Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, revolutionised urban theory. This essay kicks off a series exploring Jacobs’ influential ideas and their potential to address today’s urban challenges and enhance city living.
Adam Louis Sebastian Lehodey, the author of this collection of essays, studies philosophy and economics on the dual degree between Columbia University and SciencesPo Paris. Having grown up between London and Paris, he is energised by the questions of urban economics, the role of the metropolis in the global economy, urban governance and cities as spontaneous order. He works as an Applied Research Intern at the Mercatus Center.
Since man is a political animal, and an intensely social existence is a necessary condition for his flourishing, then it follows that the city is the best form of spatial organisation. In the city arises a form of synergy, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, for the remarkable thing about cities is that they tap into the brimming potential of every human being. In nowhere but the city can one find such a variety of human ingenuity, cooperation, culture and ideas. The challenge for cities is that they operate on their own logic. Cities are one of the best illustrations of spontaneous order. The city in history did not emerge as the result of a rational plan; rather, what the city represents is the physical manifestation of millions of individuals making decisions about where to locate their homes, carry out economic transactions, and form intricate social webs. This reality is difficult to reconcile with our modern preference for scientific positivism and rationalism. But for the Polis to flourish, it must be properly understood by the countless planners, reformers, politicians and the larger body of citizens inhabiting the space.
Enter Jane Jacobs. As the story of cities reached a point at which the assault on them seemed so great, so forceful and so fierce that it seemed there was no turning back, Jacobs, in her Magnum Opus ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ became one of their staunchest advocates, reminding us of their role in cultivating diversity and progress whilst also underscoring the logic on which they operate. It has been over half a century since Jacobs published this seminal work of literature. Its effects have certainly been felt, ushering in a shift in how planners, developers and policymakers alike approach urban planning, shifting their focus onto mixed-use developments, more walkable downtowns, and the cultivation of metropolitan diversity. Yet this book was never intended as an obscure manual for city planners and government mandarins. Rather it should be read as a robust defence of dense urban living aimed at underscoring its importance to overall human flourishing. This essay posits that the uses of cities go far beyond the economic dimension – they extend themselves into forging deep and meaningful human ties, stimulating intellectual and spiritual advancement, and playing an important role in what makes humans human. Revisiting The Death and Life of Great American Cities allows us to see how this continues to be true today and why the vitality and success of our cities are of importance to all who care about the success and flourishing of the human species.
Economic dimension of cities
Addressing the obvious first, very little of the material advancement that humanity has seen throughout its existence would be possible were it not for the economic diversity that cities help to cultivate. If this argument is made explicit at several points throughout the Death and Life of American Cities, it is implicit at every point throughout the book. In connecting millions of people in one place, the city acts as a giant labour market, allowing employers to find talent and workers to make a living. Cities are what translate abstract supply and demand graphs into tangible economic exchange, allowing buyers and sellers to convalesce in one place and permitting mutually beneficial exchange to take place. In a chapter entitled ‘The Need for Concentration,’ Jacobs highlights the role that high densities play in generating economic diversity, namely, that at low densities, businesses offering certain specialised goods could never afford to sustain themselves for there simply wouldn’t be enough demand. The calculation is reversed at higher densities. ‘By its nature,’ she writes, ‘the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by travelling; namely, the strange.’ Concentration goes further than providing businesses with consumers. Businesses do not exist in a vacuum, they exist and rely on an intricate network of support from suppliers, financial institutions, vendors and other interested stakeholders, all of which must be derived from somewhere. Connecting all of these people in one place greatly increases efficiencies and further allows for the quick transmission of ideas and innovation. This idea might further be connected with that of Joseph Heinrich’s in chapter 12 of his 2016 book, The Secret to Our Success. There exist many great minds whose discoveries have transformed the course of our civilisation (Edison, Kepler, and Einstein, to give a few examples). But progress and advancement do not depend on these great minds alone, what is needed is the broader diffusion and integration of these ideas into the society at large. Genius alone won’t suffice, as Heinrich’s anthropological examples on Tasmania demonstrate; that long-disconnected island, isolated from the progress and ideas of the broader society, regressed significantly during that time when it was disconnected. Cities, if permitted to do so, have the opposite effect, serving as both cultivators and connectors of new ideas that otherwise would never have been.
Context in which The Death and Life of Great American Cities Emerged
Jacobs goes to great lengths to show why (then) contemporary approaches to urban planning and policy were greatly undermining the role of cities in connecting and cultivating economic diversity. She opens her book with the line: ‘This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.’ That planning and rebuilding to which she was referring in 1961, and to some extent still present to this day despite the influence her works have had, was based on the belief that cities, despite their economic advantages, were not desirable places to live and were instead hotbeds of vice and criminality. Spearheaded by British urban planner Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City proposed an alternative to dense urban growth, designating permitted land uses in specific areas, segregating residential, commercial and industrial uses, and most importantly suppressing densities so they could never rise above a certain point. A slightly amended version of these ideas came in the form of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (look it up if you’re not already familiar – it’s striking!); modernism in physical form which quickly sprang from the academic to the physical realm with the construction of vast swathes of housing projects across the United States, Soviet Union and beyond. Adding to the malaise of the city was the City Beautiful movement, kickstarted by the Columbian Exposition of 1893 which began a movement of concentrating civic buildings all in one place. The proponents of these three types of new urbanism against which Jacobs takes aim were rarely ill-intentioned, she stresses throughout. However, their ideas were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what led to successful economic diversity in cities.
