, Toronto, have become prettified Gold Coasts, essentially closed to citizens unlucky enough to earn five-figure salaries.

Anthony Flint, the author of “Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City,” notes the irony that Jacobs, now the patron saint of New Urbanist planners around the world, was militantly antiplanning. Horror of horrors, Jacobs filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the controversial Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London, opposing the Connecticut city’s use of eminent domain.

This endeared her to Tea Party types and libertarians, but not to her core following of goo-goo (good government) activists. “In the end she believed not only that top-down paternalistic closed-door planning was bad,” says Flint, “but very little planning was any good at all.”

“It’s true that there is almost a cult of Jane Jacobs and I’m a member,” says former MIT professor Robert Kanigel, author of the forthcoming Jacobs biography “Eyes on the Street.” “It’s dangerous to get caught up in the hype of Saint Jane, because it gets in the way of seeing what her books were about. Nowadays developers use her catch phrases, such as ‘mixed use’ or ‘eyes on the street,’ to advance ends she would have found abhorrent.”