Dark Age Ahead

Some among us eagerly await Jane Jacobs's provocatively titled new book, "Dark Age Ahead." Sounds pessimistic, though I would imagine in a tone very different from Kunstler's.

Yet, just a year ago, in an interview, there was this exchange:

Q. Do you see a more exciting time today, with these new technologies? Or have we become more cynical?

A. I think that the world is getting more exciting. I think the end of the Cold War, which made the whole world in many ways absurd…. Think of how many idiotic things were done, on both sides, everywhere, because of the exigencies of that cold war. It has been a great liberation to have that off us. But also, we are living, I am convinced, in one of the most intellectually exciting times the human race has ever gone through. We are emerging from this linear cause-and-effect way of seeing the world into a way that has really been led by the ecologists, into a Web world, beginning to understand relationships in quite a different way. And it is affecting everything. And no end of people have grasped this and are seeing the world differently and analyzing things differently and seeing possibilities differently--basically in a very hopeful way. And I think this is awfully exciting. People who are younger than I am, you are lucky. You can play a part in what I think can be an extremely hopeful stage.

For those in New York, Jacobs will be speaking--on the past, present, and future of skyscrapers!--at City College on May 6. It is the "First Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture." I wonder what Mumford would have made of that!

Comments

[winifer skattebol]

She and Vince Scully had a nice public tete-a-tete at the National Building Museum in November 2000.
Alex Garvin said his life changed when his Yale college roommate gave him the Death and Life...classic.

[winifer skattebol]

I only hope the Jacobs talk is better than the Annual Rome Prize lecture delivered tonight by Jed Perl (Muschamp's replacement at the New Republic). A lot of blather about TS Eliot, Camus, Giacometti, and the "Majesty of Rome" exhibition. The gist of what he said: each artist must make tradition a personal matter; traditions of looking slow down and deepen our experience; we need to feel that tradition is an expression of independence.

[ChrisS]

Alex Garvin said his life changed when his Yale college roommate gave him the Death and Life...classic.

I just started reading Death and Life, wow. Saying that Jane Jacobs was dissatified with the then current state of urban planning is an understatement. I'm looking forward to reading Dark Age Ahead.

[Benjamin Hemric]

I look forward to Francis Morrone's review of Jane Jacobs' new book as I have already enjoyed a number of his articles, as well as his fascinating walking tour of the area south of the World Trade Center site.

However, I hope he doesn't make too much out of the change of tone between her "interview" from "just a year ago" and her current book though.

I have a printout of the same "interview" which I printed from the internet in 2002, and this "interview" is apparently a compilation from a question and answer period during the "Ideas That Matter" conference in, I believe, the fall of 1997. The copyright by "Government Technology" is from 1996, 1997 and 1998, and here is one of the blurbs on the sidebar: "Now in her 80s, whe is working on yet another book ("The Nature of Economies" [?]). At a recent international conference in her honor, she gave a series of interviews, from which the following has been edited and compiled by editor at large Blake Harris."

So if there is, in fact, a darker tone between this interview and her current work, there is the possibility that the change happened over a longer period than just one year.

P.S. -- I hope Francis Morrone gets a chance to discuss Jane Jacobs' speaking engagement at CCNY also. I was there and would be interested in hearing the thoughts of others who were also there.

(Although I didn't spot Francis Morrone -- Shepherd Hall probably seats over a thousand and all the seats were full -- I did notice a nice sprinkling of "famous" urbanists: Roberta Brandes Gratz, Henry Stern, Alexander Garvin, Marshall Berman [correct name?], plus, of course, the host, Michael Sorokin [correct name?]. And I am sure there were many others whom I did not see or was not able to recognize.)