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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Cities
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities

Jane Jacobs and the limits to experience

Andrew Kirby
Arizona State University, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper builds on two of the author's earlier pieces, and argues that Jane Jacob's most celebrated book was at
NIMBY its roots a form of NIMBYism and was thus regressive—the antithesis of any model of justice.
Urban design The first half of the paper situates Jacobs in the now-familiar struggle with Robert Moses but also the bigger
Neighborhoods picture of redevelopment in mid-century Manhattan. The second half revolves around three aspects of Jacobs'
Manhattan
approach to cities; the first is her focus on individual actors, the second a libertarian stance which argues that
Preservation
Gentrification
government was the problem, never the solution, and the third was a claim for universal principles (regarding,
for instance, density and land-use), although these were not based upon any empirical evidence.
In short, it is argued that while Jacobs was an admirable individual whose struggles have remained in-
spirational, it is a mistake to attempt to recycle her views in any type of urban design and to use her principles of
neighborhood life as a model for how cities should evolve in the future. This is especially true of any con-
siderations of how cities can be transformed into places that are more just.

1. Overview
While digital technologies have given us all a voice, a platform and
a potential audience, the eclipse of the expert has happened over a
longer period and has occurred in numerous contexts, ranging from
health to climate change. In this paper I want to suggest how Jane
Jacobs contributed to this process in urban studies, and why this is of
importance to the field.
In an important introspective paper, Campanella explores the di-
minution of the urban and regional planning profession throughout the
West. While planners are actively transforming China, in the US they
are more typically restricted to minor bureaucratic tasks like zoning
applications. For Campanella (2011), this lack of “speculative vision” is
more than a loss of prestige, it is a retreat from a commitment to the
creation of a better world (p. 148). Furthermore, he connects this
withdrawal to Jacobs' influence, which he explores in three specific
ways. First, her writings in the 1950s and 60s were so successful that
the era of ‘big plans’ came to a virtual halt; this in turn resulted in a lack
of focus for the discipline, whose educators became familiar with cri-
tical theory but out of touch with practice. Second, planners lost pres-
tige as community leaders increased theirs. The planning hearing—the
solicitation of lay voices—became in some ways more important than
the plan. Again, this echoes the power that Jacobs unleashed when she
protested what remote professionals were trying to do to her neigh-
borhood.
The third context is less clear cut but can be connected to the
critique developed by Marshall (2012). The latter shows how planners
and other design professionals were so keen to get ‘on side’ with the
new pro-community ideas that they incorporated all manner of asser-
tions simply because they were anti-technocratic (he develops many
examples at length). As we shall see below, some of Jacobs' key mantras
fall into this category. Testing these concepts would have smacked of
positivism and skepticism, and so they became, by default, part of the
accepted wisdom—a conflation, for Marshall, of science and pseudo-
science within urban design and planning.
By way of contrast, this paper represents an implicit defense of the
expert as the professional who has no stake in what is planned, the
individual who can be entrusted with powerful knowledge. This may
seem anachronistic—even dangerous—in an era which privileges sta-
keholders above “knowledge-holders”. In the city, this is manifested as
‘what works for my neighborhood’. Yet having skin in the game is
usually another form of self-interest, and self-interest is rarely visionary
or based upon universal principles. As urban economist Edward Glaeser
(2011) wryly observes, “one's own tastes are rarely a sound basis for
public policy” (p. 147).
In the remainder of this paper, Jacob's influence is explored, in-
cluding several contexts within which her legacy must be understood,
and several ways in which her work can be critically assessed; this in-
cludes the issue of justice, the focus of the special issue within which
this paper is placed (Basta, Hartmann, & Moroni, 2018). The next
section provides some biographical information, which is then followed
by three types of critique than have been developed against her work.

