Jane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly.
Just sharing my favourite quote from Death and Life. On cities... "They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."
A nice measured perspective / retrospective on the long-term impact of two of Urban Planning's big cornerstone books. Sort of suggests that the passage of time is a moderating force for both sides of the aisle.
A big Jacobs fan here, but I remember reading her book (The Death and Life of...) and also about Robert Moses and thinking "hmm both sides have a point" so she'd probably hate me if she was still alive.
I personally think she was a bit too trusting of the (cybernetics-adjacent?) idea of order spontaneously arising from chaos.
I live a ways outside of Boston. Local opposition did kill some prior projects that would have probably been unfortunate. But the Big Dig was a big net win at the end of a long day—thank you rest of the country for funding thanks to Tip O’Neill. Would never have happened as purely a grassroots thing.
The big dig seems like a profoundly expensive project that produced a small benefit for drivers compared to what building public transit and bike infra with the same money could have done
It was an enormous cost, but given that there was an elevated highway there before, I don't think "remove the highway entirely" was a real option; it'd be like trying to delete I-5 from Los Angeles. Burying it was the next best option. as part of the environmental mitigation for this, several good public transit projects were legally required to be built. Only some of them have actually been built, mostly very late and to a lower standard than was promised (e.g. bad fake BRT instead of light rail). If they actually built what they were legally required to build it would've been a huge win for transit too; as it is, it's a minor win for transit too. It's a real shame they didn't do the north-south rail connector at the same time.
The Big Dig was probably at least as much about aesthetics and reuniting neighborhoods as it was about improving driving. And indeed it succeeded in the former more than the latter though the elevated central artery was pretty much a disaster on both counts. But no one could say that out loud. There were some minor transit improvements though that was already pretty good in the area and cycling was pretty much not on anyone’s radar at the time.
The article reminds me of commentary I have read in the past on Elinor Ostrom, another innovative thinker who the left likes because she was female and opposed the status quo received wisdom, but feel uncomfortable with because she was very skeptical of Big Plans from the federal government or other remote centers of power. If want to advocate for Big Plans to achieve leftist ideals, then being told that Big Plans From The Center Of Power are the main source of the problem, is a difficult truth to accept.
It is a shame when people let current alliances override their actual thinking on general principles. I mean, it is necessary to make compromises for the sake of accomplishing things, but we should be aware of the fact that it is a compromise.
Also, I sort of wish the language around “big plans from the center of power” was more… nuanced I guess. Like we can believe that centralized organizations generally are not so bad for producing healthcare guidance but still not want them to make people’s healthcare decisions for them.
I feel for this. There's a "bothness" that's important for organizing from the center and from the edges. Either approach in isolation would utterly fail. Either approach overrepresented beyond the other fails to a lesser degree. Finding the razor edge balance that (1) supports the best decisions to navigate a model of the future that actually unfolds and (2) that's stable in a given context, that is the whole of the work imho
It's hard to stay on that razor edge (except in aggregate)..
There's another hidden razor edge in the call to download accountabilities. (The other side advocates for only distributing resources, for good reason: local centers of power are also ripe for abuse)
Crucially, it's the abstractions themselves that need to be fine-tuned. Jacobs had her own blunt ones-- I'd even say that yours sharpens the (overly-)general prescriptions that came out of Systems of Survival :)
It won't be a bad idea to fixate on oxymorons, because that's what these "life-giving razor edges" shall look to like to us mortals, for now. An older one is festina lente, due to Augustus. A center of power handing out ..
Something
Wat? I'm left and for decentralising power, lots of ppl I know in my political circles love Ostrom. Leftist people who think concentration of power is the solution don't fangirl over her. Her whole jam is about "downloading" power ("down" as in, to lower levels of government) and distributing responsibility. ppl who aren't down with that have no reason to be interested in her work.
So I'm not actually seeing any dissonance or contradiction from inside communities that appreciate her work?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival which points out her own dichotomous analysis which may be related to the liberal/conservative axis being discussed in another thread which I started...
The two "moral syndromes" she describes are a great framework to understand why, for example, people cannot easily switch from business to government work: different moral systems apply (aka her "systems of survival").
yeah that was really interesting. But what caught my interest the most was the hybrids. To me it was less about how "hard" it was to switch. But the really more about the horrible downside of when the two syndromes combine.
A big mega corp lobbying the government is in a way, a hybrid. And that is in a nutshell one of the fundamental problems we face in society. Is Donald Trump a hybrid? Donalds business interests are combining with a system that was designed to be honorable (the presidency).
I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe.
Yeah, I’m not sure conservative is the best term because it carries a lot of other baggage especially these days. But favors the status quo, preservationist, change mostly based on community wishes, etc. are all probably pretty fair.
