No one's outgrown Jane Jacobs

Image by Benjamin Donaldson, at the jen bekman gallery

The Nicholai Ouroussoff screed that led the NYT's Week in Review was deliberately provocative. I'm sure the New Urbanists have their panties in a bunch, as do many at my workplace.

Looking beyond the inflammatory rhetoric that's calling every urbanist to arms - and rightly so - I think that Jane Jacobs would agree, in principle, with what Ouroussoff proposes: that once a formula or set process has been established, the "unaverage" clues once again falls to the wayside and we're left again with solutions that don't necessarily address an underlying issue. Too many have taken the table of contents of the Death and Life... and applied it wholesale to solving all of our citis' problems. Design is not the only answer - whether it is on a neighborhood level or at the starchitect level.

Solutions are ever-evolving and as decisions are being made, they are determining how people are making a home and getting to work and just plain living. Though Ouroussoff does eventually end up saying that today's cities are very different from those of yesteryear, at both stages of city history, the city exhibited a similar attribute: constant change at an astonishing rate. This speaks to a high demand for the city to accommodate change.

Therefore we can't afford to make large-scale experiments that inexorably narrow a city's options. The few projects that Ourrousoff cited have wreaked havoc on many lives, and at current writing, it can be argued that they cast a negative projectile for a city's public good - namely, in the model of Los Angeles. Who really has the life experience to fully appreciate the "haunting silence" of an empty plaza? Is it a limited group of privileged, or truly the entire city's population?

Just as a healthy government should take on the task of creating infrastructure, a la R. Moses, and create incentives for developers to take on the risk of building in our city, government should create a friendly environment for the small-scale, community-based approach advocated by Jane Jacobs. This is preferable to simply dismissing, or eradicating, that option completely.