E-mail address: andrew.kirby@asu.edu.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.01.021
Received 6 September 2017; Received in revised form 29 December 2017; Accepted 31 January 2018
0264-2751/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Kirby, A., Cities (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.01.021
A. Kirby
2. Jacobs: her life
Jane Jacobs requires little introduction, as her biography is so well
known. She was highly regarded throughout her long life (being of-
fered, it is reported, some thirty honorary degrees), and received a good
deal of retrospective attention on her death in 2006, while the recent
centenary of her birth has also seen the publication of several book
length assessments (see Hirt, 2016).
She first received attention for her push back against Robert Moses,
a bureaucrat who amassed enormous power as a regional planner in
New York (see Caro, 1974). Both were figures of their time. Moses was a
traffic engineer who built roads under, over and through neighbor-
hoods with total disregard for their inhabitants. Jacobs was a symbol of
resistance at a time when social conformities were starting to be
questioned, a foundation for the subsequent decade when city streets
were often scenes of confrontation and police brutality (for additional
biographical material, see Page & Mennel, 2011).
Moses was displaced, in some measure as a result of the critical
attention that Jacobs gave to his megalomaniacal schemes. She, in
contrast, built upon her successes as a single-movement organizer and
became an influential public intellectual, first in New York and later in
Toronto, where she relocated in reaction to the Vietnam War. Over the
next two decades she coined numerous aphorisms concerning urban
planning, the negative impacts of ‘the automobile’ (as it was more often
termed at the time), and the redemptive virtues of human interaction
(Hirt & Zahm, 2012). Her principles clearly still feel correct to many
people—her published work is cited at a still-accelerating rate (Harris,
2011). Her best-known book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
has, according to Google Scholar, been cited over 19,000 times, a
number which places it in a pantheon of 20th century classic academic
texts (Jacobs, 1961).
It is this continuing role as a public intellectual that makes a critical
assessment of Jacobs' work necessary. Her insights are invoked and
continually re-applied to the goals and practice of urban design and
planning. In an odd way, she has become a new version of Robert
Moses, a figure whose image continues to hover across the city.1 Her
image is generally interpreted as a force for good—she is not un-
commonly described with words such as ‘saintly’ (Gopnik, 2016). Yet
when aspirations and beliefs inspire others to action, as saints self-
evidently do, it is appropriate to consider the outcomes with a little
skepticism. That is what this paper is attempting, with the first half
focusing upon her, and the second half dealing with her ideas, their
impacts, and their limitations.
3. Situating Jacobs
Across more than half a century, Jacobs appears to many as a heroic
figure who stood up to the excesses of a brutalist planning regime that
seemed to be turning Manhattan into a series of parking lots linked by
expressways (see contributions to Hirt & Zahm, 2012). Her struggle
contributed to a changing perspective on how—and where—political
action could be situated. During the first half of the 20th century, US
politics were normally driven by national imperatives, and organized
hierarchically, but Jane Jacobs offered an example of what could be
achieved by organizing protest outside the system, which in the late
1950s and early 60s was still relatively novel (Berman, 1988). Along-
side the evolving civil rights movement, and new ideas such as fem-
inism and environmentalism, her activism contributed to a decade of
protest and increasingly radical political action. Moreover, her im-
portance as a pioneer female activist is not to be downplayed—she
1 tenement.org/about.html.
Moses and Jacobs may always co-exist in a dialectic manner: I certainly agree with an
anonymous reviewer that they are bound together by a spatial fetish, although where
Moses saw only flows, Jacobs saw spaces (see Adhya, 2012, p. 219). Their struggle even
continues today in an opera, titled A Marvelous Order (one of Jacobs' phrases): http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/jane-jacobs-and-robert-moses-in-song.
2
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rightfully stands alongside Rachel Carson as an inspirational figure
(Van den Berg, 2017).
Yet is also the case that while Jacobs is routinely mentioned in any
assessment that is critical of urban planning, and a lack of participation
in that process (e.g. Miles, 2015), her work is not found in many key
texts. For instance, Manuel Castells did not choose to mention her
writings in his far-reaching assessment of urban social movements, al-
though his book touches on grassroots campaigns in several American
cities of the Vietnam period (Castells, 1983). It is perhaps more telling
that she also receives minimal attention in Robert Caro's monumental
biography of Robert Moses (1974). While Jacobs was a key adversary of
the latter, Caro is on record as having excised a chapter on her from the
book (McArdle, 2016). In other words, while Moses loomed large in her
life, it was possible to tell the story of his eclipse without her.