I think it's reductionist to the point of disrespectful to label her with any sort of ideology. What I remember from her books was some really good ideas. My favorite was gradual money vs cataclysmic money.
An essay in the 1964 book Ideology and Discontent makes the case that the public isn't qualified to have an opinion and found that shockingly low numbers of people can define "liberal" and "conservative" but (1) that was when hardly anyone went to college and (2) the author had the structuralist view that ideology was a fight between "marxism" and "anti-marxism" and wouldn't really recognize, say, a black nationalist or an ecofeminist as having an advanced ideology.
It's a running gag that liberals don't liberate and that conservatives don't conserve but I think liberals who liberate and conservatives who conserve have something to contribute.
I think Jane's respect for existing institutions, places and organizations that arise out of markets and fear of centralized planning are conservative. It makes me think of how Petroski wrote a whole book about pencils that comes to the conclusion that central planning doesn't work because no individual knows how to make a pencil.
I see that 'conservatives' and 'libertarians' are claiming her. I'm not sure she'd claim them. She was anti-ideology.
But this conservativism you speak of, it's such a squishy term. Respect for existing institutions, places and organizations fits when it fits and then doesn't when it doesn't. Right now, it doesn't.
Buckley (oh so nobly) said A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. But then he also said that he'd be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. So much for standing athwart history.
A conservative in the sense that anti-car urbanists can pick and choose things they really like from (such as not building a highway through Washington Square Park). Many of those same folks are probably less fond of keeping (as the article notes the fairly atypical) Greenwich Village encased in amber or at least up to the local community to evolve, opposition to the Lincoln Center (though there were certainly community costs), and opposition to non-luxury high-rise developments generally in many cases.
She was pro-market, in many ways. She was mostly against top-down development that overrode people that were already in place (at the time it happened to be government ramming highways through cities using eminent domain). So in some ways she's "conservative" in that she likes property rights, less zoning, etc.
Urban left-leaning people tend to like her because she's very human-scale focused. Many use her anti-highway work to rally against other change (often private and market oriented. Though I love her work to death, I've found a lot of what most of us would call NIMBYs and champagne socialists cite her when opposing a lot of stuff (housing they don't like, etc).
AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.
If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.
So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.
I'll lend to that. If you use Edmund Burke as the yardstick, calling her conservative is defensible because she believed complex social orders evolve from the bottom up vs grand schemes. My thought is she generally applied this thinking, and that thinking is traditionally conservative. I suppose she is a "radical localist" who stole bits she liked from every side... was a pragmatic, anti‑ideologue, but I do still feel in reading her works, she's is more frequently aligned conservatives than not.
I wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast.
I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?
Thought great Americans cities were "great" when they emerged out of small, medium and large players interacting through markets and other traditional institutions. Thought they were threatened by central planners with big ideas (e.g. Robert Moses) but no respect for the status quo.
which I didn't read when I was a kid and found it at the public library because the first chapter was about how William F. Buckley was a pompous ass but I came to enjoy as an adult because in later chapters he finds a lot of positive things to say about conservative thinkers 40 years ago when the movement had a better positive/negative ratio.
Similar to Ed Glaeser. I've spent a lot of time with Ed, I'm for sure a socialist, he's very right leaning, yet Ed and I always have great conversations, and funnily: Ed thinks Jane is great. Highly recommend Eds books, I started a whole startup after I read Triumph of the City, heh.
Jane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1471846.A_Schoolteacher_...
Just sharing my favourite quote from Death and Life. On cities... "They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."
A nice measured perspective / retrospective on the long-term impact of two of Urban Planning's big cornerstone books. Sort of suggests that the passage of time is a moderating force for both sides of the aisle.
A big Jacobs fan here, but I remember reading her book (The Death and Life of...) and also about Robert Moses and thinking "hmm both sides have a point" so she'd probably hate me if she was still alive.
I personally think she was a bit too trusting of the (cybernetics-adjacent?) idea of order spontaneously arising from chaos.
I live a ways outside of Boston. Local opposition did kill some prior projects that would have probably been unfortunate. But the Big Dig was a big net win at the end of a long day—thank you rest of the country for funding thanks to Tip O’Neill. Would never have happened as purely a grassroots thing.
The big dig seems like a profoundly expensive project that produced a small benefit for drivers compared to what building public transit and bike infra with the same money could have done
It was an enormous cost, but given that there was an elevated highway there before, I don't think "remove the highway entirely" was a real option; it'd be like trying to delete I-5 from Los Angeles. Burying it was the next best option. as part of the environmental mitigation for this, several good public transit projects were legally required to be built. Only some of them have actually been built, mostly very late and to a lower standard than was promised (e.g. bad fake BRT instead of light rail). If they actually built what they were legally required to build it would've been a huge win for transit too; as it is, it's a minor win for transit too. It's a real shame they didn't do the north-south rail connector at the same time.
