Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
unpacking a story that honestly, it feels less
like a biography and more like a battle for the
soul of the modern world. It really does. It's
the ultimate David versus Goliath tale. But,
you know, instead of a slingshot, our hero wielded
a typewriter. Right. And instead of giant. She
faced the most powerful men in New York City,
men who had the power to literally erase neighborhoods
with like the stroke of a pen. It's a truly cinematic
story. It's this battle between the top down
master builder approach to cities. Right. Think
massive highways, bulldozers, sterile concrete
towers. Exactly. And on the other side. the organic,
messy, vibrant reality of how human beings actually
live together, it's a clash of philosophies that,
I mean, it really determined how our world looks
today. And the David in this whole scenario.
She wasn't a trained architect. She wasn't a
certified urban planner. Not at all. In fact,
her opponents, these men with degrees from the
finest universities, they love to dismiss her
as just a housewife from Greenwich Village. Oh,
that was your favorite line. A housewife. A militant
dame. They thought she was just some local busybody.
But she ended up dismantling their entire worldview.
We are talking, of course, about Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs is such a singular figure because
she didn't just win a few local arguments about,
you know, where to put a park bench. She diagnosed
the fundamental failure of modern urban renewal.
She looked at all the experts and basically said
the emperor has no clothes. And we have a massive
stack of sources today. So we're going to cover
her entire life, her most famous book, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities. But crucially,
we're also going to dig into her later work on
economics. Yes. And that's so important. That's
a key part of our mission today. Most people
know her as the woman who stopped the bulldozer.
But looking at these notes, she actually wanted
to be remembered as an economic theorist. She
did. She said that explicitly in interviews.
She didn't just care about saving the neighborhood.
She wanted to understand how the neighborhood
made money. How it created wealth. Exactly. She
felt her ideas on how cities generate wealth
were her most important contribution. So today,
we're going to unpack how a woman with no college
degree invented concepts like social capital
and mixed use decades before they became buzzwords,
and why her economic theories might be the real
hidden masterpiece in her legacy. Okay, so to
understand the theory, we have to understand
the observer. And the vibe check here is important.
Jane Jacobs wasn't born a New Yorker. No, she
was a transplant. She chose the city, which I
think gives her a totally different perspective
than someone who just grew up there and, you
know, took it all for granted. Absolutely. She
was born Jane Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania
in 1916. Her father was a doctor, her mother
a nurse. So it was a solid, you know, middle
class upbringing. Right. But in 1935, right in
the thick of the Great Depression, she did what
so many dreamers do. She packed her bags and
moved to New York City with our sister. And this
is where we see the first spark. of her specific
genius, her refusal to follow the rules of efficiency.
When she arrived in New York, the trend among
intellectuals was all about order. Oh, totally.
The grid. Clean lines. They loved the grid. But
Jane, she didn't gravitate toward the grid. She
went straight to Greenwich Village. She loved
that the village deviated from the grid. She
used that exact word. It was messy. The streets
were crooked. It was confusing to an outsider,
but to her, it felt human. And she just walked?
She spent her early years just walking. And not
just, you know, walking for exercise. She was
observing. She was trying to figure out the logic
of the chaos. She was working these odd jobs
to survive, sonographer, freelance writer. But
there's a detail in her work history that I think
explains everything about her later economic
theory. Oh, this is so key. She didn't just write
fluff pieces. She wrote for trade magazines.
This is a crucial detail that often gets overlooked.
She wasn't writing high -minded architecture.
She was writing for a magazine called Iron Age.
She was writing about the flower district, the
fur district, the leather district. Which sounds
on the surface maybe a little boring writing
about wholesale zippers or cast iron. But think
about what that teaches you. You aren't looking
at the building. You're looking at the business
inside the building. Exactly. If you're reporting
on the flower district, you're not just looking
at bouquets. You're learning about supply chains.
You're learning why the flower guys need to be
next to the ribbon guys who need to be next to
the trucking guys. You're learning that a city
isn't just a collection of homes and offices.