The discrepancy between the symbolic importance of Jane Jacobs
and the reality of her opposition to what was happening in New York is
crucial to any objective assessment of her work. As Page points out,
Manhattan in the first half of the 20th century was still in very slow
transition from the excessive poverty that was well documented
throughout the Gilded Age: in the grim photographs taken by Jacob
Riis, for instance, and as portrayed by the Ashcan artists (Page, 2001;
Zurier, Snyder, & Mecklenburg, 1995). When the yet-unmarried Jane
Butzner arrived in 1935 from Scranton, it was less than a quarter
century on from Bellows' portrayal of New York as a place of chaos, in
which people and horses competed for space on the congested road-
ways (Kirby, 2017). The city possessed few tools to remove the worst
legacies of the period, especially the oldest and densest tenements,
which were still profitable.
By any objective criteria, a great deal of the housing stock was in
dire need of improvement. Yet as Page observes, “Jacobs built on a long
if submerged tradition of lamenting the rapid transformation of the city
even if it eliminated some of the most horrible of housing” (p. 105). As
he goes on to observe, this was part of a long tradition of yearning that
went back decades—“the slums of New York…became more important
as a place of memory and less a living neighborhood…a place of nos-
talgic tourism, usually for those who had never lived there” (Page,
2001, p. 108). While extending far into the past, this wistful attitude
has continued through to the New York of the present, which now hosts
a literal monument to tenement life.2
In short, Jacobs was a conservative and a preservationist at heart,
who celebrated people's experiences in place to the exclusion of most
everything else. As Marshall (2016) points out, she had little interest in
the infrastructure that made a privileged and urbane way of life pos-
sible—such as the many technologies like water, power and the
subway. If we turn to Jane Jacobs for an insight into protest and
struggle, this is well and good; if we expect her life and writings to offer
blueprints for our cities then we should be very attentive to these la-
cunae.
4. Critiquing Jacobs
It is common to find all manner of prescience in Jacobs' writings: a
recent online posting suggests for example that her last book predicted
the outcome of the 2016 election.3 There are though several critiques of
her work that can get lost in a tendency towards hagiography. First, let
us examine Jacobs' renaissance as a libertarian thinker whose body of
work questions the need for central planning. Her work—notably her
1961 book—is now claimed by intellectual movements such as ‘strong
towns’ and ‘market urbanism’.4 These argue for cities as spaces in which
2
Information about New York's Tenement Museum can be found at http://www.
3
See for example http://www.citylab.com/politics/2016/12/did-jane-jacobs-predict-
the-rise-of-trump/509987/?utm_source=nl__link3_122016.
4
http://marketurbanism.com/2016/02/21/who-plans-jane-jacobs-hayekian-critique-
of-urban-planning/; http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/2/who-plans-jane-
A. Kirby
property owners promote their own vision of their neighborhoods and
their cities, in contrast to places where planners impose a top-down
blueprint that is necessarily rigid in intent and promotes egalitarian
outcomes, which in turn inhibit personal initiative. Advocates for such
an approach connect Jane Jacobs to thinkers such as the economist
Friedrich Hayek, and we can place this advocacy firmly in the continual
search for an intellectual underpinning for the neoliberal era in which
we find ourselves.
The critique of planning controls as brakes upon initiative and
prosperity is hardly new (Bertaud, 2014; Glaeser, 2011). We should
though not ignore the opposite case, namely that self-interest is not
necessarily a noble struggle in which residents defend their turf against
vindictive social engineers. It is not especially hard to make a case that
Jacobs was a NIMBYist trying to defend a relatively privileged neigh-
borhood and to push back against all planning because of self-interest.
From this entirely experiential position, she then backfilled to create a
much larger theoretical argument to justify a very defensive stance.
