
The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs - pmcpinto
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-prophecies-of-jane-jacobs/501104/?single_page=true
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SomeStupidPoint
I read Jane Jacobs as part of a research writing class in college, focused on
American cultural health. Essentially, the class was structured as the
professor asserting Jocabs' work as the core thesis of the class, with our
main paper for the term to either concur or dissent with it. (And hence, the
class had two components -- reading Jacobs' work and a few select others the
professor picked, dissecting the arguments and sources used, and then building
a list of related materials, finding them (eg, at the main state school
archive), reading those chosen materials, and writing a paper based on them
either concurring with or dissenting from the main body of work.

I won't claim to agree with her 100%, but like many people I disagree with,
articulating what we agree on, what we disagree on, and why is very
informative about my own views on a topic.

So, at 18, it was very formative to interact with several of her books about
city structure, how culture both emerges from and influences that structure,
and related works and topics.

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LyndsySimon
The second to last paragraph:

> No reader of Jacobs’s work would be surprised by the recent finding by a
> Gallup researcher that Donald Trump’s supporters “are disproportionately
> living in racially and culturally isolated zip codes and commuting zones.”
> These zones are latter-day incarnations of Higgins: marooned, amnesiac,
> homogenous, gutted by the diminishment of skills and opportunities. One
> Higgins is dangerous enough, for both its residents and the republic to
> which it belongs. But the nation’s Higginses have proliferated to the point
> that their residents have assumed control of a major political party.

The entire article is nothing more than an attempt to cast everyone living
outside of metropolitan areas as backwards bumpkins. It's as offensive as it
is transparent.

~~~
JimmyAustin
Just because you find it offensive, and that it is transparent, does not make
it _wrong_.

~~~
CamperBob2
Stereotyping: It's OK When We Do It

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CalChris
I read _Life and Death_ when I was 20. I was a CS student working late at
night and the only other students working that late were the architecture
students. Getting coffee one told me that _Life and Death_ was _their_ book.

So I read it. Getting a good recommendation for a book out of your subject
area is gold. Jacobs is very readable.

One idea of hers that has always stuck with me was Gradual Money vs
Cataclysmic Money. She also railed against the pointless new.

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perrick
I discovered Jane's work very recently through the "The Economy of Cities" (I
haven't read her classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" yet but
I've read others) and it's been a real eye opener for me. It's was very
enlightening to discover a theory on how important cities are to growth and
well-being.

Some of her concepts such as "import replacement" (a free market process of
discovery and division of labor within a city) can be very helpful for cities
aiming to mimick San Francisco / Silicon Valley such as Lille in France (with
its Euratechnologies neighbourhood, where I work) or Shenzen (now that it's
losing its toy factories and moving up the economic laders). And the
importance of "eyes on the street" for everybody's safety, of diversity of
shops/works for economic resilience, of serendipity for the process of
innovation (the creation of new work, in Jane Jacobs terms), etc.

And by the way, her books are an easy read too ! I'd say a real "classic" :
even more 40 years later there's still some real insights for non-urbanists.

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majormajor
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-
str...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-street-
smarts)

I read this recently, which I found to be a more interesting take on Jacobs.
In particular, on how easily linked article wants to blame trump on rural and
commuter neighborhoods as uniquely isolated and un-diverse.

I agree with the take from the New Yorker article that cities don't
organically solve this problem even if mass development is kept out -- the
history of urban life in the US over the past ten years seems to be a
_reduction_ in diversity, especially in areas without a lot of recent
development, due to skyrocketing rents and trendy-but-not-diverse incoming
populations.

I see more real diversity - people of different backgrounds interacting and
doing the same things - in a lot of suburbs these days than in more urban
cores, where's it's largely reducing to a relatively homogenous set of
affluent residents and the more-diverse-but-non-resident-and-distinct set of
Uber drivers, restaurant staff, store employees, etc.

Or, to quote:

> She believed in that virtuous, reoxygenating circle whereby density—and
> short blocks and small green spaces—guaranteed diversity. This no longer
> seems so, at least not in Manhattan. In the past fifteen years, the density
> of my Upper East Side block has remained constant, and the play of old and
> new buildings, parks and streets is unchanged. (No one can build without
> several years of planning hearings.) But we have lost two toy stores, a
> magazine store, a cigar store, and a stationery-and-card store, and gained
> two banks, a real-estate office, a giant Duane Reade drugstore, and, to the
> bafflement of the neighborhood, three French baby-clothes stores. (The best
> theory is that these are part of the settlement in hedge-fund divorces.)

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Tomte
Also highly recommended (and critical of some of Jacob's core views): Triumph
of the City by Edward Glaeser.

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jgalt212
This book is very long, but a good way to spend a few months for anyone
interested in urban planning.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

[https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-
Fall/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-
Fall/dp/0394720245/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477274954&sr=1-1)

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rustynails
I apologise that I only got 1/2 way through this article. It said very little
to me.

The article spent a bit of time talking about decline of empires. I watched a
few documentaries on the topic yesterday. A central theme that recurred was
environment and conflict with other regions. This was the point where I
decided that this article wasn't for me. I'm no historian, but, the analogy
lost me. This and the lack of details about her theory.

~~~
dilemma
It ends with a reference to Marx.

~~~
gaius
Doesn't everything? In a way?

~~~
dom0
Your comment didn't (which is a saddening reaffirmation of Marx' theories).

~~~
elcapitan
Isn't everything a reaffirmation of Marx' theories?

