"She was not afraid to shatter settled thought, but she was set on fitting the shards back together, too, and with ideas some of the Sixties icons would have found altogether bourgeois.” From the intro to #VitalLittlePlans by editors Zipp + @natestorring https://t.co/0NeR9unEyO

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) September 12, 2018

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The Nature of Economies

The Nature of Economies, #Jane Jacobs. Chapter 5, Evading Collapse. pic.twitter.com/7XvNH5heYl

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 16, 2017

The Nature of Economies, #JaneJacobs. pic.twitter.com/etNMZ5uRnN

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 16, 2017

Becoming Jane Jacobs — A new light on Jacobs' great book

As a long-time Jane Jacobs armchair-scholar, I've found Becoming Jane Jacobs by Peter Laurence (Clemson University School of Architecture Director of Graduate Studies) to be invaluable. He brings some answers to the question "How did Jane Jacobs become Jane Jacobs?"

●Details of the almost 10 years she spent as an architecture critic for Architectural Forum. ●Emerging fresh post-war ideas in the areas of urban planning and design, architecture, and influential new visions of what the city should look like and how it should function. ●An emerging interest in forging an increased influence on those disciplines of the aesthetic.

There's a passage that traces ideas that were evolving at the Rockefeller Foundation from the early 1950s in architecture and urban planning that precede the funding that allowed Jacobs to take a leave from Architectural Forum and devote most of a year to research and writing of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Fascinating reading and shines a new light on Jacobs' great book.

Laurence is ideally positioned to walk the reader through the changes in underlying philosophies at work in the architecture of the 1950s and the role that architecture could and should play in city building. Prior to these years architectural criticism had all but disappeared due to often successful libel lawsuits. Forum editor-in-chief Douglas Haskell was on a mission to spearhead its resurgence, backed by its parent company, Time Inc. It was an exciting fertile time and Jacobs thrived in it, influenced by the creative, intellectual environment created by Haskell and influencing it in turn. The detail of Haskell's story makes a terrific read in its own right.

I  was under the impression (it's part of a persistent  Jacobs mythology) that the only post secondary studying she had done was a few extension courses at  Columbia University. The facts, and as they're recounted by Laurence, are more interesting and more relevant. Jacobs famously did poorly in the regimented primary and high schools she attended. Robert Kanigel in his Jacobs biography Eyes on the Street retells a family story of the chronically late for high school classes Jane, asking her mother to write her a note. Jane read the note on the way to school. "Jane is late because she spent too long sitting on the side of the bed with one shoe in her hand." Jane's son Jim said he'd seen his mother do this often. "She was working something out." Her mother is also quoted that her great accomplishment of 1933 was "getting Jane through high school."

So, the environment at Columbia, the flexibility that allowed her the chance to pick subjects in her areas of interest, was ideal. She enrolled and completed two full years of studies. Full time day classes in subjects like geography, geology, chemistry, philosophy, law, "nearly all of them subjects to which she returned in her later work." This background also shines a new light on and appreciation of Death and Life and the ideas she was "working out" in her other books. And this famous bureaucratic twist of fate: she took (completed and scored highly in) so many classes she was no longer allowed to take extension courses, but required to enrol in the formal institution. She enrolled, was rejected because of her high school grades and was understandably embittered for a very long time.

Jacobs at first thought the book would take 8 or 9 months to research, write, and edit. It took 28 months and required applying for 2 Rockefeller Foundation funding extensions. In Chapter 7, A New System of Thought, Laurence recounts the correspondence between Jacobs and Rockefeller Foundation Associate Director Chadbourne Gilpatrick who had long championed her work. It makes for reading as compelling as the book itself. She realized that she was “…not rehashing old material on cities and city planning…[but] working with new concepts about the city and its behavior. Many of these concepts are quite radically opposed to those accepted in orthodox and conventional planning theory.” She was increasingly aware that she was “proving the validity of these new concepts and giving evidence, from experience in the city itself, which shows that the alternative to ignoring them is not the rebuilding of some improved type of city but rather… the disintegration of the city."

She once said, and I paraphrase, that perception was the most important and valuable of our intellectual abilities. The book wasn't ready because she was still doing what she had always done, she was working things out. 

On @Monocle24 radio ‘The Urbanist’, the life and legacy of #JaneJacobs @peterlaurence @MASNYC @denisepinto https://t.co/i59lOMqgbT

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) December 16, 2016

Terrific presentation by @peterlaurence on "becoming Jane Jacobs" - how her ideas developed as she observed! https://t.co/DLXQQrvokS

— Michael Mehaffy (@michaelwmehaffy) December 7, 2016

Ideas That Matter — Big City Mayors meet with Jane Jacobs 2001 Winnipeg C5 Conference

Editor's notes, Mary W, Rowe. Over two days in May of this year, Jane Jacobs met with the mayors of five of Canada’s largest and most economically significant cities to discuss issues of mutual concern and importance. This historic meeting, known as the C5, was an outgrowth of a series of discussions, convened by urban advocate, businessman and ITM Executive Publisher Alan Broadbent over a twenty month period, in which Jacobs had participated. The C5 meeting was initiated by Jacobs as a means of bringing together the leadership from five Canadian cities whose economies she considers to be most at risk because of their outdated, paternal relationships with ‘senior’ levels of government. PDF of the Sept, 2001 edition of Ideas that Matter here.

