Happy Birthday, Jane Jacobs

As noted in today’s Google doodle, today is Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday. No doubt many people will write positive things about her. However, as the Antiplanner has noted before, her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is overrated.

Jacobs made two points, one of them right, and one of them wrong. Her correct point, which is celebrated by many libertarians, is in recognizing that urban planners don’t understand the cities they claim to be designing. The hubris of planners writing 50 year plans when they don’t even know what’s going to happen five years from now would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so expensive.

Jacobs wrong point, which is celebrated by many urban planners today, was in thinking that she did understand cities. She thought she understood her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, New York, but she didn’t understand it very well. She reduced her understanding to four simple “conditions” that she said all cities needed: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and density of residents and jobs. Her application of these oversimplified conditions to all “great cities” made her just as guilty of hubris as the planners she criticized.

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Jacobs’ claim that she understood cities and could reduce that understanding to a few simple rules would be just as amusing as the claims of the urban planners of her day were it not for the fact that her misunderstanding has probably caused even more misery than those planners caused. Unfortunately, her ideas were taken up by planners of the 1990s who called themselves New Urbanists.

“There is no question that her work is the leaping-off point for our whole movement,” said the director of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2000. The New Urbanists have used these ideas to devastate at least as many cities and neighborhoods as the planners of the 1950s that Jacobs was criticizing.

There is a market for dense, mixed-use neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, but that market is a lot smaller than the New Urbanists think. Moreover, the benefits of such neighborhoods are a lot less than claimed by Jacobs, while the costs, including crime, are a lot higher. Rather than try to dictate how people should live or what form cities should take, urban planners should confine their work to helping people live the way they want to live while making sure everyone pays the costs of their choices, whatever those choices may be.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

5 Responses to Happy Birthday, Jane Jacobs

  1. prk166 says:


    There is a market for dense, mixed-use neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, but that market is a lot smaller than the New Urbanists think
    ” ~antiplanner

    Until we have a free market, we will not know.

    That aside the element of who wants what and WHEN they want it is important. Gen Y is H U G E. They’re just coming into the age where they’re getting their own places to live. How much of the current market for this relatively dense living is being driven by them isn’t clear. It’s even less clear if those of hat generation living in dense settings will want to be doing so a decade from now.

  2. JOHN1000 says:

    Her rules applied quite well if you were well-to-do and without family responsibilities. If you were poor with a family, not so good.

    Her one great achievement was stopping Robert Moses from (unbelievably) running an elevated highway through Greenwich Village. That carried her for the next four decades.

  3. LazyReader says:

    Yes there is a market for the dense cosmopolitan living. However not all comprise the upper echelon of income. So enough people encroach or want the urban life, the demand raises prices. Of course ultimately if urbanophiles wanna live there it results in the dreaded highrise construction. For years Brooklyn was always seen as the alternative to Manhattans over crowded and wealth oriented living accommodations where a MCDonalds large fries costs 2 bucks. But in recent years some signs are booming that show a host of large skyscrapers are or will be going up in Brooklyn. Much to the disapproval to the Burroughs generational residents who see this as nothing more than a land grab opportunity to make billions and for the government to rake in hundreds of millions in new property taxes by sweeping away old apartments and putting up highrises (while not as tall as Manhattan’s, still stick out of the landscape like glass spikes).

    Greenwich Village is what it is but replicating brick by brick elsewhere is possible but the history is not something you can replicate. Cultural attitudes and personal history are the reason we have famous neighborhoods. But history cannot be replicated, only mimicked.
    http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-china-ripped-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world-2015-7

    I’m from Baltimore and I admit I’m not eager to see these new towers prop up in the city. We don’t need more high rises. Just like how the Antiplanner stated most transit use in America is relegated to a few cities; People don’t realize the skyscraper is becoming obsolete except in just a few cities. They’re not built to accommodate the differential boom and bust cycle of traditional real estate. Historically their preferred use as office space is being beat out by satellite offices branched out to various locations. The Industrial Revolution made Skyscrapers possible, the Digital Revolution is making them unnecessary

  4. Jardinero1 says:

    Towers over six stories are not required to create urban densities of nearly 80,000 per square mile. Buildings like this one, http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/morning_call/2016/05/sneak-peek-new-luxe-apartments-across-from-hermann.html provide a density in excess of 120k per square mile. If a park and street occupy every other block with a building such as that, you still have a density in excess of 50 k per square mile.

  5. Ohai says:

    The truth is that the lifestyle found in her neighborhood was rapidly dying out.

    It’s true. I visited Greenwich Village a few days ago. It’s just a bunch of burned out shells of buildings and abandoned cars. The only people who live there anymore are thieves and the drug dealers. What a shame!

    Greenwich villagers lived in cramped apartments, so they didn’t have room to entertain indoors.

    Brilliant. As it turns out white flight was caused by the burning American desire to entertain indoors.

    This meant they entertained outdoors, which attracted people like Jacobs to their lively streets. But it isn’t always comfortable to be outdoors, and even when the weather is pleasant it isn’t always comfortable to be on crowded sidewalks.

    The Antiplanner really captures how I feel about living in the city, right there. He really hit the nail on the head. It’s uncanny how someone who lives in rural Oregon has such a keen understanding of the urban condition.

    I’ve lost track of how many times my friends have complained, “I have to entertain outdoors, but sometimes the weather is bad and anyway crowded sidewalks are just plain uncomfortable.”

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