Jane Jacobs still helping to shape cities

"Death and Life of Great American Cities" author influential guide to new generation of urban planners

For nearly 40 years author Jane Jacobs, 84, has helped define an increasingly influential way of looking at cities, whether celebrating small business or opposing "slum" clearance and "suburban sprawl"

In this story: Different perspectives Neighborhood models Questioning authority, with a passion 'Classic for city planners' RELATED STORIES, SITES

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- You don't see much from the porch of Jane Jacobs' house, at least on this cold, rainy afternoon. A taxi. A couple of students walking. A young woman getting out of a car. A delivery truck that reads "ACE Bakery."

ACE Bakery? Wait a minute.

"Oh, that's an interesting company," says the 84-year-old Jacobs, author of the classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and several other books. "It supplies a lot of the restaurants in Toronto -- and a lot of grocery stores."

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There's more to this. She explains how the bakery was helped by a grant from a nonprofit foundation, how it puts back some of that money into the foundation, which then provides still other emerging companies with funding.

ACE Bakery illustrates how Jacobs envisions an entire city should work -- connecting the innovation of small businesses to the mixture of neighborhoods, the mixture of neighborhoods to the design of streets, the design of streets back to the innovation of small businesses.

For nearly 40 years, Jacobs has helped define an increasingly influential way of looking at cities. Basing her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand observation, she has challenged assumptions she believes have damaged modern cities: that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other; that an empty street is safer than a crowded one; that the car represents progress over the pedestrian.

Her priorities have been for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believes that economies need to be self-sustaining, self-renewing, relying on local initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies.

Jacobs' work has been attributed as a catalyst for organizations that oppose "suburban sprawl"

When "Death and Life" was published, in 1961, she was opposing "slum" clearance, highway construction and other principles of the time. Now, her book is a standard, taught throughout North America. In early November, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Building Foundation in Washington, D.C. Many of her beliefs have been incorporated by contemporary activists.

"There's no question that her work is the leaping-off point for our whole movement," says Shelley Poticha, executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a San Francisco-based organization that opposes "sprawling suburbs" and supports the "restoration" of urban centers.

"When we began 10 years ago, most of the people were Jane Jacobs followers, but they were isolated. Now, it's a different setting. I see her tactics being used in a lot of communities: in Portland (Ore.), in San Francisco, in Milwaukee."

With each book, Jacobs has examined her ideas from a different perspective: "Death and Life" focused on city planning; "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" on the economy; "Systems of Survival" on morals.

Her most recent work is "The Nature of Economies," in which she places society within a scientific context. Constructed as a symposium, the book argues that cities and people operate on the same principles as nature, presenting a Darwinian take on how we get on in the world.

"I think we have to be true to the kind of species we are, and to the assets we have -- ingenuity, adaptability and our diversity," she says. "We are very lucky we are not all alike, like pigeons in a flock. We're very lucky we have so many different talents."

With her bangs and owlish glasses, and her look of cheerful curiosity, it is easy to mistake Jacobs for an idle eccentric, the type of woman to be found late at night in the research room of the public library.

But Jacobs is a devoted, even iconic community activist. In the early 1960s, she led the successful opposition in New York City's Greenwich Village against a proposed expressway through Washington Square. She successfully opposed a Toronto highway project not long after moving here and has been a distinctive presence at public hearings.

"Right throughout she's been engaged in the life of the city, the debates and major issues," says Paul Bedford, executive director of Toronto's city planning division.

Jacobs has challenged assumptions she believes have damaged modern cities: that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other and that the car represents progress over the pedestrian

"I've been chairing a council meeting when she comes to speak and a hush does fall upon the crowd," Toronto city counselor Kyle Rae says. "Toronto has got this reputation as being a city of neighborhoods and she is the icon of that."

Jacobs lived for many years in Manhattan before she and her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, Jr., left for Canada in the late '60s, unhappy that their taxes were supporting the Vietnam War. The move, once temporary, is now permanent. A naturalized Canadian, she loves Toronto.

"People in Toronto say they used to have go to Buffalo to go to an interesting restaurant or shop for clothes," says Jacobs, whose husband died in 1996. "Now people from Buffalo come here for those things."

Jacobs' home is a medium-sized brick "Queen Anne" on an intimate, residential block, where the houses are close together and close to the street. It would make a nice model for the "new urbanist" neighborhood, within walking distance of both mass transit and of an eclectic, commercial district.