While The Death and Life of Great American Cities is often invoked today
as a universal manifesto, it is instructive to remember that Jacobs
herself was defending a middle class way of life from social change. She
saw the world in rather stark terms: Hudson Street is normal, un-
differentiated…and White. It stands in contrast to other streets in
nearby neighborhoods where otherness is on display. As she observes at
one juncture, “the Puerto Ricans who come to our cities today have no
place to roast pigs outdoors...” (1961, p. 111). And if social change were
to happen, the results were clear—“chaos and barbarism” (1961, p.
124).5
It was this defensive posture which shaped her views of the city.
Marshall (2016) points out that she lived on an island [literally and
figuratively] and although she wrote tirelessly about blocks and
buildings, there were many other key components of the city about
which she was utterly uninterested, especially the infrastructure that
makes urban life possible. This constitutes a second critique, namely,
she was little interested in urban processes—she was basically inter-
ested in turf.
“Jacobs not only didn't talk much about the New York subway
system, she didn't talk much about the water system, an engineering
marvel whose pipes snake hundreds of miles into the Catskill
mountains, bringing fresh, clean liquid to millions of people. She
doesn't talk about the power grid. It's almost as if she assumes the
dense urban neighborhoods she loved just materialized organically
on the banks of the Hudson, not the product of massive infra-
structure systems usually financed or directed by big government”.
Marshall (2016)
This may seem a carping criticism—after all, no writer can deal with
every aspect of the city. Yet as Marshall points out, it is intellectually
negligent to claim that government in general—or the planning process
in particular—should have no role to play in urban affairs. Jacobs (and
her disciples, such as the New Urbanists), may be competent to discuss
a neighborhood, but their arguments cannot be scaled up to the city as a
whole. Individuals, or networks of neighbors, cannot homestead a
power grid or implement meaningful plans to adapt a neighborhood to
rising sea levels. These are technical imperatives that rarely, if ever,
emerge organically from civil society or the market. This is what gov-
ernment does, although it can do it in an authoritarian manner and
trample people, or it can invoke collective decision making. Fighting
City Hall, on which Jacobs insisted, is a necessity, but that only makes it
a dialectical process, not a step on the road to demolishing City Hall
entirely.
(footnote continued)
jacobs-hayekian-critique-of-urban-planning.
5
Marshall Berman, who grew up in the Bronx at mid-century, has no equivocations on
this point: he writes: “there is no ‘Washington’ on Jacobs' bomber i.e. no blacks on her
block” (Berman, 1988, p. 324).
3
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This brings us in turn to a third issue, namely the vexed issue of
gentrification. It seems impossible to resolve the ethical issues that
surround the preservation of neighborhoods, which Jane Jacobs ad-
vocated. With too little investment, they collapse; but with too much,
rents and prices rise and some residents are displaced. A century ago,
the first theorists of urban development assumed that in-migrants
started poor, lived in poor surroundings, and then circulated on to
better neighborhoods as they learned urban skills. This so-called
Chicago model assumed therefore that places were stable and people
were mobile, and that poor districts served an ecological purpose—all
the while ignoring the realities of capital investment, redlining and
permanent segregation (Burgess, 1925). It also ignored the reality that
some residents had it in their power to restrict the circulation of the
poor and of ethnic minorities—often one and same, of course.
This is the darker side of defending a neighborhood: one keeps out
the bulldozers, but also any people who are ‘different’. Today, that is
easily achieved by restricting the supply of rental property and af-
fordable housing. At mid-century, it was more commonly accomplished
by deeds and covenants attached to each home, which specified who
was not permitted to buy into a neighborhood (Jews and Negroes were
often identified), while landlords had free rein to discriminate against
whomever they chose. And if legal niceties failed, there was always the
reliable default position of intimidation and real violence perpetrated
against those who attempted to change the demographics of a neigh-
borhood (for numerous examples and details, see Gotham, 2000).
Today, rules and regulations—from City Hall to the very biggest
government agencies—forbid these practices. Yet the exclusions persist,
only now they tend to be the result of the invisible hand of the market.
