THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Jane Jacobs and the American City
Scruton, Roger
THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Roger Scruton Jane Jambs and the American City w'ANE JACOBS, WHO DIED EARLIER THIS YEAR, wrote little, held no academic position, and espoused views that were widely...
...But to turn now to her The Death and Life of American Cities, published in 1961, is to encounter a store of wisdom and insight that the intervening years have only served to confirm...
...We have virtually no overhead...
...Like all gatherings in which the values of civilization are on display, cities depend upon good manners...
...Embassy is located in the nation's designated capital...
...While the Palestinians lay claim to the eastern part of Jerusalem and wish it to become the capital of a hoped-for Palestinian state, nobody questions the western part of the city to be Israeli...
...A true city is built by its residents, in that every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many residents have wanted, rather than something that a few self-appointed experts have planned...
...Only then will they facilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life...
...and good manners require the modest accommodation to neighbors rather than the arrogant assertion of apartness...
...All this ended in 1967 with the liberation of all of Jerusalem by the Israel Defense Forces and with the reunification of the city...
...That legislation has been endorsed by 93 senators...
...or world support for the division of Jerusalem and for the establishment - in any part of it - as the capital of a new Arab state...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57...
...If you look at an American city where the disease of zoning has been overcome you will discover a singular fact, which is that the buildings have fa56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 ROGER SCRUTON cades, cornices, windows that can be opened, and multiple adaptations of the classical pattern-book style...
...Of course, those are projects entirely motivated and controlled by aesthetic values...
...Since there is, in human life, no such thing as "forever," the result is buildings that stand derelict after 20 years, and indeed whole cities that are abandoned as wasteland when the local industry dies...
...A city governed by zoning laws dies at the first economic shock-and we have seen this effect from Buffalo to Tampa, as areas of the city first lose their function, then become vandalized, and finally provide the sordid background to scenes of violence and decay...
...Moreover, as the classical architect Quinlan Terry has frequently pointed out, modernist buildings use materials that no one fully understands, which have a coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a few years, and which involve massive environmental damage in their production and in their inevitable disposal within a few decades as waste...
...It is not planning that has destroyed the American city, but the wrong kind of planning directed towards the wrong kind of things...
...Thus Helsinki has been subject to a law saying that no building must rise above the height that would entirely fill the street with shadow...
...Take a look at the buildings of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and their fellows, which are routinely proposed as models in departments of architecture, and you will discover that for the most part they have either disappeared, or been preserved as museums...
...It is to be hoped therefore, that, before too long, reality will prevail and that the U.S...
...No greater aesthetic catastrophe has struck our cities-European just as much as American-than the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings, to become a declaration of its own originality...
...Before the Six-Day War in 1967 the city was divided, the Jordanians having occupied the eastern part...
...By clearing the city center of residents, American zoning laws leave it unguarded, prey to every Whether or not you go along with Kunstler's doom-scenario, the question that Jacobs has bequeathed to us remains...
...Jerusalem is today truly a free and open city...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...
...Embassy would have to be moved to Jerusalem within the next three or four years...
...Jacobs was perhaps the first person to see clearly that cities can be successful only if they solve a huge problem of coordination, and that theories of the market which argued for the impossibility of solving such problems by comprehensive planning ought to apply equally to cities...
...On the other hand, those cities also show the mark of planning: not comprehensive planning, certainly, but the insertion, into the fabric of the city, of localized forms of symmetry and order, like the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Suleimaniye mosque and its precincts in Istanbul...
...The many religious bodies in the holy city (and in all of Israel) are able to pursue their activities without any restrictions...
...Similar laws (laid down for other reasons) have preserved the urban character of Geneva and Washington, just as the law demanding the use of Roman pan-tiles has preserved the landscape and townscape of Provence...
...Lower Manhattan is an eloquent example...
...He is therefore campaigning to build a large glass tower above the city, so as to provide a center of attention in a place whose beauty arises precisely from the fact that attention is not centered but dispersed...
...in the lead, all other countries, with the sole exceptions of Costa Rica and El Salvador, have also located their embassies in Tel Aviv...
...has a lease on a 10-acre embassy lot in Talpiot, a totally Jewish neighborhood in West Jerusalem...
...The only exception is Israel where, so far, our government has insisted on locating its embassy in a city other than the capital...
