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.”

[OldDartmouthMark]

Interesting article, Keith. While reading it I was reminded of MIT's online archive "Perceptual Form of the City", which documents Boston's buildings around the time of urban renewal in the 1950s:

The objects in this collection relate to Kevin Lynch's study The Perceptual Form of the City, conducted in Boston, Massachusetts from 1954-1959.

In 1954 MIT Professor Kevin Lynch began studying city form in a five year project funded by The Rockefeller Foundation. The study was done under the direction of Lynch and Professor Gyorgy Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Urban and Regional Studies. Their research findings were the foundation of Lynch's theories on city planning discussed in his seminal work The Image of the City.

The Perceptual Form of the City study addressed the legibility and imageability of the American city in terms of the individual's perception of the urban landscape. The study focused on the cities of Boston, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, California, and Jersey City, New Jersey.

The collection includes photographs and records from the Boston phase of the project. The nearly 2,000 black & white photographs, shot by Nishan Bichajian, assistant to Professor Kepes, document the Boston urban environment during the mid-1950s prior to urban renewal. The records document the planning, preparation, and progress of the project (1951-1956), and the research process and findings (1954-1959). These records include field notes, interview transcripts, collected data, correspondence regarding the progress of the project and hand drawn maps.

Only a portion of the project documentation for The Perceptual Form of the City has been digitized. The entirety of the collection is part of the Kevin Lynch papers and is available for research use in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. A finding aid is available for the Kevin Lynch papers here.

The print photographs are available in the Rotch Visual Collections.

The archive of almost 2000 photos is a treasure trove of photographs which amounts to a 'slice of life' in mid 20th century Boston. The Flickr link below takes you directly to the photos. However, MIT's site linked below gives you the choice of viewing large, high-resolutions images if you so desire.

https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/33656

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mit-libraries

Not completely on topic, but at least a decent segue into some great 1950s photos of Boston...

[portapetey]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Interesting article in the Boston Globe:

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

“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.”

Only bottom-up maternalistic anti-plan-planning is acceptable!

Shrill activists on either end of a spectrum never seem to understand that from 30,000 feet up, they are completely identical to the shrill activists at the other end of the spectrum.

In the end, they are all just glassy-eyed zealots trying to create little dictatorships of the people and communities around them.