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JANE_JACOBS

                                                    April 29, 2006
                                             Rev:   June  26, 2006

Here I offer up my
own attempt at
doing a tribute to     There's certainly
Jane Jacobs...         no shortage of them
                       in other places.


   "Her book 'Death and Life of Great
   American Cities' is the best book I've
   ever read about cities-- how they work,
   how they change. Reading that book
   rendered visible whole rafts of secrets
   about how the world around me
   functioned. It was like taking off a             [ref]
   blindfold."  -- Cory Doctorow



  o  She took an extremely reasonable,             THE_GREAT_CITY
     almost scientific approach.
                                                   CURRENCY_EVENTS
  o  She was a concrete, inductive thinker,
     working from observation to generalization.

         Jacobs, unlike a writer like
         James Howard Kunstler, was not              NOWHERE_MAN
         the kind of person who starts
         from a manifesto and preaches
         accordingly; instead she looked
         very closely at what she saw
         happening around her, and made
         some generalizations based on
         what she saw.


         You might notice that there
         are no Jane Jacobs quotable
         quotes floating around: she       I've looked for some
         was not an aphorist, not a        Jacobs quotes to use
         rhetoritician.  She composed      myself, and I'm pretty
         no slogans.                       sure they're just not
                                           there.

                                                Her prose flows from
                                                point to point without
                                                any obvious break to
                                                begin a quote, or any
                                                obvious crescendo to
                                                close one.



  o  Jacobs was not a Professor of
     Urbanity, or an employee of the
     Department of Demarcation, or
     some such thing.

     Jane Jacobs was just herself:
     An unaffiliated, uncompromised
     intellect.

     And she revolutionized the way
     people think about cities.

     She was unique, or close to it.
                                       Far too
                                       close, really...

                                       LAST_INTELLECTUALS



  o  Jane Jacobs transcended the usual
     intellectual tribalism: she is
     claimed as a saint by people             And perhaps that's
     in opposing camps:                       the real test.

        Jacobs was one of the original
        critics of "housing projects"
        (for which she is beloved by
        libertarians/conservatives) and she
        was also an early force pushing
        back against massive post-war
        road-building projects (for which
        she is beloved by ecological
        activists/liberals).




Her masterwork was:

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

 Cities are healthiest where shared
 neighborhoods are used by diverse
 ranges of people at different times
 for different purposes.

    The philosophy behind most zoning
    regulations is completely contrary
    to this.

    They always want to sort out
    different uses into isolated
    areas and then run everyone
    between them in cars.             "It would be good if you
                                      could put the cars in
                                      their own isolated area."

                                           -- TOADKEEPER
These generalizations seem
nearly obvious once you've
had them pointed out to
you, and yet they were
direct contradictions to
what every one was being
told by the best and
brightest of technocratic
government planners.

And they *still* contradict
the "common sense" attitudes
of a large chunk of the
populace in the United States.


I read a Rebecca Solnit article in
"the Nation" not long ago, where
she discussed three female writers
who produced revolutionary works in
the sixties:
                         [ref]
    Jane Jacobs
    Rachel Carson
    Betty Friedan

What I think is interesting about
this trio is that Carson and
Friedan's works have both largely
run their course; they've been         If you read them these days you
digested by Western culture...         would treat them as historical
                                       documents, rather than as fresh
Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, is     sources of illumination.
still sinking into our collective
consciousness...  there are people
who have read and understood, and
many others who seem to think
that suburbia is the natural state
of humanity.




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