...Embassy in Israel will indeed be located in Jerusalem - the capital of one of its closest allies...
...Furthermore, functionalist building styles, which appropriate whole blocks, or thrust jagged corners in the way of pedestrians, prevent the emergence of the principal public space, which is the street...
...The reason given for not moving the U.S...
...A street in which people live, work, and worship renews itself as life renews itself...
...The various Christian denominations operated under the strict control of Moslem authorities...
...Access to all holy places became available to all...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...
...Despite the fact that, prior to their elections, both Presidents Bush and President Clinton assured the public that the U.S...
...It is a bizarre situation: All ambassadors and their staffs - including the U.S...
...And is there no distinction between a good plan and a bad plan...
...Box 590359 _9 San Francisco, CA 94159 Gerardo Joffe, President FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization...
...Any attempt to bring back the American city as a self-renewing organism, which adapts to all the changes that occur when millions of people gather together in a single place, will therefore involve not just the abolition of zoning laws, but also a rejection of modernist building types, and of the people that promote them...
...But while there would be some posturing, none of the Arab states could afford to do much else...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE Roger Scruton Jane Jambs and the American City w'ANE JACOBS, WHO DIED EARLIER THIS YEAR, wrote little, held no academic position, and espoused views that were widely dismissed as reactionary and impractical...
...Likewise with the city: There must be planning, but it should be envisaged negatively, as a system of side-constraints, rather than positively, as a way of "taking charge" of what happens and where...
...Nothing is more important than the defense of the street against expressways and throughways, against block development, and against zoning provisions that forbid genuine settlement...
...The architects who win the big commissions today--Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Daniel Liebeskind, Norman Foster--are people who design buildings like the Centre Beaubourg in Paris or the Guggenheim Museum in Barcelona, which stand apart from their surroundings, islands of Ego in a sea of Us...
...To deny the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel questions the legitimacy of the state...
...The status of Jerusalem continues to be of great importance...
...It is as if a government accredited to the United States were to insist on keeping its embassy in, say, New York, rather than in Washington D.C...
...B UT PLANNING IS NOT ALL that there is to it...
...The U.S...
...And the principal concern of the architects was to fit in to an existing urban fabric, to achieve local symmetry within the context of an historically given settlement...
...Saudi Arabia would make some perfunctory noises, but that would be just about all...
...Leaders of Congress - both Republican and Democratic - have introduced legislation by which the U.S...
...The move of the U.S...
...If they are still in use, it is the same use as the one with which they began...
...During their 19-year reign, all Jewish residents were driven out and all Jewish places of worship closed or destroyed...
...and to look at the 19th-century photographs of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or San Francisco and say, "Why don't we build like that...
...it has eyes to watch over it, and shared forms of life to fill it...
...Jane Jacobs's target was not stylistic rudeness, however, but functionalism, according to which buildings are dictatedbytheir purposes, so as to remainwedded to those purposes forever...
...Modernist building styles do not encourage this change of use...
...It is remarkable therefore that, despite this universal recognition, the United States has steadfastly insisted on placing and keeping its embassy in Tel Aviv, the major commercial city, instead of in Jerusalem, Israel's capital and the seat of the Knesset (parliament), the Supreme "The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...How do we get out of the mess...
...And that is the aspect of old Rome, Siena, or Istanbul that most appeals to the modern traveler...
...sponse to Jacobs's argument, therefore, is to point to the distinction between positive plans and negative constraints...
...Embassy to Jerusalem will signal once and for all that there will be no U.S...
...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...ambassador and his staff - must make almost daily trips to Jerusalem, because no government business is conducted in Tel Aviv...
...What are the facts...
...The United States maintains diplomatic relations with over 150 countries...
...preservation of facades and street frontages, while facilitating change of use behind them: All such remedies, which are slowly emerging (for example in the renewal of Baltimore and other damaged American cities) and which have been powerfully advocated and illustrated by Leon Krier at Poundbury and by the New Urbanists in Italy and America, owe an incalculable debt to Jane Jacobs...
...With the U.S...
...Embassy be moved t o the capital o f Israel...
...If the problem is planning, how can we plan to avoid it...
...Ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, all American governments and Congress have confirmed their conviction that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and that, once reunited, it should remain indivisible...