I do love schlepping between south and north station every time I visit family in Maine!
The transit links between the two stations are awful with any amount of luggage and nothing direct even without.
I usually just walk
The Big Dig was probably at least as much about aesthetics and reuniting neighborhoods as it was about improving driving. And indeed it succeeded in the former more than the latter though the elevated central artery was pretty much a disaster on both counts. But no one could say that out loud. There were some minor transit improvements though that was already pretty good in the area and cycling was pretty much not on anyone’s radar at the time.
Related. Others?
Stewart Brand Interviews Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969169 - Oct 2023 (1 comment)
Jane Jacobs' Legacy (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947020 - Jan 2022 (6 comments)
Jane Jacobs' Radical Legacy (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22228562 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)
Jane Jacobs: The Champion of Little Plans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17262331 - June 2018 (15 comments)
An Ad Hoc Affair: Jane Jacobs’s Clear-Eyed Vision of Humanity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577008 - Feb 2017 (17 comments)
Bright Lights, Small Government: Why libertarians adore Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038972 - Nov 2016 (3 comments)
The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772983 - Oct 2016 (15 comments)
It's the cities, stupid – Jane Jacobs' macroeconomics (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435 - Jan 2016 (26 comments)
A Conversation with Jane Jacobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850288 - June 2013 (1 comment) (<-- posted by pg!)
How Jane Jacobs saved New York City's soul - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3091165 - Oct 2011 (3 comments)
The article reminds me of commentary I have read in the past on Elinor Ostrom, another innovative thinker who the left likes because she was female and opposed the status quo received wisdom, but feel uncomfortable with because she was very skeptical of Big Plans from the federal government or other remote centers of power. If want to advocate for Big Plans to achieve leftist ideals, then being told that Big Plans From The Center Of Power are the main source of the problem, is a difficult truth to accept.
It is a shame when people let current alliances override their actual thinking on general principles. I mean, it is necessary to make compromises for the sake of accomplishing things, but we should be aware of the fact that it is a compromise.
Also, I sort of wish the language around “big plans from the center of power” was more… nuanced I guess. Like we can believe that centralized organizations generally are not so bad for producing healthcare guidance but still not want them to make people’s healthcare decisions for them.
I feel for this. There's a "bothness" that's important for organizing from the center and from the edges. Either approach in isolation would utterly fail. Either approach overrepresented beyond the other fails to a lesser degree. Finding the razor edge balance that (1) supports the best decisions to navigate a model of the future that actually unfolds and (2) that's stable in a given context, that is the whole of the work imho
It's hard to stay on that razor edge (except in aggregate)..
There's another hidden razor edge in the call to download accountabilities. (The other side advocates for only distributing resources, for good reason: local centers of power are also ripe for abuse)
Crucially, it's the abstractions themselves that need to be fine-tuned. Jacobs had her own blunt ones-- I'd even say that yours sharpens the (overly-)general prescriptions that came out of Systems of Survival :)
It won't be a bad idea to fixate on oxymorons, because that's what these "life-giving razor edges" shall look to like to us mortals, for now. An older one is festina lente, due to Augustus. A center of power handing out .. Something
Wat? I'm left and for decentralising power, lots of ppl I know in my political circles love Ostrom. Leftist people who think concentration of power is the solution don't fangirl over her. Her whole jam is about "downloading" power ("down" as in, to lower levels of government) and distributing responsibility. ppl who aren't down with that have no reason to be interested in her work.
So I'm not actually seeing any dissonance or contradiction from inside communities that appreciate her work?
A lesser known book from Jane Jacobs: Systems of survivals.
Really great book on the nature of corruption. And really the problem with capitalism.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival which points out her own dichotomous analysis which may be related to the liberal/conservative axis being discussed in another thread which I started...
I was coming here to say the same.
The two "moral syndromes" she describes are a great framework to understand why, for example, people cannot easily switch from business to government work: different moral systems apply (aka her "systems of survival").
yeah that was really interesting. But what caught my interest the most was the hybrids. To me it was less about how "hard" it was to switch. But the really more about the horrible downside of when the two syndromes combine.
A big mega corp lobbying the government is in a way, a hybrid. And that is in a nutshell one of the fundamental problems we face in society. Is Donald Trump a hybrid? Donalds business interests are combining with a system that was designed to be honorable (the presidency).
Jacobs always struck me as a conservative that leftists like.
It's as if the terms "conservative" and "liberal" and "left" and "right" have decreasing descriptive power as time moves on.