It's a complex economic ecosystem where proximity
is everything. Yes, it's all about the connections.
She later said these jobs taught her what work
was like. So while the experts... In the planning
offices, we're looking at sanitized maps and
little balsa wood models. She was on the ground
looking at how the guy selling leather relied
on the guy selling zippers next door. She saw
the invisible threads that tied the whole economy
together. And she saw them without the filter
of a formal education. I mean, her academic path
was very unconventional. She studied at Columbia
University's School of General Studies for two
years, took geology, law, economics. But she
never got a degree. And the reason why is almost
poetic, given her future status. She applied
to Barnard College, which is the women's college
at Columbia. Right. And they rejected her. Why?
Because her high school grades were too low.
It's just a delicious irony, isn't it? The woman
who is now required reading in practically every
urban planning master's program on the planet
was told she wasn't academic enough. It's incredible.
She was entirely self -taught. She followed her
curiosity, not a syllabus. And I honestly think
that lack of formal training was her superpower.
She didn't know what she was supposed to see,
so she just saw what was actually there. Okay,
so before she becomes the icon Jane Jacobs, she
had this brush with the geopolitical tension
of the era. She worked for a State Department
publication called America. Right, and this brings
us right into the McCarthy era. A scary time.
A very scary time. And this is a moment that
really reveals her spine. Because she was pro
-union and she had expressed admiration for the
writer Saul Alinsky, she came under investigation
by the Loyalty Security Board. And this was a
time when just being labeled a communist could
completely ruin your life. It was a terrifying
witch hunt. And to be clear, Jacobs was anti
-communist. She wasn't a radical in that sense
at all. Right. But her defense wasn't just, I'm
not a communist, please let me go. No, her response
was incredibly bold. She told the board that
the real threat to America wasn't radical ideas,
but the fear of radical ideas. Wow. She argued
that extremists on both sides should be allowed
to... speak because the moment you start silencing
people to protect freedom, you've already lost
it. That is a seriously high stakes argument
to make when your job is on the line. It shows
she wasn't afraid to stand alone against a powerful
committee. And she survived that investigation.
Then in 1952, she lands the job that puts her
in the belly of the beast. She gets hired at
Architectural Forum. This is the Trojan horse
moment. She's now working for a prestigious architectural
magazine surrounded by the very people pushing
urban renewal. And we really have to set the
stage for what that term meant in the 1950s.
Yeah, urban renewal sounds so nice. Who doesn't
want to renew a city? It sounds like fresh paint
and new windows. But in the 50s context, it was
aggressive. The prevailing wisdom was that old
neighborhoods were blight. They were dirty, crowded,
inefficient. Problems to be solved. Exactly.
And the solution was to bulldoze them. literally
wipe them off the map and replace them with shiny,
orderly high -rises surrounded by parks. It was
the Tower in the Park concept, which was popularized
by Le Corbusier. And Jacobs is supposed to be
writing nice things about these projects. She's
on the payroll. But then she gets assigned to
cover a development in Philadelphia. Designed
by Edmund Bacon, a legendary planner. So Bacon
takes her on a tour. He's showing her this new
revitalized area. It's clean. It's orderly. It's
architectural perfection. Nice lawns, tall towers.
And Jane just looks around and asks this simple
but devastating question. Where are the people?
It's the emperor has no clothes moment. She didn't
care about the geometry. She cared about the
humanity. The streets were totally empty. And
Bacon's response. He just dismissed her. He said
they don't appreciate these things. They don't
appreciate it. I mean, that attitude perfectly
encapsulates the top down mindset, doesn't it?
It wasn't that the design was bad. It was that
the people were using it wrong. Yeah. The arrogance
is just staggering. That was the epiphany for
Jacobs. She realized. These planners didn't care
about how people actually lived. They cared about
how the design looked from a helicopter. Right.
They were designing for visual order, but they
were creating social dead zones. Bacon showed
her an undeveloped block nearby that was crowded
and messy, and he saw it as a problem to be solved.
