Jacobean Tragedy

The gross misinterpretation of an intellectual icon

Jesse Walker from the July 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

So Jacobs's vision is open-ended and dynamic. The Sustainables, meanwhile, dream of closed systems. Jacobs thinks progress comes from small enterprises making incremental changes, with a healthy dose of trial and error. The Sustainables think it derives from design. In a Jacobean world, businesses make money by meeting consumers' needs. Under sustainable development, they follow government incentives, jump for federal subsidies, and participate in "public-private partnerships." Writes Jacobs, "Cities that take the lead in reclaiming their own wastes will have high rates of related development work; that is, many local firms will manufacture the necessary gathering and processing equipment and will export it to other cities and to towns." The sustainable agenda has no room for that kind of fluid, messy, uncontrolled, spontaneous growth.

The funny thing is, a lot of Sustainables think they're following in Jacobs's footsteps. Many of them read her damning indictment of city planners in The Death and Life of Great American Cities; many embraced its powerful assault on the freeway projects and urban renewal schemes that were wiping out living neighborhoods and replacing them with concrete.

Agreeing that those projects were awful, they added Jacobs to their pantheon--and proceeded to dream up a more "sustainable" set of transit projects and redevelopment plans. If it was wrong to wipe out high-density districts, they figured, they should go out to the suburbs and try to force high densities on a population that doesn't want them, in an economic landscape where they're inappropriate. If it was wrong to push freeways into pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, they should try to herd people into expensive, unpopular mass-transit systems. (They certainly wouldn't follow Jacobs's recent advice and allow jitneys to proliferate.)

You think I'm exaggerating? I've just described the official urban growth policies of Portland, Oregon, where more than a few municipal officials claim Jacobs as a forebear. Last year in Toronto, at a gathering held in Jacobs's honor, Brian Scott of the environmental group Livable Oregon repeated something a city hall worker once told him: "A lot of us got tired of protesting the Vietnam War, read Jane Jacobs, and decided to take over Portland." Evidently, they didn't read very carefully.

The Sustainables' grossest misuse of Jacobs may be their approach to metropolitan government. They read Jacobs's principle, enunciated in 1984's Cities and the Wealth of Nations, that the most important economic unit is the city-anchored region, not the nation-state. Somehow, they interpreted this as an endorsement of regional governance--of creating governing superstructures able to override, and ideally eliminate, the competing jurisdictions that make up most metropolitan regions. Portland gave more and more planning power to a shadowy tri-county authority called Metro. Chattanooga merged its school system with that of the surrounding county, and has made noises about further consolidating the city and county governments. Whether or not those governments pointed to Jacobs as their inspiration, their boosters--such as columnist Neal Peirce, co-author of Citistates--somehow did.

But Jacobs has long believed government should be as local and as limited as possible, and has denounced regionalism as unworkable and undemocratic. "The voters sensibly decline to federate into a system where bigness means local helplessness, ruthless, oversimplified planning, and administrative chaos--for that is just what municipal bigness means today," she wrote in Death and Life. "How is helplessness against `conquering' planners an improvement over no planning? How is bigger administration, with labyrinths nobody can comprehend or navigate, an improvement over crazy-quilt township and suburban governments?" Last year, when Ontario wanted Toronto to merge with its environs into a giant, New York-style megalopolis, she was one of the plan's angriest opponents, at one point suggesting the city consider seceding from the province. "Separating power and responsibility doesn't make sense," she explained to a TV interviewer. The Sustainables would do well to listen.

But they won't. To the extent that they have digested Jacobs, they have romanticized her vision, bastardizing her empirical observations of how cities work into a formula they want to impose not just on cities but on suburbs and small towns as well. More often, however, they simply have not digested her at all. And it shows. Their vision is static, stagnant, and statist, everything that Jacobs's is not. The result will soon be on display in Chattanooga.