With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish an excerpt from the chapter "Home remedies" from the book Vitold Rybchinsky “City Designer. Ideas and cities”. M.: Strelka Press, 2014.
When the Rockefeller Foundation offered Jacobs a grant to transform her Fortune article into a book, Glazer introduced her to Jason Epstein of Random House. The result was Death and the Life of Big American Cities. In this book, Jacobs expanded on topics covered in her Fortune article, Harvard talk, and Notes in the Architectural Forum. She took examples mainly from the life of Greenwich Village (the area where she lived), but also described old urban areas, for example, the Back of the Yards in Chicago, Boston's North End, and the new development that she happened to see. in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. As before, she named busy streets as the most important element of the successful development of the districts, but to such important aspects of city life as its brightness and saturation, the theme of safety was added, which runs throughout the book as a leitmotif. Death and Life … is a convincing work written in simple language and addressed to a wide range of readers, based on twenty years of experience as a journalist Jacobs and twenty years of experience walking the streets of New York.
In an article for Fortune, she only once disparagedly mentioned the "shabby remnants" of the For a Beautiful City movement, but did not touch on the problems of urban planning. Another thing is “Death and Life …”, where the author in the very first lines sets out his position with its inherent directness: “This book is an attack on the current urban planning system. In addition, and mainly, it is an attempt to put forward new principles for the design and reconstruction of large cities, which are not only different from the previous ones, but even opposite to what is being instilled in people today everywhere - from schools of architecture and urban planning to Sunday newspaper supplements and women's magazines. The essence of my attack is not in petty quibbles about the methods of reconstruction, about the subtleties of certain aesthetic trends. No, this is an attack on the very principles and goals that have shaped the orthodox urban planning of our day."
This deliberately provocative stance was inspired by an article by Glazer in the Architectural Forum, but Jacobs went further by combining three main ideas under the sarcastic title of "Radiant Beautiful Garden City." With a stroke of her pen, she crossed out the accomplishments of the Nice City movement like Benjamin Franklin Boulevard in Philadelphia and the Civic Center in San Francisco, pointing out that people shun these monumental spaces and that their impact on the city was more negative than ennobling. She said about the Columbus World Exhibition: "When the exhibition became part of the city, for some reason it ceased to function as an exhibition." Jacobs also had no kind words for the "garden city". Ebenezer Howard “in particular, simply ignored the complex and varied cultural life of the vast city. He was not interested in such subjects as maintaining order in large cities, the exchange of ideas going on in them, their political structure, the emergence of new economic formations in them. " Not only Howard and Enwin were criticized, but also American advocates of regional planning and urban decentralization such as Mumford, Stein and Wright, as well as housing expert Catherine Bauer. However, more than others went to Corbusier and his "Radiant City". “His city of Jane Jacobs in 1962, a year after Death and the Life of American Cities was released, was a wonderful mechanical toy,” Jacobs noted.- Everything is so orderly, so visible, so clear! As in good advertising - the image is captured in an instant”. She sharply criticizes the concept of abandoning traditional streets: "The very idea of getting rid of city streets as much as possible, weakening and minimizing their social and economic role in city life is the most harmful and destructive element of orthodox urban planning."
Like Glazer, Jacobs rejected pragmatism in modern urban planning: "Cities are a giant laboratory of trial and error, failure and success in urban planning and design." Why aren't planners learning from these experiments? She believed that practitioners and students should study the successes and failures of real, living cities, not historical examples and theoretical projects. Jacobs strongly objected to the "cult of architectural design", to the manifestations of which she attributed the concept of "beautiful" and "radiant" cities. She criticized the main postulate of modern planning: “When dealing with a big city, we are dealing with life in its most complex and intense manifestations. For this reason, there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with such a city: a large city cannot be a work of art."
She did not claim that there is no place for beauty in the city, but criticized the schematic plans of architects and the desire to ennoble the urban environment in the framework of large-scale projects, which, in her opinion, creates places completely divorced from the "chaotic" city life. Death and Life of Large American Cities came out in November 1961 and was received very well by Fr. Excerpts from the book were published in Harper's, Saturday Evening Post and Vogue, there were many positive reviews in popular publications and a few skeptical ones in professional ones. One way or another, everyone recognized that this was an important work. In particular, Lloyd Rodwin, an urban planner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an article published by the New York Times Book Review, rejected some of Jacobs's criticisms of his profession, but still called "Death and Life …" "an outstanding book." Perhaps some expected urban planners to react more sharply to Jacobs' attacks, but most of them refrained from "retaliatory strikes." Perhaps they were disarmed by the soundness of her judgments, maybe they secretly agreed with her conclusions, or maybe, regardless of the content of the book, they were simply glad that the urban planning topic was in the spotlight.
In 1962, "Death and Life …" became a finalist for the National Literary Prize in the category "popular science literature", but another book on the problems of urbanism - "A City in History" by Lewis Mumford, received the award. Mumford, then sixty-seven years old, has long been known as a literary and architecture critic, essayist, technical history and urban reform activist. Since 1931, Mumford's New Yorker column, Skyline, has served as a nationwide platform for his urban ideas, and with Culture of Cities in 1938 and now Cities in History, he has been considered the leading American theorist and publicist on this topic. Like Jacobs, Mumford opposed Corbusier's "Radiant City", but was a longtime supporter of the "garden city" idea, and one would expect a public response from him to her book. The answer came a year later, at the New Yorker. It was a killer review, sarcastically titled Mama Jacobs's Homemade Remedies.
