Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - Op Ed

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"T.O. owes debt to Jacobs"

Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 08:03 AM

CHRISTOPHER HUME
URBAN AFFAIRS COLUMNIST

More than most cities, Toronto owes a huge debt of gratitude to Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs, who died yesterday eight days short of her 90th birthday, loved this city almost as much as it loved her.

Even if she hadn't moved here from New York in 1968, she would have left this town a different place. But the mere fact of her presence, which the city wore like a badge of honour, ensured that her ideas were always close to the centre of any debate about the future of urbanism in Toronto.

Plain-spoken, utterly unpretentious, self-taught and full of sly humour, Jacobs was disarming in the directness of her opinions. She despised jargon and railed against experts, especially planners and politicians, whom she considered the cause of many of the problems that have plagued North American cities since the end of World War II.

In her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she did for urbanism what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environment. Though untrained in any formal sense — she studied neither urban planning nor architecture nor economics — Jacobs had the power of being able to see what was actually in front of her, rather than what she was told to see.

Indeed, she used to say she wrote Death And Life after having visited countless urban renewal projects in the 1950s that were never quite as their promoters described.

Of course, we live in an age when suburban sprawl has replaced city building as the dominant form of growth. Not even Jacobs could change that. But if nothing else, she forced us to question our headlong rush to remake the countryside in the image of a subdivision.

Don't forget that when Jacobs began her work, the experts were declaring that the city had no future. As the exodus from downtown grew ever more hectic, cities were expected to become wastelands abandoned to the poor, and in the U.S., to blacks. Though Canada avoided the worst of the "white flight" that left so many American cities hollowed out and decaying, it embraced suburbia with an enthusiasm that is now coming back to haunt us.

But Jacobs was also aware that cities lie at the heart of economic activity. Though Death And Life remains by far her best-known book, she went on in other volumes to explore how cities are economic engines as well as cultural generators and social integrators.

In The Economy of Cities and later Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs attempted to do to economic theory what she had done previously to urban planning theory in her first tome, namely, turn it on its head. Though neither work has received as much recognition, there have been signs recently that that, too, is starting to change.

Jacobs' argument is that conventional economic thinking from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman has consistently failed to account for the hugely significant role cities play in economic prosperity.

Just as she rejected an urban planning approach that would divide all human activities into separate compartments — a place each to live, work, play and shop — she threw out several centuries of economic science, which, she stated flatly, is a "delusion."

Though untrained, Jacobs based her arguments on the evidence of what she saw. This is what made her so profoundly persuasive. Where the vast majority of planners, economists and the like accept what they are told, are little more than founts of conventional wisdom, Jacobs questioned every assumption.

She had the kind of old-fashioned Yankee skepticism that Mark Twain mythologized. She would say that she learned everything she needed to know from her Grade 6 teacher back in Scranton, Pa.

Though she was never rude, posturing or confrontational, she wouldn't hesitate to tell a room full of professionals precisely why they were wrong. And she was just as likely to call her supporters to account as her critics.

At one convention, organized in Toronto by a group of admirers, she listened to a delegation from China as they talked about how her books had influenced a housing scheme for migrant workers. Jacobs responded politely but made it clear the project was a complete misrepresentation of her ideas.

In her last volume, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs warned against nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. Typically, she relied on the kind of quiet, inexorable logic that made her impossible to ignore.

"The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others," she wrote, "making it more likely that others will give way. With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses."

There's still time to change, she argued, but not much.

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