ancient cities

locks to maximize opportunities for choice and
serendipity at their many intersections.
Notably, each of the characteristics stood in
diametric opposition to basic tenets of modern
planning and urban renewal, which included a
preference for superblocks, lower densities with
more open space, the replacement of older areas
with new redevelopments, and the increasing segregation
of various functions (e.g., housing, work,
leisure, and transportation). Jacobs challenged a
wide range of assumptions about how cities work,
noting, for example, that parks were not an absolute
good—nor was bigger necessarily better.
Instead, vast open spaces, not easily traversed or
monitored, could function as “border vacuums,”
deadening uses in their vicinity.
Generally, Jacobs provided lessons for urban
social scientists as far away as Germany. In the
United States, her influence is particularly evident
in the work of Richard Sennett (The Uses of
Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life, 1970).
William H. Whyte continued to emphasize
Jacobsean concerns in his Street Life Project (The
Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 1980). Jacobs’s
argument for having more activity—and hence
more eyes—on the street was developed further in
critiques of crime-ridden high-rise housing projects,
where layouts prevented community self-policing,
particularly Oscar Newman’s “defensible space.”
Jacobs’s general concept of unrecognized services
that issue from community patterns prefigures
political scientist Robert Putnam’s exploration of
civic community and social capital, as well as
Richard Florida’s writings on the creative class in
cities. Nobel laureate economist Robert Lucas has
suggested that she deserved a Nobel Prize for what
he termed the “Jane Jacobs’ externalities,” that is,
the effect of cities in catalyzing human innovation.
Jacobs concluded her first book with an extended
meditation on what “kind of problem a city is”—
namely a system of “organized complexity.” She
regularly compared urban systems to complex ecosystems
with myriad niches and invoked organic
metaphors. Her characterization of the gradually
emergent, unpredictable patterns of urban society
anticipated the later enthusiasm for chaos theory
and other dynamics that are neither linear nor random.
Her late writings turned to urban environmental
questions, and she ultimately saw much
promise in “bio-mimicry.”
Jacobs, Jane
415
Jacobs delved deeper into the question of cities
as dynamic, generative entities, particularly as
engines of economic development. She held urban
centers to be the necessary locus for nearly all of
the most important developments in human civilization,
even agriculture. In her view, cities were
indispensable, constantly evolving sites of social
organization, where innovation could be brought
to bear in regional and eventually international
markets. Her emphasis on the role of cities in a
global context paved the way for later studies by
sociologist Saskia Sassen, geographer Peter Hall,
and economists Robert Lucas and Edward
Glaeser.
Jacobs has directly influenced many important
thinkers with particular relevance to urban studies:
Robert Caro cited Jacobs as a primary inspiration
for his devastating biographical attack on a master
of urban renewal, The Power Broker: Robert
Moses and the Fall of New York (1974). For
Marshall Berman, Jacobs’s vision was the apotheosis
of urban democracy as expressed through an
unruly “modernism of the streets,” which he
explored at length in All That Is Solid Melts into
Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).
More broadly, her reaffirmation of the traditional
urban streetscape became a touchstone for
architects, planners, and preservationists rejecting
various aspects of modernist urbanism. Although
urban professionals initially greeted Jacobs’s first
book with great hostility, by 1974, New York City
Planning Commission Chair John Zuccotti claimed,
“We are all neo-Jacobeans.” In the 1990s, the new
urbanism movement invoked Jacobs as a foundation
for pedestrian- and community-oriented suburban
developments like Seaside and Celebration,
both in Florida.
Aside from the ire of planners directly stung by
her critiques, Jacobs work engendered sustained
criticism as well. Those on the political Left viewed
her recommendations as insufficient responses to
large-scale capitalist forces. Indeed, Jacobs often
advocated entrepreneurship, innovation, and other
self-help as the solution for “unslumming” economically
depressed areas, while she attacked
large-scale government programs, including not
only urban renewal but also the Tennessee Valley
Authority. Although never willing to label herself
politically or ideologically, Jacobs harbored
lifelong suspicions of power and authority.