Jacob saw it as life. She realized that revitalization
was actually killing the street life that made
the city work. And then she gets another dose
of this in East Harlem, a minister named Mabel
William Kirk. takes her on a tour. Right. And
on paper, East Harlem was a slum. It was marked
for clearance. The maps in City Hall probably
had a big red X over the whole neighborhood.
When she actually walked the streets. She saw
a vibrant community. She saw people looking out
for each other. She saw a social fabric that
the planners were completely blind to. She realized
that what looked like disorder to a rich planner
from a fancy office was actually a complex functioning
society. So all of this culminates in her big
debut, right? She gets asked to speak at Harvard
in 1956, standing in for her boss. I can just
picture the room. It's full of men in suits,
these distinguished architects, all nodding at
each other about order and highways. It's the
establishment. And Jean gets up there. And she
drops a bomb. She tells these leading architects
that they need to respect, and this is a direct
quote, strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom
of their own. Strips of chaos that have a weird
wisdom. That's such a powerful phrase. She's
basically telling them, your order is stupid
and this mess is smart. It was a direct attack
on their entire philosophy. And surprisingly,
it was a hit with some people who are starting
to feel uneasy about the bulldozers. But for
the establishment, it marked her as a dangerous
thinker. It was the beginning of her transition
from observer to revolutionary. Exactly. She
wasn't just reporting anymore. She was fighting
back. And that speech eventually leads to the
book, the big one, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, published in 1961. This isn't
just a book. It's a manifesto. It was funded
by a Rockefeller Foundation grant. She spent
years researching it. And when it came out, it
wasn't just a critique. It was a demolition of
city planning as a pseudoscience. A pseudoscience?
Yes. She argued that city planning wasn't based
on how cities actually work, but on how planners
wish they worked. It was fantasy. So let's unpack
the core concepts of this book. Because they're
so ingrained in how we think now that we kind
of forget how radical they were at the time.
Let's start with eyes on the street. Okay. This
is the phrase everyone knows. This is maybe her
most famous concept. So the prevailing theory
at the time was that you made a city safe by
separating people, building towers in these vast
empty parks, and then having police patrols.
Right. Formal security. Jacobs argued the exact
opposite. She said safety comes from natural
surveillance. Meaning the grandmother in the
window. is more effective than the cop on the
beat. Precisely. If you have a street with shops
on the ground floor and apartments above, there
are always people around. The butcher is watching
the sidewalk. The person in the apartment is
watching the corner. The kids are playing on
the stoop. She called it the sidewalk ballet,
didn't she? Yes, the sidewalk ballet. It's this...
intricate, unchoreographed dance of people going
about their day. And that constant presence acts
as a self -policing mechanism. Criminals don't
like an audience. So an empty street is a dangerous
street no matter how nice the architecture is.
If no one is watching, anything can happen. Correct.
But to get those eyes on the street, you need
people there. And to get people there, she argued
for what she called mixed primary uses. Right.
You can't just have a residential district that
empties out during the day when everyone goes
to work or a business district that's a ghost
town at night. You need a mix. You need a mix
work, dwell, play so that the street is active,
you know, 18 hours a day. She laid out four specific
conditions for this diversity to happen. We have
mixed uses. What are the others? The second is
short blocks. Why do short blocks matter? It
seems like such a minor detail. Who cares how
long the block is? It's actually huge for pedestrian
flow. Long blocks isolate people. They turn the
street into a chute or a corridor. Just a way
to get from A to B. Right. But short blocks create
corners. And corners are where people turn, where
they meet, where they decide to go down a different
street. It increases the opportunities for interaction,
and it supports more retail. That makes a lot
of sense. If you have to walk 800 feet to cross
the street, you probably won't. But if you can
cross every 200 feet, the whole neighborhood
becomes a web. Exactly. More corners, more storefronts,
more flow. Okay, so what's the third condition?
The third is aged buildings. She argued that
a city needs a good supply of old, rundown buildings
mingled with the new ones. Now, this is the one
that really must have annoyed the developers.
