Jane Jacobs notes for Urban Theory Jane Jacobs, who is she

Jane Jacobs notes for Urban Theory Jane Jacobs, who is she

Jane Jacobs notes for Urban Theory
Jane Jacobs, who is she?
1. Journalist, parent, activist
2. Works for architecture journal and sees projects come through office
3. Used as great counter to Robert Moses’ reorganization of urban fabric in New York
post-WWII. Moses:
a. Used Title X to eminent domain and federal funding to clear old building
stock and create tower in the park housing projects.
b. “Clean up” what looked messy but functioned well
c. Expressways—connect city to suburbs
d. Just saw city as a “traffic problem”—very simplistic, doesn’t take complexity
of cities and how they function into account.
e. Wanted highway through city
f. Go through Greenwich Village, enter Jane Jacobs
INTRO
1. Purpose of book (p. 19)
a. To adventure into the real world and look at communities that work. Try to
learn from them through direct engagement.
2. What doesn’t she like?
a. Vast civic and cultural centers
b. Tower in the park public housing projects
c. Lots of grass
d. Single use zones
e. Ego in design—projects that scream “look what I did” without doing anything
good
i. p. 17 Calls this “bloodletting”—need fortifying, not draining
ii. p 18 Medical analogies applied to social organisms are farfetched
iii. A cancer, clean out the lungs, clogged, diseased, etc.
f. Orthodox ideas part of the urban design canon
i. Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City
ii. Patrick Geddes
iii. Decentrists: Stein, Wright, Mumford, Bauer
iv. Le Corbusier/Radiant City
1. People who are trying to kill city—ironically their ideas are
adopted by city planners for big cities themselves.
v. City Beautiful
3. What does she like?
a. THE GENERATORS OF DIVERSITY (CH 7)
1. What does Jacobs mean by diversity?: Combinations of uses
2. Must have:
a. Districts with 2 or more uses
b. Short blocks with frequent opportunity to turn corners
c. Mixed age of building stock: mixed economic class
d. Dense concentration of people
3. Main critique: Cities have been victims of orthodox city planning ideas
that are actually anti-city.
a. None of these planners/architects actually liked cities or studied what
made them vibrant, functioning spaces
b. Principles:
i. Intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each
other constant mutual support, both economically and socially
1. Organized complexity
ii. Four things needed to generate this diversity
(planners/designers alone can never achieve these things, but
we should try to implement them):
iii. Most important part is economic behavior of cities. Second is
social behavior.
4. Not a book about how a city should look. Futile to design a city’s
appearance. (20)
a. Functioning order should be focus of study
Important terms or processes alluded to but not explained directly in our texts
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Deinvestment (p. 15)
Slum: term used politically
Title 10 and eminent domain
Clearance
Urban renewal, revitalization
Red lining
Rezoning/Zoning R1 R2 etc.