Jane Jacobs’ Legacy at 100

Last week, I had the honor and privilege of spending the week in residence at Fordham University’s urban studies program as the 2016 Distinguished Visitor. In addition to lecturing about mega-urbanization, connected mobility, and “latino urbanism,” I also co-starred in a public conversation with New York University’s Bill Easterly and longtime Municipal Art Society officer Mary Rowe on Jane Jacobs’ legacy a century after her birth.

Jacobs would have turned 100 on May 4, and in addition to the worldwide Jane’s Walks happening the weekend of May 6-8, the anniversary has inspired symposia and events around the world. We spoke for an hour about her influence on economics, human development, complexity science, and other fields that have learned painful lessons from privileging top-down planning over local information.

The complete audio from our discussion is embedded above. The Fordham News also briefly covered our event in a larger discussion of Jacobs’ legacy vis-a-vis her nearly mythical rival, Robert Moses:

In the 1960s, Moses eventually met his match in Jacobs, a community organizer and intellectual who halted his effort to create the Lower Manhattan Expressway through Greenwich Village and SoHo. In Life and Death, Jacobs famously wrote of the “ballet of the street” and “eyes on the sidewalk” which espoused street-level knowledge over Moses’ mile-high view of the city.

Jacobs won and SoHo developed–as she had predicted–in organic and sometimes surprising ways, said New York University Professor of Economics William Easterly, PhD.easterly quote

“Jacobs was saying ‘The locals know best, we don’t know how, but somehow they’ll figure out how to make this neighborhood prosper,’” Easterly said.

And as Jacobs was rallying against Moses’ project, artists inspired by influential painter Jackson Pollock were filtering into the area, renovating large loft spaces in which to exhibit their giant canvases. “She didn’t even realize herself at the time that art galleries were moving into SoHo, and that was the beginning of what led to the revival of the area.”

One key benefit of the Moses-Jacobs conflict, said Wakeman, was the creation in the 1960s of community planning boards that give voice to neighborhoods’ concerns over issues such as new construction.

“Jacobs and others like her have created an entirely new fabric for community-based planning,” she said. “Communities came to understand themselves in reaction to Robert Moses, and today we have a far more extensive vocabulary for imagining urban renewal.”

Colin Cathcart, associate professor of architecture, said it would be reductive to portray all of Moses’ contributions as negative.

“There were plenty of bad things that Moses lent his name to but there was also a massive increase in the housing units, access to parks, transportation connectivity, and investment in public works on his watch–and jobs,” he said. “It’s that investment that New York is coasting on even today.”

As for Jacobs? “Her legacy is also being seized upon by proper scientists who have lots of mathematical formulas she never had,” said Greg Lindsay, senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation and Fordham’s 2016 Urban Studies Distinguished Visitor.

Lindsay expressed a concern, however, for “smart city rhetoric” that obscures the reality of services like Uber–which he said is be convenient but which also avoids taxes that would fund public transportation. Services like it are only available to those with a smart phone and a bankcard, he said, thus doing a disservice to Jacobs’ community-based, inclusive legacy.

“If you don’t have those [devices], you don’t have access to the city around you,” he said. “So the worry today is not Robert Moses; it’s the information systems that privilege such access.”