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JANE_JACOBS

                                              April 29, 2006
                                       Rev:   June  26, 2006

   "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 blindfold."  -- Cory Doctorow

   http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/25/rip_jane_jacobs_urba.html


This is my own brief, pieced together,
attempt at doing a tribute to Jane              THE_GREAT_CITY
Jacobs, though there's certainly no
shortage of them in other places.               CURRENCY_EVENTS

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

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

Notably: Jane Jacobs was not a
Professor of Urbanity, or an
employee of the Department of
DeCarceration, 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:
    this kind of intellectual
    has seemed increasingly
    rare...

       LAST_INTELLECTUALS


Jane Jacobs transcended the usual
intellectual tribalism: she tends
to be claimed as a saint by people       And perhaps that's the real
in opposing camps:                       test of independant,
                                         intellectual quality.

     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 the 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 a
 shared region is used by a diverse
 range 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       But as the Toadkeeper pointed out:
    between them in cars.             "It would be good if you could
                                      put the cars in their own isolated
                                      area."


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 discusses three female writers
who produced revolutionary works in
the sixties:
                         http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060403/solnit
    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
                                       sources of illumination.

Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, is
still sinking into our collective 
consciousness...  there are people
who have read and understood, and
many others who still seem to think
that suburbia is the natural state
of humanity.

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