Why would we need rundown buildings? Isn't new
always better? Well, not for economics. New buildings
are expensive to build. High construction costs
mean the landlord has to charge really high rent
to make a profit. Sure. So if a neighborhood
only has new buildings, the only tenants who
can afford it are chain stores, banks, or high
-end luxury brands. Right. You get a sterile
outdoor mall. You get the same five stores in
every city. Exactly. But old buildings, their
capital costs have been paid off. The rent can
be lower. And that allows for what she called
the diversity of businesses. You know, the bookstores,
the art studios, the cheap restaurants, the startups,
the experimental theaters. She famously wrote,
new ideas must use old buildings. One of her
best lines. I love that. The cool creative stuff
almost always starts in the gritty part of town
because that's where the rent is cheap. If you
bulldoze the gritty part to build a shiny new
complex, you've just evicted the innovation.
You've killed the incubator. That's it. And the
fourth condition is pretty straightforward. Density.
You need a dense concentration of people to support
all that diversity of businesses. You can't have
a vibrant sidewalk ballet in a suburb where houses
are an acre apart. You need enough customers.
You need enough people to keep the butcher, the
baker, and the bookstore in business. So she
releases this manifesto. The public finds it
refreshing because it validates what they see
with their own eyes. They read it and go, yes,
that's why I like my neighborhood. Yeah. But
the establishment, I'm guessing they didn't take
it so well. Oh, far from it. The planners were
absolutely furious. They felt attacked. And the
criticism was often incredibly sexist. Back to
the housewife thing. Exactly. They dismissed
her as a militant dame or just a housewife. One
critic called the book bitter coffeehouse rambling.
They just couldn't believe an amateur was telling
them how to do their jobs. Now we have to talk
about Robert Moses, the power broker, the man
who built modern New York. Bridges, the tunnels,
the parkways. What did he think of this housewife?
Oh, it was personal. Robert Moses got the copy
of the book that was sent to him and he returned
it. He sent it back. Sent it back. and said it
was intemperate and also libelous, and told the
publisher to sell this junk to someone else.
He refused to even engage with the ideas. Sell
this junk to someone else. Well, the joke's on
him, because people are still buying it today.
Yeah. But this wasn't just a war of words, was
it? It became a literal battle for the physical
streets of New York. This is when she enters
her activist phase. Yeah, she had to put her
body where her mouth was. And it started in her
own backyard, Washington Square Park. In 1958,
Robert Moses had a plan to extend Fifth Avenue
right through the park. Wait, drive cars through
the middle of Washington Square Park? Where the
fountain and the arch are? I mean, that's iconic
public space. Yes. He wanted to turn this iconic
gathering space into a roadway to improve traffic
flow. To him, the park was just vacant land that
was in the way of efficiency. His logic was,
why go around it when we can go through it? That
sounds completely insane to modern ears. It would
just destroy the park. So Jacobs joined the opposition,
the Joint Emergency Committee, to close Washington
Square to traffic. And she was savvy. She knew
she couldn't win on engineering terms. Moses
had all the engineers. So she won on PR. She
won on public relations. She leveraged the village
voice against the New York Times, which initially
supported Moses. She got Eleanor Roosevelt involved,
Margaret Mead. She made it a cultural war. And
they had this specific ceremony that I think
is just brilliant. symbolism it wasn't a ribbon
cutting no usually when a public project opens
you have a ribbon cutting jacobs and her group
held a ribbon tying they tied a ribbon to symbolize
uniting the park keeping it whole rather than
cutting it for a road it was just a perfect visual
for the media and they won they stopped the road
But that was just the warm -up, right? The biggest
boss fight was yet to come. Yes. The Lower Manhattan
Expressway, or LOMEX, this was the heavyweight
title match. And this is the one that's terrifying
to think about. If LOMEX had been built, Manhattan
would look completely different today. Oh, unrecognizable.
Imagine a massive 10 -lane elevated highway cutting
clear across the island. It would have wiped
out what is now Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown.