#JaneJacobs

Encore:
Jim Jacobs on the Jane at Home exhibit
about his mom, the activist-author #JaneJacobs @BWheelerglobe https://t.co/z0UXabNMmU

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) October 3, 2016

#JaneJacobs

#JaneJacobs’s Street Smarts @adamgopnik @NewYorker https://t.co/xxJ2PL0D2V via

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) September 20, 2016

#JaneJacobs

https://t.co/e5xxDT2lq7

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) October 1, 2016

#JaneJacobs

#JaneJacobs—neither liberal nor libertarian. What did she believe? https://t.co/dhrGXf5Mdo @peterlaurence @PPS_Placemaking @MarketUrbanism

— Nathan Storring (@natestorring) October 1, 2016

From The Nature of Cities — Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom

Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom were both giants in their impact on how we think about communities, cities, and common resources such as space and nature. But we don’t often put them together to recognize the common threads in their ideas.

Jacobs is rightly famous for her books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and for her belief that people, vibrant spaces and small-scale interactions make great cities—that cities are “living beings” and function like ecosystems. Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work in economic governance, especially as it relates to the Commons. She was an early developer of a social-ecological framework for the governance of natural resources and ecosystems. Read more: Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom, and their relevance to urban socio-ecology | The Nature of Cities

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Jane Jacobs' "big R&D lab" in downtown Toronto industrial sites redevelopment

20 years ago Jane Jacobs was given the chance to put her ideas into practice in the renewal of two large downtown Toronto in-decline industrial sites. The King Street neighbourhoods were a priority of then-mayor Barbara Hall and she asked Jacobs’ advice. Details of this fascinating story are told in the links below by Spacing Magazine’s Shawn Micallef in Curbed.com and in a Globe and Mail piece by Stephen Wickens.

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401 Richmond in the western neighbourhood of the "Two Kings", which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization. Read more: Jane Up North - Curbed

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She wasn’t at all surprised to see people saying 

what would Jane Jacobs have thought; 

but what Jane Jacobs would have thought 

was think for yourself. — Jim Jacobs

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#‎JaneJacobs‬ : 10 Big ideas + 4 smaller ones

4more in 2000 @NewUrbanism address—Empower immigrant 'hoods, community hearths, gentrification, sm business activity https://t.co/RFNhfFfHZI

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) April 25, 2016

From The Wall Street Journal — Classic New York Streetscapes, Then and Now

It is an essential paradox of New York City that its streetscapes seem both ageless and ever-evolving. Photographer Berenice Abbott captured that vibrant contradiction in the 1930s when she created her landmark series “Changing New York,” more than 300 black-and-white images of the metropolis shot with a large-format camera while she was working under the auspices of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Her visual time capsule documents everything from soaring skyscrapers to neighbourhood storefronts, churches, tenements, warehouses and bridges.

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What makes New York is how we recycle buildings. 

— Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at New York University

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The New York Public Library recently released free, high-resolution scans of the “Changing New York” portfolio, prompting one Wall Street Journal photographer to reshoot more than a dozen of Abbott’s images of Manhattan and Brooklyn. They reveal how much, and in some cases, how little, New York City has changed. Read more: Classic New York Streetscapes, Then and Now - WSJ

From Congress for the New Urbanism — Four ways to improve cities and towns — Jane Jacobs

A neighbourhood hearth: The Angel Café in San Francisco.

The most influential writer on urban planning in modern times, the late Jane Jacobs received the Vincent Scully Prize from the Green Building Council in 2000. Jacobs made a seminal speech offering suggestions for communities on four topics: Empowering immigrant neighbourhoods to develop freely, investing in “community hearths,” dealing with gentrification, and, finally, encouraging small business activity. Although the speech was made 15 years ago, her excerpted comments resonate today: Read more: Jane Jacobs: Four ways to improve cities and towns | CNU

"The object is to nurture locales where ppl, on foot, will naturally encounter one another” #JaneJacobs #Placemaking https://t.co/G0WVx5Yr9h

— Proj 4 Public Spaces (@PPS_Placemaking) February 5, 2016

Learn how CNU supports New Urbanist discourse through its new platform, #PublicSquare: https://t.co/lQ7M2dCvNa pic.twitter.com/ePMp66Sat8

— NewUrbanism (@NewUrbanism) February 5, 2016

From DougSaunders.net — Citizen Jane

OCTOBER 11, 1997 It’s easy enough to find her. Just stroll westward past the bookstores and cafés of Bloor St and head north on leafy Albany Ave. Step up to the narrow red-brick house with the big front porch, and knock on the door. There will be a shuffling, and finally you will be greeted by a little old lady with an apple-doll face and a warm smile. Be careful, though: She isn’t what she seems. Read more: Citizen Jane

So good—@dougsaunders knocks on #JaneJacobs door “Her theories can alarm and offend even her most ardent supporters" https://t.co/1m9dxZO6L2

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) November 18, 2015

The conversations that formed this article were the beginning of a lot of things I pursued https://t.co/iQHhoviF5n

— Doug Saunders (@DougSaunders) November 18, 2015

From @CityLab — The Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs Opera Is Almost Here

The Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs Opera Is Almost Here @CityLab

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Monday, October 19, 2015

From Planetizen — The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking"

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Michael Mehaffy refuted the contrarians and clarified Jacobs' lasting "Top 10" observations found in the incredibly influential book. 

