Jacobs is a fascinating writer. She’s passionate about making cities vibrant, and deeply curious. Together with her training as a journalist, these characteristics turn what could be a dry tome or trend-driven screed into something that is both very readable and still relevant to today’s urban planning debates.
Jacobs takes aim at the predominant school of urban planning at the time, which sought to enable isolated aristocratic lifestyles at high density or escape the city altogether. Instead, Jacobs sees the beauty in the diversity, variety and community of cities, evocatively referring to their rhythm and coordination as a “ballet,” where others may see only bustle. What particularly sets her apart from her adversaries in this book, and what has leant the work staying power, is her view of cities as dynamic and interconnected, like living organisms. She directly makes this comparison in Chapter 22, where she philosophizes on “The kind of problem a city is”:
Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” Cities, again like the life sciences, do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains all. They can be analyzed into many such problems or segments which, as in the case of the life sciences, are also related with one another. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.”
Jacobs sees how issues like mixed-use neighbourhoods, foot traffic, building age, density, and road and park structure are all related questions. Failures for an urban region to thrive arise from these material factors, and often result in feedback loops. One example I found particularly compelling was her analysis of a hot restaurant scene falling victim to its own success. By chance, a mixed-use area became known for its handful of restaurants. Because the area was seen as a good bet for investors, it attracted other restaurant entrepreneurs. The area became busy during the dinner hours of 5-9pm, but there was little foot traffic outside of these times. The empty streets during the day and late night made the area feel dead and unsafe. As a result, the restaurant traffic died off too, as diners moved to livelier locations they discovered during their walks around the city.
Her solutions to the problems she identified are limited. For example, as an alternative to the decaying restaurant scene, she uplifts a wise landlord who carefully selected tenants with varying business models, rather than optimizing for who could pay the highest rents. Hoping thoughtful individual capitalists will forgo profits is a naive and unsustainable model for creating thriving cities. Jacobs believes strongly in the power of the markets to solve problems, disapproving of public housing and strong central governments. She values self-determination and democracy, pointing to various neighborhood councils as models for creating communities that respond to the needs of their members. However, it is unclear how these models of democracy should interface with the “wise landlord” to produce the desired mixed use neighborhoods.
It is this intersection of private property and democracy that challenges social organization at all levels: the cities Jacobs studies, as well as nations and larger structures. Jacobs avoids interrogating this question directly, keeping her writing carefully nonpartisan (beyond its general commitment to western capitalism — she was of course writing at the height of the “Cold War”). Her incisive critiques but vague politics have earned her fans as diverse as socialists and neoliberal Hayekians. Her continued relevance to the urban planning questions of today is part condemnation of her approach: despite inspiring generations of urban planners, we have still not cracked the nut for how to balance private property and social wellbeing, and our cities bear the scars of our continued commitment to individual freedoms over communal good.