Stadtluft Macht Frei (city air makes one free)

Thanks, Adam (the proprietor of the Market Urbanism blog) for posting on this very good essay by Thomas M. Schmidt — and thus giving others an opportunity to discuss it on your blog.

Although I agree with much of what Thomas Schmidt has to say in his essay, I think the essay also contains some minor, yet significant, errors — significant because they seem to me to perpetuate some “Urban[ism] Legends” with regard to Jane Jacobs and her work.

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TS (Thomas Schmidt) writes:

Jacobs had started “Death and Life” by looking at her own neighborhood (Greenwich Village, where Mises worked at NYU at the same time that Jacobs was writing) and seeing it as a microcosm.

BH (Benjamin Hemric) writes:

I don’t know if this is what Schmidt really meant to say, but the wording of this statement seems to me to imply that “Death and Life” was an outgrowth of Jacobs’ observations about life in Greenwich Village. Jacobs, herself, writes (in the preface of “Death and Life”?) that many of her observations are actually from other places. Plus, large chunks of the book have nothing to do with Greenwich Village.

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TS wrote:

She opposed policies she called “the sacking of cities.” Many of these were local in nature, like the depredations of Robert Moses, who was barely stopped by community organization in Greenwich Village from plowing through what is today the tony SoHo district with an elevated expressway . . .

BH writes:

While Jacobs did write about the “sacking of cities” (around the country) and while Robert Moses was probably responsible, in one way or another, for most of the “sacking” in the New York City area, the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway that Jacobs helped lead happened AFTER “Death and Life” was published, as did the fight against the City’s West Village urban renewal plan, which Jacobs also helped lead.

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TS wrote:

. . . (indeed, Jacobs’ chapters on creating ideal urban neighborhoods build on the geographical and economic features of Greenwich Village to demonstrate how proper formation can create communities that can withstand political meddling), or Euclidean zoning, which segregates industry and housing.

BH writes:

While some parts of Greenwich Village do have many of the features that Jacobs believed made for healthy urban districts, I think it is inaccurate to imply, as the TS statement above seems to me to do, that Jacobs was intent on building “ideal” urban neighborhoods that would, more or less, replicate Greenwich Village (e.g., make Wall Street into Greenwich Village, make Times Square into Greenwich Village, make Rockefeller Center into Greenwich Village, make Park Avenue into Greenwich Village, etc.).

What Jacobs was interested in, so it seems to me, was understanding how cities, and city districts (at one point in “Death and Life” she even seems to denigrate the word “neighborhood”), grow, stagnate, decay, and revitalize themselves — so that the right, not the wrong (counterproductive), methods can be used to fight stagnation and decay — whatever kind of urban district was experiencing distress.

This is very different, so it seems to me, from “creating ideal urban neighborhoods.” It’s similar to the difference, so it seems to me, between someone who is interested in understanding how people gain and lose weight and someone who is on a mission to see that everyone becomes thin.

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Benjamin,

Jacobs had started “Death and Life” by looking at her own neighborhood (Greenwich Village)

I meant that the first three or four chapters describe an ideal street life and district, so I was being literal. I did happen, before ever discovering Jacobs, to have lived nearby both the North End of Boston and Telegraph Hill, and took the same delight in those areas that she did.

“Jacobs was intent on building “ideal” urban neighborhoods”

Well, she does recommend cutting through where blocks are too long to create the smaller block structure that facilitates mixing and connectedness. She does first seek to understand, but she also does quite a bit of prescribing, based on that understanding, including byzantine tax structures in one chapter. But you are correct: her first and foremost concern is a loving examination of the districts that can “unslum” and in that way transform the proletariat into the middle class, to coin a phrase.

Thank you for your serious and insightful feedback!

Tom

Hi, Tom!

Hope you won’t mind this dialog format, but I find it helps me write quickly and to the point.

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Tom wrote (the numbering is mine — BH):

I meant that the first three or four chapters [1] describe an ideal street life and district, [2] so I was being literal.

Benjamin writes:

Reagarding [2]: I thought you may have meant it only literally when you said that Jacobs started “Death and Life” by looking at her own neighborhood, which is why I tried to hedge my original statement by saying, “I don’t know if this is what Schmidt really meant to say . . . .” However, I do think it’s important to explicitly address these sorts of things, since I think many readers would in fact understand it in the other way (meaning: Jacobs was so besotted by her neighborhood she decided to write a book about it, and this is the genesis of “Death and Life”) since this does seem to be the current “urban[ism] legend” about Jacobs.

Regarding [1]: But I still have to disagree somewhat that the purpose of the “ballet of Hudson Street” segment is to describe an “ideal” street life — especially as a literal prescription for other districts. As I see it, the “ballet of Hudson Street” segment is more of a literary device to help Jacobs describe — in a non-boring, entertaining fashion — how a complex street system can work to create safe streets.

I think the “ballet of Hudson Street” in Jacobs’ urbanology is akin to dissecting a frog in biology. By dissecting a frog we see how a living organism “works.” That’s not to say that every living organism has to be like a frog.

Other types of districts (e.g., W. 57th St., Rockefeller Center, Times Square, etc.) have other types of street-life (and other, sometimes very different ballets, so to speak). And Jacobs isn’t suggesting that they all become like Greenwich Village’s.

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Tom wrote:

She does first seek to understand, but she also does quite a bit of prescribing.

Benjamin writes:

I think you bring up an interesting and important point — one that probably needs to be more fully addressed in the future.

However, to address the issue briefly, it seems to me that throughout “Death and Life” Jacobs makes statements more or less along the lines of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” — meaning, “leave things alone, but IF A PROBLEM DEVELOPS (e.g., high crime, economic stagnation / decay) then lets make the right kind of interventions not the wrong ones.”

For instance, she notes that mono-culture, residentially zoned Park Avenue doesn’t have much in the way of street life — that paid doormen are the “eyes on the street” that make the street safe. She doesn’t suggest, however, that this be changed — it works on its own terms (especially since, for livliness and interest, Lexington Avenue and Madison Avenue are just steps away — because of short blocks). If, however, somewhere down the line this were to break — say, Park Avenue becomes too poor to have doormen — we know what the problem is and how to fix it.

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Thanks for the return comment. As I hope I’ve made clear, I agree with much of your original article — and I especially enjoyed the fact that you discussed some of Jacobs other books too, not just “Death and Life.” Hope you get around to reading, “The Nature of Economies,” too, if you haven’t already. I am currently re-reading it, and it seems to address some of these issues, at least indirectly.