Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead
In case you missed it (as I did), Jane Jacobs died on April 25, 2006, 10 days shy of her 90th birthday. As the Int’l Herald Tribune put it: ’she reshaped the way people viewed cities.’ And, according to the Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh): ’she wrote the book on urban planning.’
To those congratulatory eulogies, I proffer the following:
Jacobs acutely forecasts the chills and terrors of the end of this era and this civilization.
This forecasting is captured in “Dark Age Ahead”, published in 2004 by Vintage Books. Her name may be linked most often to her first book, “The Death & Life of Great American Cities”. But, I will hold the deceased Jacobs dear for her last published work. Always an observer with the long-term eye, Jacobs ends her final published work with these pointed words:
History has repeatedly demonstrated that empires seldom seem to retain sufficient cultural self-awareness to prevent them from ovrereaching and overgrasping. They have neglected to recognize that the true power of a successful culture resides in its example. This is a patient and grown-up attitutde to take. To take it successfully, a society must be self-aware. Any culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity become weak and hollow. A culture can avoid that hazard only by tenaciously retaining the underlying values responsible for the culture’s nature and success.
I was captivated by the gloomy title, the paperback’s burgundy cover, and from the first page of its brief 176 pages [it includes an additional 48 pages of Notes & Comments, which detail Japans’ Ainu minority, the astronomical rise of car ownership in the US & Canada, the demise of China’s shipping mastery of the 15th Century and plenty more about the chanages afoot in global superpowers in decline].
As a short obit on The Nation’s website states:
Jacobs’s teachings are as complex as the complexity she discovered in vibrant cities. Understanding about anything, she argued, comes only through direct observation and persistent inquiry. Her inclusive spirit emphasized the value of all participants and gave greater weight to the informed citizen than the credentialed expert.
Complex, yet straightforward in her ability to present such compelling challenges to the status quo. I would be confounded how the status quo could have been such when presented with Jacobs’ precise criticisms shaking not only Robert Moses to the core, but the smoke and mirrors promising suburbia & that American Dream.
RIP. May we not forget your wisdoms in spite of our days ahead & collective lack of self-awareness.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Ms. Jacobs sure changed the way we viewed the modern metropolis, all right–her views among liberals have become almost a secular religion. Not only did she fail to comprehend that suburbia was the natural offshoot of megalopolitanism. She also trashed the work of her former mentor, Lewis Mumford, and his Decentrist associates, in a most scurrilous, twisted manner, arguing that it was they who were somehow resonsible, as much as or even MORE so, for the disaster of bureaucratic public housing highrises–a development which Mumford and Bauer themselves attacked. Finally, as Mumford himself argued in “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies to Urban Cancer,” Ms. Jacobs approach to the metropolis and the market was simple-minded, fiscally tight-fisted, and crudely celebratory. She and her mentor Nathan Glazer despised planning, most of all socialist planning. She was a right wing liberal, and I am disappointed but not surprised that a left-liberal mag like Clamor should celebrate her, given the sorry state of left-liberal politics today (are you going to support Hilary Clinton for president, like you did John Kerry?).