Alex Mazer asks, “does [Jane Jacobs’s] vision still hold true for the world today, or is her work the remnant of the politics of an era – the 1960s and 1970s – whose relevance has passed?” My answer is both yes and no. Yes, her vision holds true today, and no, her relevance hasn’t passed.
In the sixties and seventies, Torontonians were inspired by charismatic national and local leaders – Jacobs among them – who believed in sustainable communities. This leadership, supported by strong environmental and community-level policies, led us to innovation through broad, citizen-based democracy. In the 1980s, governments responded with policies that supported a cleaner, greener, and more community-relevant way of life: greenbelt and escarpment protection, waste minimization, cleaner air through pollution prevention, waterfront trails, and the globally recognized concept of sustainable development.
But, with the early-nineties recession, political momentum flagged, ideas fizzled, and our innovative policy-makers became voices in the wilderness, waiting patiently for the next green wave. We forgot (and now claim we didn’t know) the costs of the consumer lifestyle. Now, after fifteen years of inertia, the threat of global warming has parachuted us once again into a “new” era of consciousness.
Ontario’s new Places to Grow plan, which recently won the American Planning Association’s coveted Daniel Burnham Award, rests on the foundation of Jacobs’s vision – vibrant, self-sustaining communities connected by efficient transportation corridors and surrounded by green. And many of the solutions put forward by this May’s meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a network of hundreds of scientists and experts, can be found in Jacobs’s 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Hopefully, one day soon, her vision of the future will come to fruition.
Sally M. Leppard
Founder and ceo
Lura Consulting
Toronto, Ontario
Even if Alex Mazer can be forgiven for one or two appalling assertions (most notably, that Jacobs’s advocacy of lower-level government was appropriate up until the end of the Cold War, but that, post 9/11, it appears “naive and even irresponsible”), he has squandered the opportunity to give a substantive critique of an icon who he quite rightly complains seems immune.
The problem is that Mazer confines his criticisms to Jacobs’s four minor, non-urban works, tacitly endorsing her most consequential ideas even as he claims to be reappraising her. In fact, there are plenty of reasons for doubting the accuracy of Jacobs’s beliefs about urban decline and renewal, most famously outlined in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For example, many argue that her prescriptions are in part responsible for the disappearance of affordable housing in Jacobs’s own Toronto neighbourhood and, more generally, the suburbanization of poverty that Canadian cities have witnessed in recent decades. A generation of councillors and planners deployed her ideas in the name of neighbourhood preservation, and the result was social cleansing.
Mazer’s missed opportunity is even clearer in light of Michel Arseneault’s Field Note about French architect Roland Castro (“Suburban Renewal,” May). Among Castro’s considerations in rebuilding a notorious public housing project in the Parisian suburbs are some of Jacobs’s most prominent “dos and don’ts” for urban renewal: yes to short block lengths and the preservation of old buildings; no to mixed primary use and buildings abutting the sidewalk. Castro’s project is exactly the kind of thing Jacobs’s ideas should be evaluated against. She originally claimed her observations were only applicable to a small number of “great American cities,” but they’ve been employed (without her protest) far more widely than that, and the results need to be considered when assessing her legacy. A world, even a First World, of Greenwich Villages is an impossibility, and Jacobs’s vision can only really be appraised in the context of a world of banlieues and tract suburbs.
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