One of the world’s foremost authorities on cities, Jane Jacobs got her start reporting for a newspaper in her modest-size hometown, Scranton, Pa. Her classic 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” challenged the urban-planning model of free-standing towers in broad plazas and championed older city neighborhoods with lively streets and a mix of homes, shops and other offerings. She has continued to explore urban form and function in such books as “The Economy of Cities” (1969), “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” (1984) and “Systems of Survival” (1992). Formerly a resident of New York City, the 81-year-old Jacobs now lives in Toronto, where a five-day conference about her work, “Jane Jacobs: Ideas that Matter,” begins Wednesday.
Q: Once viewed as unconventional, many of your ideas have worked their way into the mainstream. What satisfies you about their acceptance?
A: It’s satisfying, but there’s very little really to show for it now except that the wrong things are being done less. That’s important. You know, Hippocrates said to doctors, “Do not harm.”
Q: What’s an example of the improvement in thinking?
A: There’s one in Toronto called the St. Lawrence neighborhood, which would have been the St. Lawrence (housing) project. It would have been as awful as all the others. But instead, the planners continued the streets of the city through it, didn’t isolate it, joined it up, mixed up all kinds of buildings and incomes in it, and made it a flexible, normal sort of place.
The Canadian equivalent of the Federal Housing Administration didn’t at first want to lend to this because it said, `This is too old-fashioned.’ Actually, it was the latest thing going at the time. It was so radically new to do a thing like that.
Q: Is the New Urbanism, with its front porches and picket fences, a practitioner of your principles? What do you think of the New Urbanism town of Celebration being developed by Walt Disney Co. in Orlando?
A: Celebration is real in the sense that it emphasizes actual streets. It does give reason for people to use them on foot. It does mix up incomes, types of buildings.
The problem is it’s stuck in a suburban structure. It may not be suburban itself in style, site planning, placement of commerce or all those things. On the other hand, it’s stuck in the kind of transportation system where everybody depends on the automobile.
Q: You can get a Starbucks coffee, but you can’t buy a refrigerator in Celebration. Does that bother you?
A: No, it doesn’t bother me. That’s true even in cities. Where I live, there are all kinds of things I can buy by walking down to the corner. It happens I can’t buy a refrigeratior there. And if I did, I couldn’t carry it home.
Q: Conventional wisdom is that the Internet and high technology will work against cities, decreasing the need for face-to-face contact. Is there anything to that?
A: People still seem to circulate and see each other. They’ll feel out of it if they don’t.
Q: What’s your take on the so-called Disneyfication of cities?
A: Why don’t you talk about citification of Disney? Disney’s town, Celebration, is much more citified than Walt Disney’s previous conception of the city, which had some real futuristic stuff.
Now there are grids, streets instead of cul-de-sacs, stores that are close enough or mixed in enough with residents that you can walk to them easily, connections of everything with the street. These are old city principles. They’re older than America.
Q: How has urban America changed since the publication of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”?
A: I think things are worse than they were at the time I wrote it. And it’s going to be harder to correct a lot of things–if they can be corrected.
The alienating, sterile housing projects, like those in Chicago, have been made larger and more condensed.
These have been so destructive that they’ve hurt all the areas around them. There aren’t the healthy areas to connect them with, as there were when they were fewer and smaller. . . . I think an awful lot of repair work has to be done.
Q: Will suburban sprawl be curbed through legal or political means?
A: Sprawl will be curbed eventually. It’s just too expensive in land and in energy and in money.
I don’t think that it will be done by negative means. I think the only way it will happen is by positive means. And by that, I mean by people getting a different and preferred vision, like Celebration.
If that’s so, we shouldn’t expect change to be in the form of just a little town like that. If the New Urbanism really does take, it will begin to permeate, in much less planned ways, the whole sprawl. It will fill in places. It will infiltrate. It will subvert.
Every so often, inevitably it seems, there comes along a generation that just can’t stand what the previous generations did. And it’s utterly disrespectful toward it, utterly ruthless toward it. That’s the way the post-Victorian generation was. They just hated Victorian planning and Victorian styles of every sort. We can be just as sure that our sprawled suburbs are going to change radically.
Q: But concrete lasts a long time. A regional shopping mall is a hard thing to recast, isn’t it?
A: A suburban mall is a pretty fragile thing. Actually, these can be disintegrated quite easily. There are a lot of them that go out of business now. As soon as you get too many in an area, some collapse.
Q: What will the urban crisis of the 21st Century be?
A: I don’t know. I’m not any prophet. And I never have tried to be.
Q: Could America’s metropolitan areas repeat what has happened in Europe, with city centers the sole province of the rich and the outskirts a repository for the poor?
A: My worry capacity tells me a much worse crisis will be if our economy stagnates, and that really means if our city economies stagnate, which they are doing. When an economy stagnates, the problems of whatever kind pile up unsolved. As people get poorer, they don’t get better. They get meaner as a rule. I worry about that.
Q: Are there cities you consider models for the future?
A: I don’t think there’s any one city that’s perfect and couldn’t be improved. And maybe there’s not any city that’s so bad that it’s hopeless, although I wonder about that sometimes.
In America, I think that one of the most delightful and also economically sound ones is San Francisco. I’m very much impressed with San Francisco. And, of course, it’s connected very much with its environs.
At the other pole, of places I am absolutely not impressed with, is Detroit. I think it’s been a sinkhole of American technology, of social hopes. I don’t know whether it can be rescued.
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An edited transcript