MICHAEL MEHAFFY Planetizen Dec. 15, 2011 Just now we are nearing the end of the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs' hugely influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The year has seen a remarkable series of re-assessments and, in some cases, revisionisms. Planner Thomas Campanella has criticized Jacobs' "evisceration" of planning,which created a vacuum into which privatizing interests rushed; economist Ed Glaeser has argued that Jacobs fed gentrification with her call for preservation of some old buildings instead of all new towers; and sociologist Sharon Zukin attacked Jacobs' alleged fantasy of the "social-less" urban block. Most recently, my friend Anthony Flint suggested that Jacobs was a libertarian with a mixed legacy of NIMBYism.

What I find remarkable about these accounts – speaking as an instructor who regularly uses her texts - is that in almost all cases these were things that Jacobs herself simply never said. Read more: The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking" | Planetizen: The Urban Planning, Design, and Development Network

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapters six, seven

Trading, taking, monstrous hybrids and anomalies. Street gangs and organized crime, Mafia, Columbia drug cartels, Neopolitan Camorra, Hong Kong crime associations are examined. How does organized crime fit — or not fit — into the scheme of two survival systems, the guardian and the commercial? Exhibiting essentially guardian habits and characteristics; loyalty, hierarchy, use of force; they have in common an involvement in trade, resulting in "monstrous hybrids." 

The centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union comes in for special attention—

If you put economic planning into guardian hands you get economic planning for guardian priorities. The planning apparatus that presided over these [Soviet] investments, in itself, a pork barrel providing millions and millions of desirable jobs, increasingly for their own sake, not because they were pulling their weight creating viable production and commerce.

Or as the joke went up and down Eastern Europe, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." 

Law and agriculture are anomalies and are seen as subversive of the systems but interestingly art's provenance "seems to come from both taking and trading ... and its difficulties different from those of commerce and guardianship" To come: a discussion of "casts of mind."

The Economy of Cities

Jane Jacob's economics thought is often condensed as something called "import replacement." More accurately it can be said to be summed up as an economic self-replicating ecosystem. Better yet, as "new work added to old." Her hypothesis in The Economy of Cities is that there are three ways, and only three ways that she was able to uncover, by which a city's economy grows and prospers—" 

• By adding export work to other people's local work;
• By adding export work to different local work of their own;
• By exporting their own local work." 

"The significant fact about these processes is that they all depend directly on local economies... these are the only ways I have been able to discover. Indeed it soon becomes exceedingly tiresome to read the business histories of exporting organizations because their narrative plots are so few. One might be reading the same three novels over and over again." Chapter 6, How Large Cities Generate Exports.

From The National Film Board — City Limits with Jane Jacobs, 1971

City Limits by Laurence Hyde, National Film Board of Canada

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapters four, five

“…science needs the same values and precepts as commerce. Honesty is the bedrock of science. Moral rules for research are: don’t lie, don’t deceive or cheat under any circumstances; if you’re making reasoned guesses, say so and lay out your reasons.

“Voluntary agreement is the agreement that counts among scientists. Forced agreement to findings or conclusions is worse than useless. Science thrives on dissent for the sake of the task. Any theory is thus only provisionally true in science. It’s understood that theories can’t be proved; they can only be disproved. An accepted theory is merely one not yet proved false—and the possibility always exists that it may be."

The group is unable to disprove Kate's hypothesis of two moral syndromes, the commercial and the guardian, examining the kibbutz in Israel, the Scandinavian welfare states, communist Eastern Europe.  And they prepare in Chapter 5 to take a closer look next at the Guardian System.

Of particular interest to me is Chapter 5's examination of historical cultural expressions of an aversion to commerce. 

In the days of chivalry, a man was unfit for knighthood if he had a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent on either side who had been a merchant or a craftsman, 'in trade', as they said. Shameful, base. contaminating. But why? The doings of craftsmen and merchants are so innocent compared with making wars, pillaging, extorting, persecuting, executing, censoring, holding prisoners for ransom and monopolizing land at the expense of serfs, peons or slaves—all honorable activities for people who would sooner have died than sink into trade. 

Consistent throughout the research that lead to the identification of the two Systems of Survival, as the syndromes are also called in Chapter Four, is the recurrence of the value in the guardian syndrome 'shun trading.' Contemporary examples include class attitudes that, for instance, ascribe a moral superiority to a non-profit enterprise, and class attitudes of distinguishing "inferior new money from superior old money cleansed of commercial taint by the passage of generations and time."