Soho, the whole cast -iron district. gone gone
hundreds of buildings thousands of families and
businesses evicted, Moses argued it was necessary
to connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan
and Williamsburg bridges. He saw the city as
a machine for moving cars. That's all it was
to him. A machine for moving cars, not a habitat
for people. He called it slum clearance, but
Jacobs knew it was community destruction. And
she chaired the opposition committee. She was
the face of the resistance. And it got intense.
This wasn't just about writing letters to the
editor anymore. In 1968, At a public hearing,
the tension just boiled over. What happened?
The crowd actually charged the stage and they
destroyed the stenographer's notes so there would
be no official record of the meeting approving
the plan. That is anarchic. And Jacobs was there.
She wasn't just there. She was leading it. She
was arrested. She was charged with inciting a
riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing public
administration. A 52 -year -old journalist and
mother getting arrested. for inciting a riot
to save a neighborhood. That is hardcore. It
really shows how desperate the situation was.
It is. And ultimately, the political pressure
became too much. Lomax was killed. She is credited
with saving Soho. If you walk through those cobblestone
streets today, past the boutiques and the lofts
and all the tourists, you are walking through
Jane Jacobs's victory. That neighborhood exists
because she fought for it. It's interesting,
though. There's a note here about Robert Carra.
He wrote The Power Broker, which is the definitive
biography of Robert Moses. It's like a thousand
pages long. It's a doorstop. But apparently he
barely mentions Jacobs. It's a massive, massive
omission in the historical record. Caro initially
wrote a chapter on her, but it was cut for length.
He has since said he feels sick every time someone
asks him about it. Because you really can't tell
the story of Moses' fall without the story of
Jacobs' rise. She was the immovable object that
stopped his irresistible force. Robert Moses
had never lost a public fight before he met Jane
Jacobs. So she wins the battle for New York.
She slays the giant. But then, in 1968, She leaves.
She moves to Toronto. Why? Did she feel like
her work was done? It wasn't about retirement.
It was about principles and family. She was deeply
opposed to the Vietnam War. She had two draft
-age sons, and she feared they would be drafted
into a war she considered unjust. So the family
packed up and moved to Canada. They did. She
settled in a neighborhood called the Annex. Right.
And at the time... That area had so many American
draft dodgers, it was sometimes called the American
ghetto. Yes, it was a haven for people fleeing
the political climate in the U .S. But she didn't
retire from activism, did she? I feel like Jane
Jacobs couldn't stop fighting if she tried. It
was just in her blood. Not at all. Almost immediately
upon arriving in Toronto, she found herself in,
you guessed it, another highway fight. Of course.
The Spadina Expressway. It was basically the
same script as New York. The city wanted to blast
a highway through established neighborhoods to
bring commuters downtown. And she jumped right
in. Hello, I'm new here, but you really need
to stop this highway. Pretty much. She became
a leading figure. The theme was always the same.
Are cities built for people or for cars? She
brought her New York tactics to Toronto. She
was arrested twice in Toronto during these demonstrations.
Arrested again. And once again, the expressway
was stopped. She saved the Spadina neighborhood.
It's incredible. She goes two for two in major
North American cities. She's the highway slayer.
But her influence in Toronto went even deeper.
She started getting into local politics in a
way that sort of leads us toward her economic
theories. She did. She advocated for the separation
of the city of Toronto from the province of Ontario,
calling for a province of Toronto. Wait, she
wanted the city to be its own province. That's
a huge structural change. That's like New York
City seceding from New York State. Exactly. She
felt that cities function so differently from
the wider regions that they need political sovereignty
to manage their own economies. And this is the
perfect bridge to talk about her economic work,
which is really the hidden gem of this deep dive.
