Submitted by Ben Hemric, Nov 20, 2007 08:43

My take on Jane Jacobs is that she was actually not as anti-garden city, in general, and not as anti-Forest Hills Gardens, in particular, as people might think. What Jacobs -- the great pragmatist -- was concerned about in her work (and especially in "Death and Life of Great American Cities") was why certain city districts (and cities) thrive and others stagnate and decay. For Jacobs, the problem with the Garden City movement was that it claimed to be about cities but wasn't really about cities at all -- it was really about developing an entirely different lifestyle as an alternative to cities. Thus, it was an evasion of the real issue that was of concern to Jacobs (i.e., what makes real cities thrive or decay), and it was a false bill of goods being sold to people (such as the concerned citizens and government officials of real cities) who were also concerned with improving and solving the problems facing genuine cities (and not in ditching real cities and creating competitive alternatives!). However Jacobs comes across to me as being far less judgmental and urbanistically "snobby" then people seem to be making her out to be these days. (I'm thinking of the text of the Municipal Art Society exhibit and a number of recent articles about Jacobs which appear to me to be talking about her as though she was a kind of "snooty" Emily Post of urbanism, someone who's main mission in life was decreeing which neighborhoods exhibited the urban equivalent of "good breeding," "good posture," "proper manners," etc. -- and which didn't.) The way I see Jacobs, In contrast, is that she was someone who focused on cities and the people who lived in cities and really didn't concern herself with the way other people chose to live their lives. If other people preferred instead to live in a garden city neighborhood (or on a farm, or in a forest, or in a small fishing village, or in a small town, etc.), that was no skin off her back -- just don't tell her that this is "urbanism" or a valid substitute for urbanism, and just don't have the gov't subsidize or promote it at the expense of genuine cities.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.