Surely they would have been bitter adversaries: Richard J. Daley, the late authoritarian Chicago mayor, and Jane Jacobs, the combative New York City activist and author. He ripped expressways through Chicago’s quilt of ethnic neighborhoods and presided over the erection of its massive public housing projects. She stopped an expressway from slicing apart her Greenwich Village neighborhood and championed the beauty of small things — the ballet of the sidewalk and the front stoop.
He was the ultimate establishment figure, an imposing man who resembled a corporate executive in his dark suits. She was the ultimate rebel, her owlish glasses concealing a ferocious curiosity and lack of respect for authority.
Although these two giants of mid-20th Century urban America never met (Jacobs died last year, Daley in 1976), they now share one thing: a pair of insightful conferences honoring their memory and assessing the prospects of Chicago and other American cities. Coincidentally held within days of each other, the conferences underscore how much the metropolitan landscape has changed during the last half century and how leaders of cities large and small are struggling to come to grips with those seismic shifts.
It is no longer enough for mayors to fix the streets and make sure water comes out of the tap, Mayor Richard M. Daley said during the third annual Richard J. Daley Urban Forum, titled “Building the Future City,” held May 2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, other speakers argued, city leaders need to attend to the “tourist infrastructure,” from spectacular attractions such as Millennium Park, to the smaller details such as signs that guide globe-hopping visitors through the urban maze.
Three days later, it was time for a Chicago Architecture Foundation symposium, provocatively titled “If Jane Jacobs Came to Chicago …” Those words evoked British journalist William Stead’s 1894 expose “If Christ Came to Chicago,” a searing look at the city’s political corruption and underground economy, and seemed to portend an equally scorched-earth examination of Richard M. Daley’s Chicago. But the verdict from the assembled experts about a hypothetical Jacobs visit to the realm of King Rich was mixed.
Jacobs, they said, would have found much to like — the rumbling “L” as the symbol of a mass-transit city, the vibrant interplay between Wrigley Field and its neighborhood and the disappearance of the Robert Taylor Homes, once the world’s largest housing project. But she would have turned her thumbs down on such things as the bland new housing of University Village, the sea of parking lots surrounding the United Center and U.S. Cellular Field and the lack of community participation — so far, at least — in Chicago’s plans to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
More important, perhaps, was the judgment some speakers rendered on Jacobs herself: The lessons about the making of good cities that she so brilliantly codified in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” hold far less relevance in an America where the vast majority of people live in suburbs and exurbs. Among those lessons: “eyes on the street” promote safety, mixed uses are preferable to segregated ones, short blocks are better than long ones and small plans are preferable to big ones.
U.S. cities losing residents
Census figures bear this out, especially in the Midwest. St. Louis had 856,796 residents in 1950. It had fewer than half that, just 348,189, in 2000. In the same period, Detroit shriveled from more than 1.8 million people to 951,270; Cincinnati shrank from slightly more than 500,000 to 331,285. The cities that are growing, such as Phoenix (which zoomed from slightly less than 107,000 residents in 1950 to more than 1.3 million in 2000) invariably are laid out for the convenience of cars, not pedestrians.
But exurbs and suburbs weren’t the enemies on Jane Jacobs’ radar screen 46 years ago. She was fighting Robert Moses, the uber-urban planner who believed that Jacobs and her Greenwich Village allies were simply “a bunch of mothers.” If her prescriptions for cities in “Death and Life” were remarkably on target, they were also too narrow, argued Henry Binford, professor of history at Northwestern University. And they didn’t anticipate the larger economic forces transforming today’s American cities.
As Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury secretary, observed in his keynote address at the Daley forum, technology now allows goods and services to be transmitted electronically with far more ease than before. But pressures for face-to-face interaction remain, Rubin noted, and cities are well positioned to take advantage of those demands if they hold a global advantage in key fields such as commodities trading, have great universities that feed businesses with intellectual capital and can serve up an array of cultural delights you can’t get in Peoria.
Linking tourists and residents
With checks in all those boxes, Chicago seems ascendant, the forest of construction cranes along its skyline creating the impression of a boomtown. The reality, however, is more complex. Empty nesters and yuppies tend to be the ones filling the high-rises, while families with children escape to the urban fringe. Census figures show that from 1950 to 2000, Chicago’s population dropped from 3.6 million to slightly less than 2.9 million, a decline of 20 percent — healthy compared to the 50 percent declines in St. Louis and Detroit, but still troubling.
Not surprisingly, speakers at both conferences were keen on the idea of attracting residents. Tourism shouldn’t simply be an end in itself, they said, but a way of enhancing a city’s livability for those who live there — or who might move there. To cite one example, Chicago needs far more aboveground signs directing tourists and residents to the underground pedway tunnels.
“If you don’t have a city that feels friendly and welcoming to people, it doesn’t matter what you build,” Dennis Judd, professor of urban politics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said during the Daley forum.
But what you build still matters, and the chief test of reconciling the needs of the tourist city and the everyday city stands to be the Olympic Village, which is planned to rise above the truck marshaling lots south of McCormick Place and west of Lake Shore Drive.
In a perfect illustration of divergent agendas, the U.S. Olympic Committee last month cited the Olympic Village as one of the deciding factors in selecting Chicago over Los Angeles as the American city that will bid for the 2016 Games. In Chicago, however, early plans for the village by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill were widely panned for repeating the failings of mid-century modernism, their midrise housing blocks likened to a row of ice cubes cut off from their surroundings.
Significantly, former Daley administration officials at both conferences sounded the same critique, which was right out of Jane Jacobs’ activist playbook: Neighbors need to be involved in the planning. The Olympic Village has to “flow back to the city around it,” as Valerie Jarrett, former planning commissioner and now vice chairman of the Chicago 2016 Olympic Committee, put it.
The remark signaled the continuing relevance of Jacobs’ critique and showed how enlightened political leaders have absorbed it, something that would have been unthinkable half a century ago.
Mayor not at odds with Jacobs
In contrast to his father, Richard M. Daley wouldn’t have been Jacobs’ adversary. In many ways, he has taken her lessons to heart. Think of his rebuilding of historic neighborhood schools: “Kids can’t learn when they see their breath,” he said at the forum honoring his father.
“We need government to work for us,” said Kenneth Jackson, the noted Columbia University urban historian who keynoted the Jacobs event, referring to urban planners who are sensitive to small-scale issues as well as the big picture.
Of course, that big picture now includes the threat of global warming, which Jacobs’ preference for dense settlements neatly anticipated. Her lessons also have fresh meaning for the emerging urban clusters in Chicago’s suburbs. With their high-rise downtowns, Evanston and Arlington Heights are as much cities as they are suburbs.
Still, the urban canvas on which architects paint the future is always changing, which means Jacobs’ vision needs to be reformulated lest it become rusty and irrelevant.
At the Daley forum, such fresh thinking came from Sarah Dunn, partner of the Chicago architectural firm UrbanLab, which in February won the History Channel’s City of the Future national design competition with its plan for a 22nd Century Chicago. The proposal calls for “eco-boulevards” that would replenish Lake Michigan with treated wastewater and storm water while creating people-friendly greenways.
A long way off from reality? Perhaps. But skeptics said the same thing about Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago when it was released in 1909, and it still influences us today with its vision of a thriving lakefront and downtown. Cities change, but this much remains constant: the need to make them livable, if not vibrant and inspiring.
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bkamin@tribune.com
Blair Kamin is the Tribune’s architecture critic.