Right. As we mentioned, she told Reason magazine
she wanted to be remembered for her economic
theories, not just for stopping bulldozers. Her
book, The Economy of Cities, challenges basically
everything we think we know about how wealth
is created. Her central thesis is a concept called
import replacement. And it really challenges
the traditional idea that nations are the drivers
of economic growth. Jacob said, no, look at the
city. The city is the engine. The nation is just
a collection of cities. OK, can you break down
import replacement for us? How does it actually
work in practice? The outline mentions a bicycle
example. The bicycle example is perfect. OK,
so imagine a city. Let's use her example, Tokyo
in the late 1800s. It imports bicycles. It buys
them from somewhere else like Britain. So money
leaves the city to pay for them. Eventually,
a local mechanic starts fixing those imported
bicycles. They learn how they work. They learn
the engineering. So they develop the skills locally.
Right. Then maybe a local metal shop starts making
parts for them. Spare handlebars, new chains,
and eventually the city starts manufacturing
the entire bicycle themselves. They don't need
to import them anymore. So they stop importing
them. They keep that money in the local economy.
That's step one. They replace the import with
local production. But here is the magic trick,
and this is the key to her whole theory. They
don't just put that saved money under a mattress.
They take the wealth they saved and the new skills
they learned, and they use it to import new things.
More complex things. More complex things. Maybe
now they import sophisticated gears or motors
they can't make yet. Then they learn to make
those. It's a ladder. It's a cycle of learning
and expanding. So the city's constantly replacing
its imports with local work, only to import even
more advanced stuff. She argued this is how civilization
advances. It's not about natural resources. It's
about human ingenuity clustering in cities. The
city isn't just a container for people. It's
an incubator for skills. It's a learning machine.
Which leads to her later book. Cities and the
Wealth of Nations, where she argued that macroeconomics
is flawed because it treats the nation state
as the basic economic unit. Exactly. She believed
the real economic unit is the city region. She
even proposed that cities should have their own
currencies. Their own currencies, like a New
York dollar or a Toronto dollar. That sounds
chaotic. Why would you want that? It does sound
chaotic, but her logic was fascinating. She argued
that a single national currency acts as a mask.
If you have one currency for a huge, diverse
country, it averages out the booming cities and
the struggling ones. Can you give an example
of that? Sure. Let's take, say, Detroit and San
Francisco. They both use the U .S. dollar. San
Francisco is booming with tech money, so the
dollar stays strong. But Detroit might be struggling
with manufacturing decline. Okay. If Detroit
had its own currency, the Detroit dollar would
drop in value because its economy is weak. Which
sounds bad, right? You don't want your money
to drop in value. But it's actually a feedback
loop. A cheaper currency makes Detroit's exports
cheaper to the rest of the world. It means people
buy more Detroit cars because they're a bargain.
It also makes imports expensive for Detroiters
which encourages them to make things themselves.
Which brings it right back to import replacement.
Back to import replacement. It's a self -correcting
mechanism. She compared it to a pain signal in
the body. If you numb the pain with a national
currency you don't know you're injured and you
don't heal. Ah, I see. So without that, the struggling
city just gets stuck. It's propped up or it just
withers away because it can't compete. That was
her argument. That is a radical way to look at
national economics. She really viewed everything
as an ecosystem, whether it was a street corner
or a global trade network. She saw feedback loops
everywhere. That is the key word, ecosystem.
Her book, The Nature of Economies, literally
argues that economies follow the same rules as
biological nature. Differentiation, feedback
loops, adaptation. She didn't see a city as a
machine to be fixed. She saw it as a living organism
to be nurtured. And she also had this philosophical
framework, moral syndromes, in her book Systems
of Survival. This feels a bit different from
the street -level stuff, but it also feels really
relevant to how we govern ourselves. It is, but
it explains so much about corruption and societal
friction. She identified two distinct ways humans
organize themselves. The commercial syndrome.
and the guardian syndrome okay break those down
what is the commercial syndrome the commercial
syndrome is for traders scientists business people
it governs how we exchange goods and ideas it
values honesty because you can't trade if you
lie industriousness efficiency and voluntary
agreement it's about the deal it shuns force
yeah the guardian syndrome the guardian syndrome
is for government police the army it values loyalty
obedience tradition and um ostentatious display
it's about protection uses force to maintain
order. Okay, so merchants versus knights, basically.