As Page drily observes, Jacobs' home is now worth millions; her defense
of Greenwich Village was successful, at least in monetary terms. Yet
that was not a key part of her campaign. She was, rightly, concerned
about the affordability of homes, and argued strongly that restricting
construction above the five or six stories that demanded an elevator,
would ensure the balanced development she prized. Yet this has proved
to be incorrect, for reasons that are laid out by economist Glaeser
(2011). Indeed, as systematic studies show, neighborhoods that are
preserved do tend to increase in value and therefore to gentrify—the
preservation is solely of the real estate, not the community (McCabe &
Ellen, 2016).
5. The outcomes of defending neighborhoods
This paper is designed to contribute to an examination of issues
pertaining to just outcomes in the city. Its position is a simple one,
namely that we live in unequal societies. As a majority of us lives in
cities, these may manifest the inequalities generated elsewhere; alter-
natively, with sophisticated policies, they may ameliorate them. In part
this amelioration is undertaken by the public process, in part by the
market and in part it is shaped by demands from residents.
It is a comment on the rigidities of urban affairs in the Eisenhower
era that in order to create a rhetorical space for resident participation,
Jane Jacobs had to seek to destroy the legitimacy of the planning
process. Only with the eclipse of the expert could laypeople have their
say, and this accounts for the vitriol that she poured across an entire
profession. This is however an extreme position. Sidelining all plan-
ners—whom we might today label ‘knowledge-holders’—leaves us with
‘stakeholders’. While the ideal policy process is one which integrates
expert and contextual opinion (Adhya, 2012), Jacobs's activism—and
thus her writing—was opposed to such a compromise.
While residents certainly have situated knowledge and therefore
know best about what happens in their neighborhood, they also have a
vested interest in policies and outcomes that promote that place. The
second half of this paper explores the criticism that Jacobs' worldview
was, in reality, little more than an extrapolation of a basic NIMBYism (a
defense of a privileged neighborhood within a diversifying city), with
the result that both the foundations and the constructions of her
A. Kirby
arguments are regressive. They represent, in short, the antithesis of any
model of justice. These arguments revolve around three basic points,
which will be developed in turn.
5.1. Building a big picture from jigsaw pieces
My first point is that Jacobs is promoting a view of urban life based
on human behavior, something she shared with her contemporary
Erving Goffman. Both were fascinated by the observation of nuances
and quirks, although their norms were very different: Jacobs was ob-
sessed with crime and normality, while Goffman was equally intrigued
with deviance and abnormality. Goffman's work seems strange and
distant to us today, full of antiquated etiquette rules about dealing with
‘beggars’ or nodding to acquaintances in the street (Goffman, 1971). It
fails because it is descriptive yet normative. As Fine and Manning
(2003) observe “The analysis of behavior in public places, while it has
not entirely disappeared, remains a small field, perhaps because of the
perceived triviality barrier. […] the micro-examination of public life
has not further developed a set of innovative and powerful concepts as
was evident in Goffman's finest work” (p. 72).
Jacobs' writings have better stood the test of time because they
possess a narrative quality and her actors do not receive the same su-
perior gaze as did Goffman's. Yet this remains a problematic approach,
based as it is upon a subjective presentation of events. Jacobs' ob-
servations of Hudson Street have become part of a narrative that we tell
ourselves about 20th century Manhattan, which includes West Side
Story, New Yorker cartoons, seemingly endless Woody Allen movies and
the death of Kitty Genovese (discussed in Kirby, 2016). Goffman's ap-
proach can contribute to our understanding of individual behavior—his
work on front and back regions is especially useful—though it did not
allow him to build up a cumulating theory of behavior within the city,
however. The same is true of Jacobs' portraits of the ‘sidewalk bal-
let’—they are illustrative and little more (1961, pp. 50–4). Perhaps
another reason for this is that while Jane Jacobs wrote a great deal
about the street, she actually spent remarkably little time there
(Gopnik, 2016). She was no flâneuse—and according to Marshall
Berman, she was not much of a New Yorker either. He begins one of the
final chapters in All that is Solid with a panegyric to Jacobs, with whom
he shared a deep and abiding contempt for Robert Moses. However,
towards the end he takes off in a different direction, contrasting his
experiences in the Bronx with hers in Greenwich Village. As he points
out, her world was one of advantage and even “snobbish ignorance”
(Berman, 1988, p. 325).