...Streets, with doors that open onto them from houses that smile at them, are the arteries and veins, the lungs and digestive tracts of the city-the channels through which all communication flows...
...That might indeed be the case...
...Modernist buildings are ecological as well as aesthetic disasters: sealed environments, dependent on a constant input of energy, and subject to the "sick-building syndrome" that arises when nobody can open a window or let in a breath of fresh air...
...J ACOBS'S IDEAS HAVE SHARED the fate of every prophecy in recorded history, which is to be ignored by those who might have acted on them...
...King Abdullah of Jordan would not jeopardize the political and financial lifeline that the U.S...
...Embassy to Jerusalem is that it might violate "Arab sensitivities...
...Wasn't Venice planned, after all, and Ephesus, and Bath, and a thousand other triumphs of urbanization...
...THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE daytime, and without the principal hubs of social communication...
...The Israelis insist that Jerusalem continue as the indivisible capital of their country...
...Foster has lighted in his travels upon the lovely 18th-century city of Lisbon and taken offense at its level architecture, which never rises above the height of an aristocratic palace, and concentrates all attention on the place where human life occurs, which is the street...
...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world...
...Constraints on materials, styles, heights, and sizes, rather than on functions...
...Court, and of all government offices...
...Legal side-constraints ensure that cheats will not prosper...
...Egypt would certainly not refuse its yearly multi-billion dollar subsidy from Washington...
...Congress in favor of moving embassy to Jerusalem...
...has extended to him...
...Embassy not in Israel's capital...
...The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...The law of ethology, which tells us that maladaptation is the prelude to extinction, applies also to the American city, of which there are few remaining examples...
...In consequence, the city developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries into one of the most genial and people-friendly of places...
...But they also illustrate the way in which her own preference for "spontaneity" over "planning" cannot, in the end, be sustained...
...Jerusalem - reunited and indivisible...
...This ad has been published and paid for by FI.AME Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...
...Although a free economy is needed if we are to solve the problem of economic coordination, freedom must be contained, and it is contained by law...
...To deny the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel questions the legitimacy of the state...
...In a previous clarifying message we showed that before the Six-Day War in 1967, the claim that Jerusalem was a Moslem/Arab city had seldom been asserted and that such claim had come about only in modern times...
...Kunstler has gone on to argue (in The Long Emergency) that suburbanization-which is the only consensual solution to the disaster-is unsustainable, and that America is preparing an extended emergency for itself when the oil runs out...
...to learn how to read a project couched in postmodern jargon in the style of Liebeskind or Eisenman, and to say, "This is gibberish...
...recognition of the street as the primary public space, and of pedestrians as the primary users of it...
...The Arabs demand that at least the eastern part of the city should be yielded to them...
...Her message has been taken up and refined in recent years by James Howard Kunstler who, in The Geography of Nowhere, describes the aesthetic and moral disaster of American urbanization, as the zoning laws drive people constantly farther from their places of work and recreation, leaving the abandoned wreckage of fleeting businesses in their wake...
...Just as the whole world rejoiced when the ugly wall dividing Berlin was torn down, so do we rejoice that the wall, the barbed wire and the machine gun emplacements dividing the city were finally torn down...
...Cities, sh e argued, should develop spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended results of the consensual transactions between their residents...
...In all of them, the U.S...
...U.S...
...Perhaps the wisest reStreets, with doors that open onto them from houses that smile at them, are the arteries and veins, the lungs and digestive tracts of the city...
...Buildings designed as lofts now house apartments, theaters, restaurants, even chapels, and with the expiry of each use comes the birth of another...
...And that was about ten years ago...
...kind of nomadism, and occupied by buildings that can never adapt to social and economic change...
...This effect is exacerbated in America by the absurd zoning laws, which banish industry to one part of town, offices to another part, and shopping to another, leaving the residential areas deserted in the continued on page 56 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 You deserve a factual look a t . . . 52B Jerusalem (11) Should the U.S...
...This, it seems to me, is the greatest challenge faced by American city halls today: to learn how to stand up to self-appointed experts in a field where the true experts have been marginalized or silenced...
...Embassy would be moved to Israel's capital, the Administration has until now blocked all moves in that direction, declaring that it would jeopardize the so-called "final status" talks on Jerusalem...
...Roger Scruton, the writer andphilosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
