Myles Leslie
Toronto, Ontario
It feels almost churlish to critique Alex Mazer’s article on Jane Jacobs (“City Limits,” May), in which he asks whether it is time to rethink our view of her as a visionary. His dismissal of the visionary status of Toronto’s secular saint is so gentle that he seems almost sorry to be asking the question. But ask it he does, and his answer is baffling.
How can anyone attempt to dismiss Jacobs as a one-book-wonder and forget Cities and the Wealth of Nations, a reinvention of economics almost as revolutionary, persuasive, and appealing as her masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities? And why would Mazer skip over that compelling book to devote so much ink to deriding a minor work like The Question of Separatism?
These books share a core vision that was central to Jacobs’s work and the driving force behind her activism. She knew from relentless observation that vibrant, dense networks produce more good ideas than the brightest individual, that chaotic and engaged interaction evolves those ideas better than most costly think tanks, and that diversity really is our strength. That’s why she favoured the creativity of communities over the dictates of demagogues. And that’s why she so forcefully argued, before it was popular to believe it, that cities had taken hold as the most important socio-political unit despite the dominance of the nation-state. Her subsequent work enriches that legacy with increasingly complex views of the forces that condition the dynamic interplay of communities, ideas, and initiative and the impact of those forces, for good or ill, on the world.
Mazer concedes that Jacobs’s vision produced great achievements, but even then, he underestimates them. For example, while he credits Jacobs’s reshaping of Toronto’s politics with the stunning electoral victory of David Miller in 2003, he overlooks her impact on what were, at the time, equally surprising victories by David Crombie, John Sewell, and Barbara Hall. He also minimizes the significance of the expressway victories in New York and Toronto, which were critical to the success of those cities and inspired the revitalization of inner cities across North America.
Finally, and inexplicably, Mazer questions Jacobs’s visionary status on the basis of her active role in everyday affairs. This is historically wrong; Jacobs’s impact was almost always through ideas and rarely through direct mobilization. More importantly, it is philosophically indefensible. What are visionaries for if not to guide real action? It is an affirmation of Jacobs’s visionary status that the foundation that took up her legacy chose to call itself Ideas That Matter. Would that more of our thinkers assumed their ideas should.
Sean Meagher
Toronto, Ontario
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