SACKING OUR CITIES
Griffin, C. W.
Sacking Our Cities The Life and Death of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. Random House. 458 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by C. W. Griffin A s recently as the mid-Nineteenth Century, doctors drained...
...They threw our homes down and pushed us here and our friends somewhere else...
...Cultural buildings should not be isolated in monumental centers, but kept among buildings with dillercnt uses...
...Some planners go along with politicians and traffic commissioners who back big merchants howling for more parking space to attract sitll.more congestion in city downtowns...
...But the big men come and look at that grass and say, 'Isn't it wonderful...
...As an example of tenant reaction to these sterile prisons, Mrs...
...So thick was the superstitious fog clouding this subject that it took years of effort by observant physicians to expose the folly...
...To appease this obnoxious tin god, cities are carved, flattened, and sprawled and pedestrians are herded into narrowed sidewalks and assailed with physical danger, noise, and exhaust I nines...
...Slum clearance, community "fight blight" programs, public and private housing projects, urban freeways and parking garages, and isolated civic and cultural centers are mutilating our cities, not revitalizing them, she claims...
...they don't like cities, says Mrs...
...Jacobs has many of Orwell's virtues—a lively, personal style: great power of critical observation...
...But one must forgive an author a few venial sins in a work aimed at exposing such monumental lolly...
...Basically, Mrs...
...Jacobs was amazed at the progress that North End citizens had made rebuilding and repairing buildings since her visit there twenty years earlier, when the area was an overcrowded tenement district...
...An observant walk through some varied city streets would teach planners more about good and bad city planning than a host of academic sessions on the aesthetics of urban renewal projects...
...For example, I don't think that city planners are to blame for America's monstrous sacrifices offered daily at the shrine of the automobile...
...Bankers, following the lead of planners who prematurely pronounce an area dead, blacklist "slum" areas for mortgage loans, thus depriving the residents of the benefits of the American credit system...
...A self-respecting reviewer must, of course, find some quarrel with an author...
...Not only are orthotlox planners ignorant of the facts of city life...
...Cities need old buildings with low rents to support essential small specialized enterprises...
...Mrs...
...in which the sides of buildings around parking lots had not been left raw and amputated, but repaired and painted as neatly as if they were intended to be seen...
...Jacobs discussed North End insisted that 275 dwelling units per net acre make North End a slum, even though he admitted that the district had low tales of juvenile delinquency, disease, and inlant mortality...
...For thirty years the largest conventional mortgage loan made in North End was $3,000...
...Jacobs argues convincingly...
...Jacob's case against the planners is a simple one: planners should view their problem from the human rather than the architectural viewpoint...
...Jane Jacobs, an editor of Architectural Forum, attempts to blow away the intellectual fog blinding American city planners...
...Intricate, close-grained development—instead of monotonous segregated projects tagged for special uses—is what makes a city, Mrs...
...a prelerence for concrete facts over vague intellectual abstractions which so easily condense into the mists of jargon...
...Mingled all among the buildings for living were an incredible number of splendid food stores, as well as such enterprises as upholstery making, met a I working, carpentry, food processing...
...She maintains that not only is city planning at the primitive stage of medical science when bloodletting was in vogue, but that city planners and their bureaucratic colleagues are blithely draining the life-blood of our cities...
...Jacobs quotes one beneficiary of public housing: "Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place...
...Bound by anachronistic conceptions of the Garden City or the Radiant City, planners and architects typically design housing projects sporting such useless adornments as tidily conceived grass plots banned to the residents...
...Populated sidewalks under surveillance of small shopkeepers and other "public characters'' concerned with maintaining order are safer than those that go dead in off hours...
...Nobody cared what we need...
...High residential density and overcrowding are not synonymous...
...And not the least of her achievements is to prove that one alert, inquiring mind is worth a thousand academic tlegrees...
...This makes her cast the city planners in a role too decisively villainous...
...And her proposals for new programs and municipal political reforms to conserve and restore the unique advantages of the big cities flow logically from her concept of the city as a delicate, complex organism that cannot survive the amputations performed by those ignorant of the city's vital processes...
...The virtues of Mrs...
...Jacobs, still a minor one, concerns her all-or-nothing approach to urban problems...
...The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking.'' Net a Boston planner with whom Mrs...
...We don't have a place to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents...
...Reviewed by C. W. Griffin A s recently as the mid-Nineteenth Century, doctors drained the blood of their victims to draw out the evil humors causing disease...
...Jacobs reports ". . . this was the only city district I had ever seen...
...it is the essential nutriment of cities...
...City blocks should be small, to unite a district and promote diversity and vitality...
...During a visit in 1959 Mrs...
...And what George Orwell did to British socialists in The Road to IVigan Pier, she has done to the city planners...
...Jacobs' polemic far outweigh any defects...
...Now the poor have everything!' " This paternalistic attitude of planners, aggravated by some puritanical notions of how people should spend their leisure time, leads them into absurdities in classifying slums, according to Mrs...
...and, above all, independence of mind that refuses to be cowed by established dogma...
...What John Kenneth Galbraith did for the economists in The Affluent Society Mrs...
...Variety is not only the spice of life...
...But despite intense political pressure New York City's Planning Commission refused to approve a foolish $57-million garage-building program in midtown Manhattan, which needs more automobile traffic in the same measure that Los Angeles needs smog...
...Building diversity keeps downtown districts alive after dark...
...North End, a densely-populated but healthy low-income area near Boston's waterfront, throbs with vitality...
...Jacobs has done for the city planners...
...North End triumphed over the same obstacles that prevent some slums from rebuilding into healthy communities...
...She has set the stage for an urgently needed controversy on the future of our exploding metropolises...
...The urban renewal process itself encourages the slum racket, already subsidized by city tax assessing policies...
...My chief quarrel with Mrs...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
