The Project, The Guide
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), the vivacious New Yorker-turned-Torontonian, urbanist, and community activist whose work has defined much of contemporary urbanism in America, was truly a giant. She has since her emergence as a force in Lower Manhattan politics of the 1950s and 1960s reached a level of near-mythic reverence. In her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs approached urbanism and the urban fabrics of our lives as a 20th century Sherlock Holmes, a real detective working to uncover the mysteries of what makes a great metropolis like New York tick. Her intuition from observations of both great forces and minute, often overlooked details was and is remarkable.
More than fifty years after the publication of Great American Cities, the lessons and observations remain prescient. Her discussion of myriad topics finds a welcome home in 2014. Two weeks ago, I stood outside a neighborhood bar in Nob Hill, an affluent hilltop enclave just northwest of San Francisco’s downtown core. While waiting for a few friends to arrive, I chatted with a longtime resident of the neighborhood — indeed, he has lived in Nob Hill since its name graced the pages of Jacobs’s book. We made pleasant smalltalk, discussing a few great hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the area, the transformation of the boundary between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin, just south (and radically different, both socioeconomically and racially). Yet, in our brief conversation, another gentleman walked by and spoke with my friendly stranger; they caught up on neighbors’ movements and travels, some minor gossip. The second man told my new friend that he would leave a key for him at the corner store, providing access to an out of town neighbor’s apartment so he could check in over the coming weekend.
Jacobs’s discussion of “neighborhood key holders”—an indispensable function of urban neighborhoods—had come to life, persisting with equal function and social importance in 2014 as it had in 1959. For the gentleman casually chatting on a Tuesday night on California Street, bemoaning the horrid winter storms back east, a vital neighborhood performs as it always has. Thus, as a guide to understanding where and how we live in our great American cities, Jane Jacobs remains as potent a voice for reason as ever. Her experiences and perspective echo today, fifty years, two Web booms, and 2,800 miles away.
Scope
In the following series of posts (I cannot guarantee a length or an estimate of what this project will encompass, except in the grainiest of overviews) I will channel my inner Jane Jacobs. Although her works made reference to San Francisco and to the Bay Area more broadly, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is preeminently a book about New York. Similarly, her later works are preeminently books about particular, individual Canadian cities and provinces, such as Toronto and Quebec, and so on. As discussed below, with the ongoing upheavals and breakneck reconstitution of the city of San Francisco, now seems an appropriate time to tackle a work such as this — an account of the changes, the challenges, and the opportunities facing one of America’s great places.
With Jacobs’s work as a guideline, I will trace over her sociological, economic, and historical accounts of New York, applied anew (and, I hope, with integrity and veracity) to San Francisco. These entries will discuss the various physical and social dimensions of great (and not so great) urban spaces, including the seemingly mundane—from sidewalks and their various services to a city and its neighborhoods, to the essence of good neighborhood parks—to issues at the grandest of cosmopolitan scales. Think of this as a tour of the City by the Bay, peering beyond satellite maps and skyline panoramas to the details of street-level life (and death), one block, neighborhood, and district at a time.
San Francisco in 2014
Why San Francisco? It’s a reasonable question. Ultimately, today’s San Francisco is a fascinating and compelling counterpoint to Jacobs’s original exploration of mid-20th century New York City. Writing in the first of several decades of ‘urban decline,’ Jacobs’s New York was a city losing population to its suburban fringes while slum-clearing, massive ‘affordable housing’ project developments, and radical vehicular transit projects reconfigured the skyline. 2014 San Francisco is a stark contrast: a massive influx of affluence, extraordinary population growth, gentrification, a housing crisis, socioeconomic inequalities with ethnic and racial undertones, and the ubiquitous threats of losing the city’s unmistakable character. Despite these differences in time, circumstance, and geographic location, however, the insights and lessons offered by socially and environmentally responsible urban planning remain quite consistent.
Beyond Jane—Michael Sorkin
Her irreverent wit and incisive writings notwithstanding, it must be noted that Jane Jacobs is far from alone. In drawing inspiration from Jacobs, I do not wish to convey any image of being chained to her ideas or arguments. While powerful and certainly applicable today, the challenges of 2014 require new insights and innovations as well.
