Would that it were so

A Visionary Remembered....

...her most radical early propositions have since become so pervasive and widely accepted...

I think folks are getting a bit carried away. Just go look at the sort of anti-urban stuff — Gehry, Koolhaas etc etc — still being lauded as works of genius. No, Jacobs has been widely-discussed and praised but her ideas, even the most basic, are only hesitantly being implemented. Her approach is more extolled than followed. If you want the most perfect example possible, just go look at the three blank facades (out of four) of Gehry's Disney Center in LA. Even such a simple rule as "eyes on the street" is invisible in the major part of a building which is supposed to be the generator of a new urban neighborhood.

Jacobs was not about air-fairy sort of things like "community" and "sustainability" and "diversity" — I mean, who can be against those words?  Yes, a Jacobean city would have those attributes. But Jacobs was about specific details of how to get there, what makes a good city. So something simple like the vivid "eyes on the street" is not supposed to be a goal or a discretionary amenity but an essential specific required building block, like a 2" x 4" is in house construction.

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Btw, the more I read the accolades for her impact, the more I feel it necessary to suggest that Jacobs' impact was enormous on thinking about cities but not all that great in actually building them, if you judge from the stuff still considered good architecture by not-missed critics like Muschamp.

Comments

[Riversider]

We are local people in a town that has just been re-designated as a 'city'.

This step-up in status has got to the planning department's heads, and they now have some grandiose schemes in mind that will destroy the rather pleasant and liveable environment that currently exists.

For example, they want to build over land currently used by hundreds of people every week to play football, and land used by local people to cultivate their allotments, replacing them with over 4000 new houses, and a 'Water Sports Park', that in Lancashire's climate will only get used for a couple of weeks every summer.

The barrage that would create this will fundamentally change an inter-tidal environment of tremendous ecological importance, and quite considerable beauty, and the whole operation increases the flood risk to existing housing in the river's flood plain.

Read more at http://save-the-ribble.blogspot.com

[Will Cox]

More honored in the breach.

[David Sucher]

Thanks, Will.
Exactly the phrase I was missing.

[Neal LaMontagne]

Too often we think of Jane Jacob's lessons as the examples that she used: "eyes on the street", "diverse, mixed uses", and so forth, and we lose sight of how she thought (you identified her enormous impact on thinking about cities - I absolutely agree). To me her legacy reminds us not to jump to quick conclusions on how to design cities, but rather to always think it through - what exists that works, how can we make it better (and not wholesale replace it), how do people actually use it. Even though our urban design prescriptions seem more sophisticated today (even the New Urbanists'), I think the planning/design industry always forgets to walk the streets and pay attention to context. Think it through, pay attention to the little things, and be aware of the big patterns that we don't always see at first. That is what I read Jane Jacobs to remind me about.

And thats why I read this blog - thanks for your great effort!