New Urbanists Turned Jacobs' Vision Into 'Superficial Formula'

Among the many examples of lipservice paid to Jane Jacobs and the principles for which she stood, there have appeared one or two examples of people speaking their true, dark thoughts about her. Take the New York Times, for example. Its sickening “critic’s notebook” of last Sunday, called “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs,” has since been reprinted in a number of places, including this website. In it Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

But the problems of the 20th-century city were vast and complicated. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation’s dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification. And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.

Really, Mr. Ouroussoff? What do you know of what Jane Jacobs thought? We suspect she would contest your contention that cars “remain critical to the development of American cities.” We suspect she would see your claim for what it is, “the gospel of the car ad.” We suspect she was capable of seeing this “beauty” you speak of for what it is also, and was aware of the seeming contradictions you imply in her observations on the nature of traffic. We recall in Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) her writing:

Sidewalks 30 or 35 feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them—along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.

“Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width.” How telling. But nowhere is Jane Jacobs “anti-car” in her writing. She is simply realistic about cars: their danger, the disruption they promise, and the sick addiction the modern world has come to have for them.

With James Howard Kunstler, who contends: “Nobody, it seems, can imagine an American life not centered on cars,” Jacobs would have chided Ouroussoff.

With Enrique Penalosa, who has famously said “You can build cities for the car or you can build cities for human beings,” Jane Jacobs simply advocated on behalf of the latter.

It’s no surprise though that newspaper pundits, dependent on the automobile for the advertising that fills their centrefolds, would get all meally-mouthed about someone whose writings and practice nailed the dangers automobile dependency presents to urban life.

Because it's past time to ban automobile advertising.

I picture the strawman Ouroussoff attacks in this article is weighed on the bottom, such that everytime the strawman gets a bop on the nose, it pops back up again for another round from Nicolai.

Over and over again he attacks the poor man of straw, until by the end of the article the floppy hat is knocked off, one overall strap is askew, and the corncob pipe is but a stem.

Best,

D

Check out what Jim Kunstler has to say about this piece:

http://kunstler.com/homebody.html

Somehow, he managed not to comment about Ouroussoff's ability to type with his head positioned in another part of his anatomy.

And remember, this is the same newspaper that brought you Jason Blair and Judith Miller.

Ken
Ken

Ouroussoff states the following in his piece:

"And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments."

"[SoHo]is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled."

"...the plaza at Lincoln Center — or even at the old World Trade Center — can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the
chaos."

Ouroussoff has so oversimplified and abstracted the city that he has taken the humanity right out of it. He makes of it an object of disinterested aesthetic appreciation, as if one stands before it for a few moments the way one stands before a canvas in a gallery, to take in the experience and then move on to the next. He has forgotten that people live in cities. They shouldn't have to conduct their daily business in barren windswept landscapes so that aesthetes like Ouroussoff can have their occasional haunting moment.

He also does not appreciate that the city is a complex representational artifact, not an abstraction. A people builds a reflection of itself in its city, while the kind of abstract stimulus Ouroussoff advocates represents no one.

Finally, the city ought to be susceptible to common sense thinking. Ouroussoff, sadly, advocates a city of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.

Dino Marcantonio

Ouroussoff has devoted himself to a rear-guard defense of a dying style: mid-twentieth-century modernism. Because this school has nothing constructive to say about city planning, he spends much of his time sniping at planners who are more successful. He cannot even write about Jane Jacobs without veering off into an irrelevant attack on the New Urbanists.

This attack has no basis. He says that New Urbanists in New Orleans are "tarting up historic districts for tourists, even as deeper social problems were being ignored," when the New Urbanists have actually focused very strongly on providing affordable housing (as well as on designing environmentally sustainable transit-and-pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods).

But if we really want to see how backward Ouroussoff's thinking is, we should consider this criticism of Jane Jacobs:

"she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways ...."

At a time when global warming has already begun and when gasoline prices are rising rapidly, Ouroussoff criticizes Jane Jacobs for admiring walkable cities rather than cities built around freeways!!

In Los Angeles today, they know better. Mayor Villaraigosa strongly supports smart growth with dense housing around transit stations to create walkable neighborhoods. In fact, the New York Times said in an editorial today that we need "more efficient transportation systems as part of a larger smart-growth strategy." Why is the Times architecture critic so much more backward then their editorial board?

In this comment about freeways Ouroussoff doesn't think about how cities work in environmental terms or in human terms. As usual, he thinks of cities as aesthetic objects, so he can look down his nose at anyone who doesn't share his cliquish taste.

But his aesthetic is so retrograde that he doesn't have anything to be snobbish about. The last person who wrote about the beauty of freeways, as far as I can remember, was Sigfried Giedion who wrote in 1941 about building cities at the "great scale of the freeway." In this article, Ouroussoff even tries to rehabilitate Giedion's favorite urban planner: Robert Moses! This sort of thinking was cutting edge back in 1941, but today we can only ask: How can Ouroussoff be so backward?

We live in a retrograde time. If we have an oil-man in the White House, I suppose it is not surprising that we have a freeway-man as architecture critic of the New York Times.

Charles Siegel