5.2. The Cold Warrior
Given the way in which she is still invoked so often, it can be
something of a shock to be reminded of Jacobs' antiquity. Born during
the First War, she was a child of the Depression; her adulthood was
shaped by the great ideological struggles of the 1930s and 40s, and
when she entered the public sphere it was defined by the imperative to
celebrate American individuality in contrast to the social conformity of
the USSR. One way in which this manifested itself was in terms of
unease about the sameness of the suburbs which were appearing around
all American cities, and a concomitant urge to celebrate “the life of
great American cities” rather than their death (Modarres & Kirby,
2010).
Another of Jacobs' contemporaries was Ronald Reagan. While he
was of course much more explicitly associated with the anti-Communist
cause, both shared a reactionary outlook and both promoted the mantra
that government was the problem, never the solution. Given what we
know about Robert Moses, this oppositional stance seems entirely ra-
tional. Regional transport planning smacked of the Marshall Plan in
Europe or the TVA, something done to people rather than for people. As
Riesman (1957) observed at the time, “the air is sodden—the cold war
absorbs much of our energy, and we struggle, not to plan, but even to
4
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
register what is happening to our fantastically expanding economy,
population and metropolitan malaise” (p. 125).
For Jacobs, to ‘fight city hall’ was the imperative for any neigh-
borhood or district. Yet she extended this imprimatur far beyond the
destruction wrought by expressways. She not only had very explicit
rules for how long a block should be and what structures it should
contain, she also had norms for the height of buildings, as noted earlier.
Even modestly vertical proposals, such as a nine-storey library for NYU,
received her opposition (Glaeser, 2011, p. 147).
What causes one to recoil today is the opprobrium that is draped
across all planning interventions. For Jacob, any proposed change was
an intervention, and any intervention was destruction. Throughout her
major work, the ‘Death’ of the title is connected to professionals who
practice “pseudoscience” which results in “mindless, routinized city
program[s]” (p. 124). This is the point at which preservation of turf
becomes a crusade to impose values on others, which may, or may not,
have just consequences. It certainly has economic outcomes. As Glaeser
indicates, Jacobs' grasp of economic principles was unsteady, and she
assumed things about the property market that were already at odds
with current events, as renting began to become a less favorable option.
McCabe and Ellen (2016) write about the tendency for the number of
housing units in a neighborhood to decline and for rentals to disappear
after a preservation designation: “homeownership rates increase after a
neighborhood has been designated as part of a historic district, perhaps
as a result of the conversion of multifamily dwellings into single-family
homes, or the sale of rental units to homebuyers. Given that low-income
households disproportionately rent their housing units, a decline in
rental units means fewer housing options for low-income households”
(p. 144).
Reading commentary today on Jacobs as a pioneer feminist with
lofty aspirations (Van den Berg, 2017), one can only be disappointed
that her activism held her neighbors together in the face of a planning
process that she loathed, but then surrendered them to the economic
forces that she endorsed. As Gopnik (2016) writes, “the Jacobs street, a
perfect reflection of the miracle of self-organizing systems that free
markets create, becomes a perfect reflection of the brutal … destruction
that free markets enforce”. As he laments, “the West Village is un-
recognizable today” (p. 11).
5.3. Science and pseudo-science
Jacobs offered a view of the city that was very detailed in its claims
for density, building height and so forth, emphasizing the link between
urban design and social outcomes. Her advocacy for her tenets, such as
the most desirable mix of residential and commercial activities, was
though not supported via empirical work—which is a little ironic, given
her claims that the planning profession was peddling “pseudo-science
built on a foundation of nonsense” (Marshall, 2012, p. 257).