I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe.
BTW, what does conservative mean?
Yeah, I’m not sure conservative is the best term because it carries a lot of other baggage especially these days. But favors the status quo, preservationist, change mostly based on community wishes, etc. are all probably pretty fair.
I think it's reductionist to the point of disrespectful to label her with any sort of ideology. What I remember from her books was some really good ideas. My favorite was gradual money vs cataclysmic money.
An essay in the 1964 book Ideology and Discontent makes the case that the public isn't qualified to have an opinion and found that shockingly low numbers of people can define "liberal" and "conservative" but (1) that was when hardly anyone went to college and (2) the author had the structuralist view that ideology was a fight between "marxism" and "anti-marxism" and wouldn't really recognize, say, a black nationalist or an ecofeminist as having an advanced ideology.
It's a running gag that liberals don't liberate and that conservatives don't conserve but I think liberals who liberate and conservatives who conserve have something to contribute.
I think Jane's respect for existing institutions, places and organizations that arise out of markets and fear of centralized planning are conservative. It makes me think of how Petroski wrote a whole book about pencils that comes to the conclusion that central planning doesn't work because no individual knows how to make a pencil.
I see that 'conservatives' and 'libertarians' are claiming her. I'm not sure she'd claim them. She was anti-ideology.
But this conservativism you speak of, it's such a squishy term. Respect for existing institutions, places and organizations fits when it fits and then doesn't when it doesn't. Right now, it doesn't.
Buckley (oh so nobly) said A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. But then he also said that he'd be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. So much for standing athwart history.
no one really knows
A conservative in the sense that anti-car urbanists can pick and choose things they really like from (such as not building a highway through Washington Square Park). Many of those same folks are probably less fond of keeping (as the article notes the fairly atypical) Greenwich Village encased in amber or at least up to the local community to evolve, opposition to the Lincoln Center (though there were certainly community costs), and opposition to non-luxury high-rise developments generally in many cases.
Similarly, strongtowns.org was born of conservative principles and fiscal responsibility.
She's probably just your average centrist, like 90% of people.
Was she conservative?
I don't know much about her politics, besides that she left the US for Canada over opposition to the Vietnam War.
She was pro-market, in many ways. She was mostly against top-down development that overrode people that were already in place (at the time it happened to be government ramming highways through cities using eminent domain). So in some ways she's "conservative" in that she likes property rights, less zoning, etc.
Urban left-leaning people tend to like her because she's very human-scale focused. Many use her anti-highway work to rally against other change (often private and market oriented. Though I love her work to death, I've found a lot of what most of us would call NIMBYs and champagne socialists cite her when opposing a lot of stuff (housing they don't like, etc).
This reason interview (libertarian org) outlines a lot of it: https://reason.com/2001/06/01/city-views-2/
She was: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/12/01/conservatives-jane-...
https://mises.org/mises-daily/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsid...
(Big Jacobs fan over here, I've studied her to death)
AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.
If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.
So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.
I'll lend to that. If you use Edmund Burke as the yardstick, calling her conservative is defensible because she believed complex social orders evolve from the bottom up vs grand schemes. My thought is she generally applied this thinking, and that thinking is traditionally conservative. I suppose she is a "radical localist" who stole bits she liked from every side... was a pragmatic, anti‑ideologue, but I do still feel in reading her works, she's is more frequently aligned conservatives than not.
I suppose that is also part of the joy in Jane.
I wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast.
I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?
She was a nimby in a era where there should've been more of them. I live in a city that didn't have a jane jacobs, and we're the poorer for it.
Leftists tend to be pretty conservative
A common saying is a politically incorrect leftist sayings is mistakable from alt-right rhetoric. The shoe-horse theory...
It's wrong (the shoe-horse), But a lot of people think(have been told) that.
Horseshoe.
Wow that was a big derp. Thank you.
What makes you think that?
Thought great Americans cities were "great" when they emerged out of small, medium and large players interacting through markets and other traditional institutions. Thought they were threatened by central planners with big ideas (e.g. Robert Moses) but no respect for the status quo.
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet
and the really good book
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2421900.Watch_On_The_Rig...
which I didn't read when I was a kid and found it at the public library because the first chapter was about how William F. Buckley was a pompous ass but I came to enjoy as an adult because in later chapters he finds a lot of positive things to say about conservative thinkers 40 years ago when the movement had a better positive/negative ratio.
Similar to Ed Glaeser. I've spent a lot of time with Ed, I'm for sure a socialist, he's very right leaning, yet Ed and I always have great conversations, and funnily: Ed thinks Jane is great. Highly recommend Eds books, I started a whole startup after I read Triumph of the City, heh.