Inside her home, you get the impression the owner is either moving in or about to move out. The house appears in a state of hopeful transition, like a thriving city still under construction.

The ground floor alone embodies two principles Jacobs writes about often: variety and ingenuity, reusing materials intended for a different function. There are stained glass windows, African sculpture, a golf putter, an oil portrait of her great aunt, some old bones dug up from a beach, a quintet of swivel chairs and a book shelf that runs from one end of the house to the other. A closet has been converted to a telephone booth and some wire and clothes make for a comically scary scarecrow on the main staircase.

Jacobs never graduated from college and has no formal degree of any kind, only a lifelong expertise in observation. Her mind seeks out the unexpected. She learns from neighborhood strolls, books, pamphlets, magazines, even commercials.

"I look at the advertisements in magazines and on television and the kinds of houses that are shown as desirable are quite different from what they once were," she says. "They have big porches, on the street, close by other houses. I think that's significant. I think taste is changing."

She continues a long tradition of American pragmatism, from Benjamin Franklin to John Dewey and William James. She believes that ideas should come from experience as opposed to the other way around.

"She manages to not get swept away in the canned and abstract policy-speak with which too many people write about cities," says Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine. "She brings the enthusiasms and generosity of an amateur rather than the prepared depositions of a professional."

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916, Jacobs was a doctor's daughter with a compulsion to question authority -- especially when it came to cities.

"One of our teachers, I guess it was the fourth grade, told me cities form because there's a waterfall around and so there is power," she recalls. "Well, I was very dubious about this and immediately told her that in our neighborhood park there was a waterfall and it had nothing to do with the city."

Cities were her passion, first downtown Scranton, with its restaurants and courthouse square, and then New York, where she moved as a teen-ager and which she adored at first sight.

"In 1928, I went there with friends and ... we came through the Holland Tunnel and right into the middle of the financial district, on a regular working day," she recalls. "And I was just flabbergasted by the number of people on the street and how they were all rushing around."

During the Depression, on days when job hunts went nowhere, she would invest a nickel in the subway and explore a neighborhood: the diamond district, the garment district, the meatpacking district. Soon, she made money out of her passion, writing articles for various magazines.

New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses, who built much of that city's infrastructure and tore down neighborhoods to do it, came under fire in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

"Death and Life" emerged from her reporting. Published in 1961, not only did it attack canonical beliefs in city planning, it attacked such canonical figures as historian Lewis Mumford and the then-imperishable New York City parks commissioner, Robert Moses.

Jacobs believed cities suffered from an anti-city bias among planners, the romanticization of a more rural way of life. Because of this, she wrote, vital communities were being torn down simply because they were "crowded," other neighborhoods were fatally isolated and parks were being constructed without regard to their surrounding environment.

She specifically criticized Mumford, author of the classic "The Culture of Cities," for his misguided attachment to the anti-city philosophy, and Moses for his dogmatic attachment to the automobile.

Her arguments were clearly heard. Mumford, who had praised Jacobs' magazine work as "devastatingly just," dismissed her as a "sloppy novice." Moses told her publisher, Random House, that the book was "intemperate and inaccurate, and also libelous."

But "Death and Life" emerged as a founding text for a new way of seeing cities. About half a million copies are in print and the book has become essential for urban studies courses.

"It's the classic of all time for city planners," Bedford says. "It communicates the way in which cities actually work that means something to the average citizen. Every time you read it you learn something new."

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" has become a bible for city planners

"Jane Jacobs took on a very rigid ideology which we're trying to overhaul," says Joseph B. Rose, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. "We're trying to get away from the rigid stratification of neighborhoods and allow people to live and work in the same place. We're taking zoning actions in Tribeca and Brooklyn that moves us toward some of the things Jane was championing."

Robert Caro, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moses biography, "The Power Broker," calls Jacobs "one of the heroines of New York history." He believes she stands for "independent thought, smaller is better, that streetscapes have to very carefully crafted, that the car can't be allowed to dominate the city."

Jacobs declines to assess her impact or to predict how cities will evolve. But she enjoys a success story wherever it might turn up, including one in her own community.

When she first moved to Toronto, her neighborhood had an organization called the "Annex Ratepayers Association." The message, Jacobs pointed out, was that the only people worth representing were property owners and taxpayers.

"And then they woke up to the fact that the whole population ought to be in on this, including students and people who rent. The name was changed to the Annex Ratepayers and Residents Association. Now it's the Annex Residents Association."

Jacobs smiles.

"I think that's progress."

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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