As mentioned already, this point is fully explored by Stephen
Marshall in his excellent 2012 paper. He writes “clearly, there have
been many investigations that have ‘followed’ Jacobs' work, on density,
mixed use, social capital, crime and so on, but generally these works
simply restate Jacobs' assertions as if already factually established”
(Marshall, 2012, p. 262). Most important is that on the few occasions
when empirical work has been done to test the propositions, they have
been found wanting. This began in the 1970s and has continued to the
present. Jacobs claimed for instance that gas stations are bad for cities
as they encourage automobile use, while bars are good (as they en-
courage pedestrian traffic): not surprisingly, this has been refuted (bars
may be associated with activity, but some of it, predictably, involves
drunken behavior). In a detailed examination published recently,
Anderson, MacDonald, Bluthenthal, and Ashwood (2012) found that
other hypothesized relationships were reversed, stating for instance
“Jacobs had it backwards; rather than commercial uses reducing crime
in residential areas we found the converse to be true—residential par-
cels appear to reduce crime in commercial areas” (p. 755).6
A. Kirby
A key claim made by Jacobs relates to the organic relations between
people in neighborhoods, which she termed ‘social capital’ (and she was
one of the first, perhaps the first, to use the term: 1961, p. 138). For her,
social capital was a reservoir of goodwill that provided the energy to
maintain what she termed ‘neighborhood networks’. This is an evi-
dently reasonable statement, insofar as it is impossible to imagine a
functioning neighborhood that lacks any form of network organization.
Yet we need to once again contrast Jacobs' vison with subsequent re-
finements of the term. Social capital as an attribute has been ex-
haustively investigated, most visibly by Putnam (2001), who contrasts
what he terms ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ capital. Colleagues and I have
specifically applied these terms to neighborhood networks and action in
an empirical study of Phoenix, involving measures of class, ethnicity,
tenure and stability (Larsen, Harlan, Hackett, Kirby & Nelson, 2004).
What is most crucial about these refinements is that they point to what
we can think of as positive and negative networks. For instance, bonding
social capital is cohesion, but it may also be defensive and thus po-
tentially negative: it is manifested in terms of the exclusionary cove-
nants mentioned above. Bridging social capital is more typically posi-
tive, as it extends beyond a neighborhood, and permits the formation of
alliances with others.
This example supports the insight that social activism at the
neighborhood level is much more complex than many readers infer
from Jane Jacobs' blueprints. As we have seen, Death and Life has been
used as a guidebook to small scale development and the importance of
public space; it has been especially inspirational for those who advocate
for ‘the right to the city’, in contexts such as homelessness and the
encroachment of private property rights into formerly public spaces.
Yet as previous papers have argued, neither organic neighborhoods nor
public spaces are necessarily the places in which progressive values
thrive simply because they display the open interactions of the sort
praised by Jacobs (Kirby, 2008, 2016). As already noted, mid-century
New York was highly segregated, and its public spaces were carefully
monitored to ensure that they were occupied by the ‘right’ people. That
is why crime was of such compelling importance to Jacobs and why the
Genovese case was such a cause célèbre in 1964. It spoke directly to the
specter of black rapists (although by this date and in this place the
lynching was entirely judicial), and the need for eyes upon the street. In
short, when we read about the ‘sidewalk ballet’ as a celebration of open
interaction, we are overlooking just how structured things really were
on Hudson Street.
6. When justice confronts gentrification
This paper has argued that Jane Jacobs offered a vision of how to
make cities better places, which is why her ‘brand’ has strengthened
over seven decades. An emphasis upon people in places—rather than
cars, or skyscrapers—seems an obvious way forward, and her will-
ingness to confront bureaucracy and the bulldozer resonates in this
oppositional age. Yet as suggested here, this stance is rooted in partial
insights and even contradictions. Moreover, this problem has become
more sharply visible as more of our population is based in urban areas.
