Ben Franklin's Town Life Updated
WARNER, SAM B. Jr.
Ben Franklin's Town Life Updated THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES By Jane Jacobs Random House. 458 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by SAM B. WARNER JR. Department of History, Harvard...
...Dewey's progressive school was to create an environment for nurturing the independence and creativity of individuals, and for harnessing these qualities to community life...
...The Death and Life of Great American Cities is in the best tradition of reforming journalism—its criticisms are concrete and sharp, its remedies are pragmatic...
...There is a great proliferation of both organized and informal voluntary associations...
...Jacobs creates a wide and effective range of critical tools for dealing with present urban political and planning practices...
...Jacobs assumes that benign conditions can be created in cities without first controlling the larger forces of society...
...Jacobs is opposed to this method of using people...
...Having either abandoned or ignored the impulse which informs these men's work, the public has taken up a few of the end products of their thought and misapplied them with disastrous effect...
...Jacobs' Greenwich Village (along with a few small quarters of other cities) contain almost identical elements: The people are gregarious and carry on an active street life...
...Quite properly, there is no more room for Boeing's 3,000 engineers in Mrs...
...Unless the American public consciously turns away from its mechanized approach to human problems and undertakes an intelligent effort to integrate national, social and economic planning with small-scale city planning, Mrs...
...As a remedy, he has proposed regional integration of industry and agriculture...
...Thus her ideal city is humane in taking pleasure in the small-scale events of everyday life, tolerant and dynamic in its appreciation of diversity of character and occupation, and democratic in its insistence on voluntary associations and participation in the control of the environment by its residents...
...Franklin's Philadelphia and Mrs...
...Jacob's Greenwich Village than there would be in Mumford's towns...
...Jacobs makes to Franklin's 18th century city is her advocacy of a wide ethnic and racial variety, an attitude Franklin was unable to manage...
...Essentially, her book analyzes the vitality of those few urban quarters where the elements of Franklin's town life still persist, and contrasts these quarters with deteriorating retail districts, vast greying suburbs, unsafe parks, jungle housing projects, and gigantic highway wastelands...
...Boeing, however, will not disappear by its own impulse...
...Jacobs commentary on the present urban scene—and an equally powerful one could be written on the destruction of rural life—only adds testimony to the soundness of Dewey and Mumford's confrontation of industrial society...
...As fervently as Dewey or Mumford, Mrs...
...Her specific criticisms of both completed and proposed urban projects are marvellous, and immediately useful as a city dweller's weapon against Robert Moses-like planners who sponsor such debilitatingly large projects as New York's East Side housing or Boston's West Side demolition...
...Mumford likewise sees 20th century conditions of work, home and politics as rapidly destroying both the freedom and creativity of Americans...
...Both men have attempted to design an environment which could control modem technology and reorient the habits of thought which create mass standardization of men and institutions...
...Like them, she insists upon the importance of a vital and diverse small-scale life as the essence of a creative democratic society...
...Jacobs' criticism derives from her revival of Benjamin Franklin's idea of town life...
...But its fault is the same one which—with the exception of Lewis Mumford's books—plagues all American city reform literature: Mrs...
...From this point of view, Mrs...
...Jacobs adds artists, writers and professionals) dominate the scene...
...Housing is dense, with small stores, shops and factories mixed in among the residences...
...Jacobs' Franklinesque town life will be destroyed and perverted as surely as Mumford's vision and Dewey's schools have been...
...indeed, they have spread far beyond the mere factory situation...
...Today, Boeing Aircraft places 3,000 engineers in one room and uses them in the same way Henry Ford used his production-line workers...
...Conditions in the mills and slums of America have been ameliorated, but mechanization and standardization have gone forward unchecked...
...Tradesmen and artisans (Mrs...
...Unfortunately, though, The Death and Life of American Cities can never be more than a defensive weapon...
...nor will the habit of thinking which makes it behave as it does...
...Before Mrs...
...The only important addition that Mrs...
...Mrs...
...The organization man, the interchangeable executive, the office clerical pool, the gigantic housing project, the monster hospital and high school, are all products of the same habit of mind...
...Department of History, Harvard University At a time when the cities of America have become the despair of intellectuals and a mire of bad politics and destructive planning practices, Jane Jacobs has written a book which will give desperately needed hope to all those concerned with reviving the dignity and vitality of our metropolises...
...The vitality and freshness of Mrs...
...For Franklin and for her, the countryside is at best a bit boring, the wilderness not ennobling but merely savage...
...It is a significant measure of the intellectual confusion of our times that both Lewis Mumford and John Dewey, two men whose works have sought to create a richer democratic community life, are misunderstood and under heavy attack...
...Jacobs' eminently sensible reforms can be realized, she must recognize that they require as much reorientation of thinking as has been suggested in the proposals of Lewis Mumford —a man she regards as hopelessly, if not dangerously, Utopian...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 12
