http://clamormagazine.org/blog/archives/jacobs-dark-age-ahead/ the official blog of Clamor Magazine. Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:57:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.3 http://clamormagazine.org/blog/archives/jacobs-dark-age-ahead/#comment-2473 Tom Smith Thu, 18 May 2006 17:57:55 +0000 http://clamormagazine.org/blog/archives/jacobs-dark-age-ahead/#comment-2473 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?). 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?).

]]>