Increasingly, society and city are one; the failures of the former are
manifested in the latter. That is especially true of the geologically deep
inequalities of wealth and privilege which exist between those who
have—one is tempted to write ‘everything’, which in the city is revealed
as a functioning network of homes, retail and leisure ‘experiences’
connected via private transport—and those have little (manifested as
endless displacement), or nothing (manifested as homelessness).
The Jacobs model is a defensive one, designed to preserve, and to
resist change. It can be applied normatively, as New Urbanists have
6
Some empirical investigations are hard to decode. Sung and Lee (2015) examined
‘urban vitality’, which they translated as walking. I am not convinced that the two are as
interchangeable as they suggest.
5
Cities xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
attempted, yet in both contexts, the outcomes tend to make things
worse for some, rather than better for all. This comes about because the
focus is upon the neighborhood; it is a micro-scale focus that, as we
have seen, views the city as a jigsaw puzzle, a place of fragments. That
may in large measure be true of individual experiences within civil
society, but not of the market or of politics. Individual neighborhoods
and districts may maintain and even prosper but often by pushing off
the externalities—those that come with life in any city—on to others.
One of the clearest ways in which we can see the limits to experi-
ence, as opposed to analysis, is revealed by thinking about the city in
environmental terms. This is something that gets little attention from
Jacobs, beyond routine mentions of ‘city parks’, which she saw as parts
of the organic morphology of blocks and land-uses. Yet in recent years,
a concern for sustainability has caused a reassessment of amenities,
with the refurbishment of industrial sites and the installation of bike
paths and similar additions. These are pleasant for residents, but tend to
produce “environmental gentrification”, followed again by displace-
ment of the low-income resident. This has been documented, for in-
stance, in New Orleans, where attempts to create greenways were im-
mediately seen as an effort to introduce an alien planning concept and,
in a deeply segregated city, as “ethnic cleansing” (Fields, 2009). In New
York, “policies that encourage these improvements tend not to be
linked to a broader social-equity agenda, so low- and middle-income
residents are forced into peripheral neighbourhoods where population
densities are lower, commutes are longer and environmental problems
are more common. Many sustainability gains are simply a regressive
redistribution of amenities across places” (Wachsmuth, Cohen, &
Angelo, 2016, p. 392).
The key issues here extend far from environmental concerns to
connect with other dimensions of the city; and they do so in very basic
terms with regards to social justice. Just outcomes in the city cannot be
considered only at the scale of the individual neighborhood or district,
insofar as this misses the spillover effects from one to another. And as
we scale up to the city or region, we move beyond the limits of ex-
perience and into the realm of data and analysis.
7. Conclusions
Jacobs' premises have been explored over the decades by scholars
who have focused on the power of institutions within our economic
system and the limits to individual pushback. That is not of course to
argue for quiescence; but it is to argue for a richer politics that trans-
cends the lived experience. It is to argue that social justice does not
emerge solely from within civil society; but rather that it can be shaped
within planning and design as a redistributive process—one that offsets
the “burdens of place” in ways that individual residents and their
neighborhoods cannot accomplish alone (Vojnovic et al., 2013).
As Marshall (2016) observed of Jane Jacobs, “she worshipped the
local, the ballet of the streets, without seeing all the factors that made
that dance possible. It's important not to try to copy the design of a
street or place, without recognizing the foundation for that design,
which can include physical infrastructure as well as legal and financial
regulation” (unpaginated). By her concern for the street, she margin-
alizes the value of more complex redistributive processes—such as the
planning process itself. As we find sometimes within the contemporary
sustainability literature, there can be a naïve belief that any one of a
handful of ‘urbanisms’ can produce a better quality of life for all
(Carmona, 2014). In some fortunate enclaves, with their teeming
sidewalks and artisanal cafés, the heirs to Greenwich Village recreate
Jacobs' visions. But these are Potemkin Villages, places of trust fund
privilege, which have little in common with real neighborhoods in real
cities.
Acknowledgements
I am pleased to recognize two anonymous reviewers and the guest
A. Kirby
editors of this special issue for their feedback and encouragement, and
Stephen Marshall, whose work helped shape some of the ideas pre-
sented here. All the usual disclaimers of course apply.
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