Part of Mumford's negative reaction to Death and Life … was the result of resentment. He befriended Jacobs, corresponded with her, encouraged her to write books, and she repaid by ridiculing the writings of the people he admired and called Culture of the Cities "a caustic and tendentious catalog of vices."But the differences between Jacobs and Mumford were also conceptual. He shared her thesis about the complex nature of cities and the need to avoid simplistic solutions, but rejected many of her sweeping generalizations. In particular, in the review, he expressed disagreement with her peremptory Lewis Mumford, whose views on urbanism contradicted Jacobs's views on the dangers of city parks. As a native of New York, Mumford remembered the days when Central Park was completely safe (so it will be again by the late 1980s). He also objected to Jacobs' assertion that dense housing, busy streets, and a variety of economic activities were all in themselves to combat crime and violence, pointing out that in Harlem - then the most dangerous neighborhood in New York - all three conditions are present, and there is no sense … He also challenged the caustic characterization that she awarded to the inhabitants of the suburbs: "Millions of the most ordinary people strive to live in the suburbs, and not a handful of fanatical haters immersed in bucolic dreams." Mumford sharply criticized her idea that the city is not a place for artistically full-fledged architecture. “It so happened that from the very reasonable position that good buildings and beautiful design are not the only elements of urban planning, Ms. Jacobs slipped into the superficial thesis that they do not matter at all.”
Although Mumford paid tribute to her as an astute observer of urban life ("no one can surpass her in understanding the complex structure of the metropolis"), he was irritated by Jacobs's categorical rejection of urban planning as such. He himself was a longtime planner and knew personally the pioneer of urban planning, the great Scotsman Sir Patrick Geddes, who laid the foundations for urban planning in a manner similar to how Olmsted became the founder of landscape architecture. Geddes (1854–1932) was a supporter of the concept of the "garden city", he extended Howard's ideas to urban areas and, being a biologist and botanist by training, was one of the first to point out the importance of ecology and the need to protect nature. His ideas influenced not only Enwin and Nolen, but even Le Corbusier. In 1923, to promote Geddes' ideas in the United States, Mumford, Stein and other advocates of urban reform formed the American Regional Planning Association, which promoted projects such as Radburn in New Jersey and Sunnyside Gardens in New York. Thus, many of the urban development projects that Jacobs criticized were personally supported by Mumford. He lived for ten years at the Sunnyside Gardens, designed by Stein and Wright. "It's not utopia," Mumford said of him, "but it's better than any neighborhood in New York, including Mrs. Jacobs's Greenwich Village" quiet backwater."
Mumford described Death and Life … as "a mixture of common sense and sentimentality, mature judgment and the hysterical sobbing of a schoolgirl." A cruel assessment, but there is some truth in it. Jacobs was a journalist, not a scientist, and she used dramatization and exaggeration in selecting the facts in favor of her arguments. Her knowledge of urban history was limited. In particular, she did not take into account that the participants of the For a Beautiful City movement called not only for the construction of monumental administrative centers and boulevards, but also for the gradual improvement of the existing urban environment. Her succinct account of the history of the garden city movement in America simply dropped a very fruitful period before the outbreak of World War II, and it seems that Jacobs simply did not know about Daniel Burnham's plan for the development of Chicago, which detailed the richness and diversity of city life. or projects like Forest Hills Gardens, whose versatility and building density were in line with her ideas. In addition, she often drew far-reaching conclusions from isolated examples, in particular, using data on the high crime rate in Los Angeles in 1958 to prove that cities focused on motorists are, by definition, dangerous to residents. The future has shown the extreme doubtfulness of this conclusion. Shortly after the book's release, there was a sharp increase in crime in the pedestrian-oriented cities of Baltimore, St. Louis and New York. Her analysis of the causes of urban decline is not without flaws. They found themselves in distress not because of lack of planning, but because as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the middle class rushed to the suburbs. When wealthy townspeople left the very densely built downtown areas that she liked so much, poverty, crime and racial conflict reigned there.
However, the fact that Jacobs was not a sociologist and an expert on the history of cities determined not only the weaknesses, but also the strengths of her book. She approached the topic in a completely different way from professional city planners: instead of theoretical reasoning about what cities should be like, Jacobs tried to understand what they really are, how they work or do not work. As a result, where professionals saw confusion, she noticed a complex system of relations between people, and in what seemed to them senseless chaos, she found energy and vitality. Jacobs objected to the tendency of planners to view cities as simple structures (biological or technological) and used her own unexpected analogy: a city is a field in the night. “There are many bonfires burning in this field. The bonfires are different, some are huge, others are small; some are far from each other, others are crowded on a small patch; some just flare up, others slowly go out. Each bonfire, large or small, emits light into the surrounding darkness and thereby snatches a certain space out of it. But this space itself and its visible outlines exist only to the extent that they are created by the light of the fire. Darkness itself has no shape or structure: it gets them only from and around the fires. In the dark spaces, where the darkness becomes thick, indefinable and shapeless, the only way to give it shape or structure is to light new fires in it or to brighten up the nearest ones that already exist."
