by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Rutgers, 2006.
The new book Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, puts a human face on the woman whose hawk-like visage behind thick black glasses has solidified into an icon, but whose personal story's subtlety and surprises have fallen away in the casting process.
Author Alice Sparberg Alexiou, a longtime journalist, tells the life of Jacobs from her birth in Scranton to her death as a Canadian citizen last year at age 89. Along the way, this relatively short book, 200 pages or so, shows both the roots of Jacob's original and fresh thinking, and tells her career in greater nuance and complexity.
I never knew for example, that Jacobs lacked a college degree and had been a terrible student in high school. She did not even attempt to attend college initially. Later after moving to New York City from her native Scranton, she applied to Barnard but was rejected because of her poor high-school grades. In grade school, she was thrown out of class for impertinence, which seems in retrospect to signal her independence and lack of deference to authority.
Jacobs, who got started as a journalist freelancing for Vogue and other popular magazines, got into writing about planning and architecture almost by accident in the early 1950s. In just a few years she was lecturing at Harvard and had come up with the ideas that became the basis for her groundbreaking classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is still a shock reading the precision and confidence of Jacob's writing, to think how relatively new she was to the entire subject, not to mention untrained in development, planning or design.
After the release of Death and Life, Alexiou tells how Jacobs lead the fight against urban renewal in her own Greenwich Village, her eventual relocation to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War, and her move into writing about economics more than urban planning. In broad terms, most casual students of urban planning know this story. It is the more complete telling of it that makes Alexiou's book worthwhile.
Lewis Mumford, for example, who is frequently cast in newspaper stories as Jacobs' great antagonist, is shown more accurately in Alexiou's book as agreeing with Jacobs most of the time and having initially helped her in her career. The two great writers about cities were united in their hatred for conventional urban renewal and Robert Moses' plans to hollow out Manhattan with freeways. The two parted company only in their respective solutions to urban decay, with Mumford favoring the creation of Garden Cities outside urban centers. Jacobs contemptuously described Garden Cities and Mumford's support for them in Death and Life, thus drawing a line between the former friends.
Mumford and Jacobs were very similar in many respects. Both were journalists first, both lacked college degrees and were essentially self-taught. Alexiou apparently missed these parallels, because she doesn't mention them and at one point uses Mumford as an example of academic pretension.
In telling Jacobs' story, Alexiou writes admiringly of the woman but does not hallow her further. She shows that Jacobs had her blind spots and could say stupid things, like in 1970 flippantly advising New Yorkers not to pay their subway fares as a way to start breaking down authority. Alexiou also criticizes Jacobs for not focusing enough on race as a factor in urban decay. I was personally unconvinced by Alexiou's criticism but she marshals strong supporting arguments.
As far as I can tell, this book by Alexiou, a longtime journalist and graduate of Columbia University's Journalism School, is the first formal biography of Jacobs. More are likely to follow as academics, who Jacobs always held in certain contempt, perhaps because of their institutions' initial rejection of her, mine the story of this great thinker of the last century for more material.
Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Rutgers, 2006.
The new book Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, puts a human face on the woman whose hawk-like visage behind thick black glasses has solidified into an icon, but whose personal story's subtlety and surprises have fallen away in the casting process.
Author Alice Sparberg Alexiou, a longtime journalist, tells the life of Jacobs from her birth in Scranton to her death as a Canadian citizen last year at age 89. Along the way, this relatively short book, 200 pages or so, shows both the roots of Jacob's original and fresh thinking, and tells her career in greater nuance and complexity.
I never knew for example, that Jacobs lacked a college degree and had been a terrible student in high school. She did not even attempt to attend college initially. Later after moving to New York City from her native Scranton, she applied to Barnard but was rejected because of her poor high-school grades. In grade school, she was thrown out of class for impertinence, which seems in retrospect to signal her independence and lack of deference to authority.
Jacobs, who got started as a journalist freelancing for Vogue and other popular magazines, got into writing about planning and architecture almost by accident in the early 1950s. In just a few years she was lecturing at Harvard and had come up with the ideas that became the basis for her groundbreaking classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is still a shock reading the precision and confidence of Jacob's writing, to think how relatively new she was to the entire subject, not to mention untrained in development, planning or design.
After the release of Death and Life, Alexiou tells how Jacobs lead the fight against urban renewal in her own Greenwich Village, her eventual relocation to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War, and her move into writing about economics more than urban planning. In broad terms, most casual students of urban planning know this story. It is the more complete telling of it that makes Alexiou's book worthwhile.
Lewis Mumford, for example, who is frequently cast in newspaper stories as Jacobs' great antagonist, is shown more accurately in Alexiou's book as agreeing with Jacobs most of the time and having initially helped her in her career. The two great writers about cities were united in their hatred for conventional urban renewal and Robert Moses' plans to hollow out Manhattan with freeways. The two parted company only in their respective solutions to urban decay, with Mumford favoring the creation of Garden Cities outside urban centers. Jacobs contemptuously described Garden Cities and Mumford's support for them in Death and Life, thus drawing a line between the former friends.
Mumford and Jacobs were very similar in many respects. Both were journalists first, both lacked college degrees and were essentially self-taught. Alexiou apparently missed these parallels, because she doesn't mention them and at one point uses Mumford as an example of academic pretension.
In telling Jacobs' story, Alexiou writes admiringly of the woman but does not hallow her further. She shows that Jacobs had her blind spots and could say stupid things, like in 1970 flippantly advising New Yorkers not to pay their subway fares as a way to start breaking down authority. Alexiou also criticizes Jacobs for not focusing enough on race as a factor in urban decay. I was personally unconvinced by Alexiou's criticism but she marshals strong supporting arguments.
As far as I can tell, this book by Alexiou, a longtime journalist and graduate of Columbia University's Journalism School, is the first formal biography of Jacobs. More are likely to follow as academics, who Jacobs always held in certain contempt, perhaps because of their institutions' initial rejection of her, mine the story of this great thinker of the last century for more material.
@RegionalPlan
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