Jane Jacobs & The Mothers

Jane Jacobs and the Mothers

“People who know will know how it is. I’m afraid that people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads, like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from traveler’s descriptions of rhinoceroses.”

And with this statement Jane Jacobs erased the requirement for the proper letters after her name and wrote one of the boldest books on architecture and urban planning that the last century has produced. The 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, stunned an entire generation of largely male architects and urban planners with its devastating critique of the “urban renewal” programs that were then in fashion. As in the fairytale of the little child who shouted out, “The emperor has no clothes on!” what Jane Jacobs shouted out was essentially this: ‘Your grand designs may look lovely on paper but people don’t actually want to live there.’

Jane herself had been living in Greenwich Village since the 1930’s with its hustle and bustle, and enjoying the vibrant neighborhood as a place to raise her family, so she was one of the “little people“ whose lives would have been upended and dismembered in the slash-and-burn policies that went hand in hand with the grand schemes of urban renewal that emerged in the 1960s.

The Housing Act of 1954 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 had let loose a flood of government money that was quickly snatched up by wily developers who used it to raze neighborhoods that could be declared ‘slums’ and put highways and high-rises in their place.

Remember that this coincides with the redlining of neighborhoods that was taking place in the deliberate attempt to separate the races by shielding white families from dislocation and allowing the heaviest burdens to fall on the African-American and minority neighborhoods wherever questions of new roads and new suburban developments were on the table. This is also the same moment when the fortunes of the poor take a precipitous dive and the graphs of the differences between the haves and the have-nots begin to show a growing divide in America.

Rather than seeing a building which had fallen into disrepair as a rotting log that simply needed to be hauled away and the lot bulldozed for some high-rise, Jane saw every fallen log as the potential for a new ecosystem of important lifeforms that would regenerate the forest floor and thus feed the ongoing life stream of the larger ecosystem in which it was embedded.

She extolled the virtues of an old brick building which had served a dozen different purposes over its 150-year lifespan: as a factory, as a warehouse, as a dance studio, as a restaurant, as a community center, as an artist’s loft... and who knows what next? It was the not knowing that was so important because it represented that natural abundance which all healthy ecosystems have, of things waiting in the wings to be used and adapted for the next occupants with their unknown challenges and opportunities.

Janes genius was to argue from the point of view of the observant scientist on the street, rather than the armchair philosopher or city planner in the sky. She spoke with conviction and passion and, importantly, the factual evidence to back up her claims that beneath the seeming chaos was an organic order that supported the flourishing of urban communities.

What irked Jane Jacobs was the supercilious arrogance of the men who presumed to know what was best for the mothers and children who actually had to live at home and forge their life out of the environment that was given them. The ugly high-rises with the lack of play space and proximity - where mothers who needed to do their indoor work could keep a watchful eye on their children - was only one of her eagle-eyed complaints about the new buildings that gobbled up so much of the urban renewal money. And history has proven her to be absolutely correct: many of those low-income projects of the 1960s have simply been torn down as they became the breeding ground for crime, delinquency, and human misery of all kinds.

Jane Jacobs, “Mother”- Meets Moses, “Master Builder”

One fateful evening in 1955, Jane Jacobs showed up at a public hearing in lower Manhattan about a massive road building project that was going to run right through Washington Square Park, demolishing 416 buildings along its route. Robert Moses, the “master builder,” the giant of urban planning who at that very moment was holding no fewer than 12 different government jobs in his hand, the emperor who had decreed that a vast 12-lane highway had to rip through SoHo in order to provide swift and efficient transportation for his ideal and car-centric New York City, stood up to defend his plan against the citizen voices who were howling in protest. As Jane recounted it later during an interview:

“He stood up there gripping the railing and he was furious at the effrontery of this (our protest), and I guess he could already see that his plan was in danger, because he was saying, ‘There is nobody against us – nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch of… A bunch of mothers!’ And then he stomped out.”

With her seminal book still years in the future, and her public stature no greater than that of any other citizen, Jane Jacobs continued her protest and her gathering of signatures and her wooing of journalists and her harassment of public officials until the entire project came crumbling down at the feet of the “master builder.”

It is about individuals like Jane Jacobs that another mover and shaker and challenger of patriarchal paradigms, Margaret Mead, stated with conviction:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, is the only thing that ever has.”

The city of Toronto, Jane Jacobs’ home for the latter decades of her life, proclaimed her birthday, May 4, as Jane Jacobs Day. So this coming week as we move towards a celebration of Mother’s Day here in the United States perhaps we could dedicate the days between Monday and Sunday to giving thought to all of the mothers who now, in their own gritty, persistent, determined, and undervalued way, are raising the next generation of Americans in the private silos of their own homes and instilling values which will light up the lives of the entire world 20 years hence.

I hope these mothers and their children will have the audacity to walk into the streets and speak their truth to power and demand that the values by which Americans construct society align with the genuine needs and desires of real people, not merely the fantasies of the rich power brokers at the top of the hill. After all, those on the ground are the ones who “know how it is.”

As Jane once observed:

“Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes real imagination.”

Rebecca Armstrong, May 2020