Enter Michael Sorkin. Sorkin, whose collection of essays, All Over the Map (2013), articulates a tremendous breadth and depth of issues in modern planning, architecture, and urban living (also deeply rooted in the New York milieu), provides another inspiration. In many ways, Sorkin is the heir apparent to Jacobs’s legacy and vision of urbanism; yet, there is more. He is an astute, eloquent student and instructor of contemporary urban spaces—not to mention a haltingly direct critic of mainstream architecture and planning. More than Jane Jacobs, however, he pulls his keen insights from the streets and casts the increasingly global issues of urbanism in the broadest, and certainly the most damning of terms.
The mesmerizing final essay of Sorkin’s book, “Eutopia Now!,” globalizes the context of the present project. Urbanism and its very real social, economic, and environmental ramifications—among others—frame many of the crises that are apt to unfold in this new century. Sorkin notes:
Resistance to scaling—one of utopia’s liberties—ignores the true dimensions of our crisis. . .[As of 2009, s]ix and a half billion people. Half in cities. Half of these in slums. The urban population is growing by a million people a week, and most are poor. By 2015, according to the UN, there will be 358 cities of a million or more; by mid-century, 1,000 [to include San Francisco and San Jose, CA. . . . Speaking of China’s boom and uneven endorsement of automobile-centered policies, specifically, to] their credit, the Chinese government is beginning to accelerate green moves, but the ice cap is melting fast. The canary in the mineshaft has croaked. (Sorkin, p. 375)
As Sorkin’s writings implicitly and explicitly evince, the story of the city and the vision of Jane Jacobs are neither anachronistic throwbacks relegated to irrelevance, nor are classic tenets of Jacobs’s urbanism readily applicable to heretofore unprecedented challenges of this century. The truth, as it often is, rests somewhere between. Jacobs’s feel for the pulse of urban neighborhood vitality coupled with Sorkin’s cognizance of the globalized, networked identities of today’s major cities are equally essential vantage points from which a legitimate study of the city should emerge.
Nevertheless, until her death in 2006, Jane Jacobs demonstrated a nearly unparalleled understanding of cities, their forms and struggles, their people and social fabrics, and she consequently maintains a uniquely privileged appreciation here. Writing to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg shortly before her death, Ms. Jacobs’s words find a special resonance for San Francisco:
The community’s plan [versus the city’s grand planning schemes] does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford.
(…)
I will make two predictions with utter confidence. 1. If you follow the community’s plan you will harvest a success; 2. If you [do not], you will maybe enrich a few heedless and ignorant developers, but at the cost of an ugly and intractable mistake. Even the presumed beneficiaries. . .the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit; misused environments are not good long-term economic bets. (Quoted in Sorkin, p. 234-235, emphasis mine)
Although her writing was specific, particular to a given project at a given time, this passage is general—it is virtually ubiquitously applicable in America’s great, present-day cities. And it is a call to action, a call to consider how we build our public and private spaces, as well as how we manage our brick-and-mortar and socially networked lives. Critically, it is a demand for lifting the communities that comprise our cities from the shadows of city halls, firmly placing people, families, and their wellbeing at the heart of planning. These are the foundations for the approach that will follow in this series.
I look forward to exploring this with you and sincerely welcome all ideas and feedback, commendations and criticisms. Check back for the first major entry next week, February 17-21, for an entry on Sidewalks: Safety. Thank you for reading.
About Me/Why Me?
My name is Andy Carr and I am a resident of San Francisco. I moved here in June 2013 from suburban southeastern Virginia, but I have lived in Texas, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Germany. First and foremost, I am a trained social scientist, but I am also a professional editor, a freelance writer, and a passionate urbanist. In less than eight months, I have fallen in love with my adopted hometown. In a city of passions and ambitions, my greatest hope is to contribute to the discourse on San Francisco—to preserving its many treasures while preparing it to address its challenges—to keeping this a city where passions and ambitions are engaged, achievable, and meaningful for all.
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