Andrew Blum on urbanism and modernism

I love Jane Jacobs, especially The Life and Death of Great American Cities.  Jacobs understood that the vitality of a city emerges spontaneously and organically, and can not be created by fiat through urban planning.  Of course, she was also the first "urban naturalist"; she described almost scientifically what gives cities and neighborhoods vitality and what saps it.  Ironically, this has made her the patron saint of modern planners, who seem to view Life and Death as a recipe for good planning, rather than a rejection of planning.  (You can't sit through a City Council meeting without hearing about the need for "eyes on the street.")  She has also been canonized by neighborhood activists who fight change of any type.      

Andrew Blum has written a great piece on urbanism that captures the increasing tension between these views in the modern, global enviornment:

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.

. . .

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

. . .

I saw this firsthand while living in Toronto, just a few blocks from Jacobs’s home on Albany Avenue. It is a wonderful urban neighborhood, treed, friendly, and alive. But Toronto was sick at the edges. Thanks to a strong sense of identity—much of it built on Jacobs’s own vision and activism—Toronto’s relatively low-density downtown neighborhoods have been (until recently) well protected from new tall buildings. As an active participant in Toronto civic politics, Jacobs often showed up at planning meetings to fight the destruction of a beautiful old block in favor of some new condominium tower. The neighborhood was all.

But I couldn’t help but see what was happening in the broader city: Growth was being shunted to the suburbs, the number of “smog advisories” increased each summer, and the subways were often empty. In truth—overrun by cars, eyes tearing from the bad air—I began to sour on Jacobs, not as an observer of the city or an impassioned describer of its life but on account of what struck me as the shortsightedness of her localism, or at least the localism shouted in her name.

“I think we’re not too far off from recognizing that it’s a moral imperative to add density to any place with a transit stop,” believes Christopher Leinberger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution—displaying plenty of the modernist brio and contempt for the souls of cities that Jacobs fought. But I’m tending to agree. We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density. When it comes to our homes, we are all justifiably afraid of change, especially when it feels like (or is) destruction. But we don’t often pair that truth with another oft-repeated one: Our way of life is unsustainable. In North America’s most beautiful urban places, we unfailingly fight every new tall building in the name of “quality of life” and the “character of the neighborhood.” We claim to have internalized the idea that it’s all connected, that slowing the warming of the planet is a global project, but the nature in our backyards remains sacred—often to the point, perhaps, of self-destruction.

I know I’m dancing a little too closely with the clean-sweep modernist planning Jacobs rightfully fought. But the contradictions we face are too challenging not to. I like how the urbanist Marshall Berman puts it: to be a modernist is to be “at home in the maelstrom.” "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” We can resist the extremes of modernism and all its failures; but that does not free us from facing up to the same challenges and inequities that modernism sought to rectify. I don’t know that Jane Jacobs fully accepted this.

But to the extent that we can create new solutions, looking to the hearts of neighborhoods—the people and the web of connections found there—may give us reason to be optimistic. A tenet of modernist planning was that cities didn’t matter any more, that communications technology (much less the threat of nuclear war) rendered them useless and inefficient. Of course, the opposite has proved true. As technology has lowered the barriers between places, the differences between them have become accentuated. At least at a global scale, when ideas and capital flow freely, they tend to dry up in some places and pool in others—as in New York. But the influence of communication technology is beginning to have an impact at the neighborhood scale as well. Jacobs wrote that “word does not move around where public characters and sidewalk life are lacking.” Now it does. There are the people paused at the top of the subway stairs, occupying two spaces at once, one physical, one virtual. And in neighborhoods around the country—this one in particular—community online message boards and blogs are thriving, entirely in parallel with news passed stoop to stoop.

. . .

I recently heard a rumor, passed stoop to stoop, that the owner of the wonderful urban agglomeration across the street—newsstand, bakery, barbershop, capoeira studio—is putting the whole thing up for sale. Fronting partly on Flatbush Avenue, its zoning would allow an apartment tower. I can easily see the good: Here’s the proverbial tower over a transit stop. There’s no historic value to the architecture of the existing buildings, and the new could even be beautiful, maybe using the latest low-energy technology and designed in a style as representative of this age as the brownstones were of a century ago. But I’d be lying if I weren’t horrified by the loss of the stores or, more important, the “public characters” who run them. Their spirit—indelibly tied to this place, as no Starbucks ever could be—has accrued over decades and would not be simple to replace. It’s easy to say that the city must evolve, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shocked by its speed. Still, you won’t find me on the barricades fighting against it. There’s more at stake than being called “boss.”

These excerpts don't do justice to the essay.  Read the whole thing.

Comments

[M1EK]

The essay falls into one of the most common fallacies - that ALLOWING higher density is the same thing as requiring it. The paragraph that begins with the Leinberger quote, for instance, indicates that the only choice which would lead to more density is to mandate it, when in fact, in most places, all that's required is to strip away the existing forced policy of LOW density.

Allowing high density means that people who want to develop their property as low density still can, if they derive significant value from doing so, but nobody is forced to keep their property low density.

I get so tired of this canard ("you want to force people to live in high-density apartments") that I should probably devote an entire category, if not a blog post, to it. Remind me to someday, please.

[AC]

Your take on the Leinberger quote is probably right, but I didn't interpret the essay as a whole to advocate mandating density (which I oppose, too). Mandating density is a very heavy-handed, rigid kind of control, not the "maelstrom" that he talks about in the next paragraph. The main point of the essay, I think, is that we should not fight density to preserve a nostalgic ideal of neighborhood.

[M1EK]

Agreed; I just think the language, especially in that paragraph, makes it look like the only two choices are mandating density or mandating low-density.

[AJB]

Hi, Blum here. I really appreciate your enthusiasm for the piece. For me, a key point is that neighborhood activism is often about polarization, and that's a problem, and a failure of Jacobs' legacy. It's certainly been the case here in Brooklyn with the Atlantic Yards, with really bad results.