For a city to succeed, grow and thrive, mixed-use of both commerce and people is needed so that an area can sustain itself uniformly throughout the day. For new ideas and businesses to emerge and take hold, the city must contain a variety of both new and old units; old units allowing economically risky ideas or with low overheads to exist. For neighbourhoods to improve, change must be gradual rather than cataclysmic, ensuring that communities and neighbourhoods have the time to form robustly. Density, more than anything, matters, but it is essential that this diversity exists in a way that the city can make use of. Density, unless accompanied by mixed-uses, short blocks which permit street life and sustain a variety of economic uses, means very little. From that effective density (that is, a density that is effective because it is combined with reasons for people to intermingle and interact with people outside of their usual social circles, if even lightly), stems all of the other benefits that cities confer: strong communities, safer streets as there will be many people to watch over them, new businesses which can tap into the city’s broader resources, and the opportunity for spontaneous and unplanned social interaction.
In response to the stultifying controls that have been imposed on our cities in the form of planning, land use, parking requirements, and density thresholds (among others) has emerged a vital movement of pro-housing advocates in the post-Jacobs era. The modern YIMBY, or Yes-In-My-Backyard, movement has rightly focussed on reducing controls and ensuring we build as much as possible, wherever possible. Condominiums, high-rises, sprawling suburban developments; new developments in any form are welcomed by YIMBYs as a means of reducing housing costs and enabling people to tap into the untapped potential that cities offer. And rightly so: pro-housing advocates often refer to the so-called ‘housing theory of everything,’ which links a lack of affordable housing to a plethora of social issues, including poverty, lack of access to education, and environmental degradation. There are strong reasons to be sympathetic to these arguments: increasing housing affordability benefits not just those who are already in cities, so too does it permit thousands more to tap into the places where they can be most productive, tap into, and create new opportunities. But Jane Jacobs offers something for us YIMBYs too, by showing us that our cities offer so much more than just economic benefits. But this is only so if urban development takes a particular form.
Cities as cultivators of diversity
‘A city’s greatest asset,’ Jacobs declares, is its ‘very wholeness in bringing together people with communities of interest.’ Cities play a central role in cultivating civic life, they allow individuals with similar interests to come in a way and interact spontaneously in a way that’s never possible at smaller densities. In suburbia, human interaction is governed by ‘togetherness,’ the requirement that much shall be shared,’ amongst residents ‘or else they must settle for lack of contact.’ Parents attend the same PTA meetings, soccer games, and birthday parties. The bar for friendship in suburbia is necessarily higher, for it entails a much greater level of commitment and intimacy. ‘Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results.’ Cities, and particularly lively sidewalks, permit another type of civic life to emerge: one where humans are loosely connected and can then choose to develop these relationships further if they so choose. Jacobs provides vivid examples from her street: the local grocers that one can ask for favours like holding keys, individuals who watch over the children of others and keep them out of trouble, ‘connectors’ who know many individuals loosely and, in connecting them, bring about the political fabric required for self-governance.
One critique levelled at Jacobs’ urban vision is that it is overly rose-tinted. This is not the case: in New York, in London, in Paris, there continue to exist pockets of urban life with a strong underlying social fabric, needed now more than ever in an age where people are increasingly inward-looking as a result of social media. Surrounding the Great Cities is another model: areas like the Clarendon neighbourhood in Virginia are a good illustration of how we can tap into the benefits of density and concentration whilst still allowing those in the suburbs to tap into these vibrant areas.
The city, notes Aristotle in Book 3 of Politics, ‘must be regarded not just for the sake of living together,’ but rather ‘for the sake of noble action.’ Jacobs is in many ways an intellectual heir of this thought: presenting why the spatial dimension matters in how we live, showing how concentration and lively mixed-use sidewalks cultivate further diversity, progress and strong civic life, then underscoring why not any form of planning will do: only that which permits for spontaneous use cases, that is not overly regimented, and most of all allow for cross-use and walkability, will suffice.
Jacobs and the defence of cities
The genius of Jane Jacobs is that her critique, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is not limited to that. This work of literature, and the richness in which her prose and descriptions come together to form an image of the city truly do make it a work of literature, fundamentally challenges the status quo and persuades us as to why urban life is so desirable. Americans have come to view the American Dream and suburban life with a white picket fence as synonymous. Jacobs urges us to look beyond that, to recognise that the city is not a place we should be resigned to living in because of the economic effects. Rather, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a reminder of how the diversity of cities is just a reflection of the individuality and uniqueness inherent in every one of us.