We need both of those, right? A society needs
both. You absolutely need both. But her crucial
insight was that you must keep them separate.
The danger comes when you mix them. What happens
when you mix them? You get what she called monstrous
hybrids, corruption. If the police, who are guardians,
start acting like businesses, the commercial
syndrome, you get bribery and the mafia. They
are literally selling protection, which should
be a reaction. Conversely, if the government,
the guardians, tries to run the economy like
an army, you get the inefficiencies of communism
or state corporatism. You get rigid five -year
plans that ignore reality on the ground. She
argued that maintaining the integrity of these
separate systems is crucial for a healthy society.
That is surprisingly deep for someone who is
constantly being labeled a housewife by her critics.
It seems like she was always looking at the underlying
systems. However, we do have to look at the other
side of the coin. Her ideas have been dominant
for decades now. Are there valid criticisms?
Because, I mean, if you look at the West Village
today, it's not exactly a place for the working
class anymore. It's Millionaire Row. This is
the big one, the gentrification paradox. The
very neighborhoods she fought to save Greenwich
Village in New York, the annex in Toronto, are
now some of the most expensive real estate on
planet Earth. Her own house, the one she converted
from a candy store, would be worth millions of
dollars today. It's completely unattainable for
the kind of people she wrote about. So did she
kill the village by saving it? Critics ask exactly
that. Did her success in making these places
desirable eventually price out the very diversity
she cherished? The old buildings and the cobblestones
attract the wealthy, who then price out the artists
and the small businesses that made it cool in
the first place. Did she have a defense against
that? Did she foresee it happening? She did.
And she argued it wasn't the fault of her ideas,
but of scarcity. She said, we have too few neighborhoods
like Greenwich Village. Everyone wants to live
there because the alternatives, the soulless
suburbs or the sterile high rises are so unappealing
to so many people. So demand just massively exceeds
supply. Exactly. If we built more dense, mixed
use, walkable neighborhoods, the demand wouldn't
be concentrated on just the few that exist. The
problem isn't that the village is good. It's
that we stopped building more villages. We need
to clone the model, not just preserve the museum
pieces. That was her stance. Scarcity drives
the price up. But there are other critiques.
The economist Tyler Cowen questions the issue
of scale. Right. Jacobs' ideas work great for
a neighborhood in New York. But do they work
for a rapidly urbanizing city of 10 million people
in a developing nation? Can you rely on eyes
on the street and short blocks when you need
to house millions of people? Like. That's the
question. Sometimes you might actually need the
master builder to put in the subway lines and
the sewage systems on a massive scale. You can't
just wait for the neighborhood to evolve organically
if you have a massive housing crisis. Some problems
might require the top -down approach she hated.
And there was critique from the left, too, right?
Yes. Some argued that in Death and Life, she
ignored race. She wrote about unslumming. which
was her word for improving a neighborhood. But
critics pointed out she didn't fully grapple
with the systemic racism, like redlining, that
prevented black communities from getting the
loans or mortgages to do that unslumming. That's
a fair point. Her experience was very much centered
on a specific type of white, working -to -middle
-class urban experience. She assumed that if
the government just got out of the way, people
would fix their own neighborhoods. But that assumes
everyone has equal access to capital to begin
with. It was a blind spot. And it's worth noting
that toward the end of her life, she got quite
pessimistic. Her final book, published in 2004,
was titled Dark Age Ahead. It's not exactly a
cheerful title. Sounds like a sci -fi dystopia.
No, she saw signs of cultural collapse right
here in North America. She worried about the
decline of the family and community, the commercialization
of education, and a lack of accountability in
the professions. She felt we were forgetting
how things actually worked, forgetting the weird
wisdom she championed. She thought we were losing
the ability to self -correct. That's it. It's
interesting that someone who championed the resilience
of cities ended on such a warning note. It's
a reminder that progress isn't guaranteed. I
think it comes back to her belief in the fragility
of these ecosystems. They're strong. But if you
chip away at the foundations, the social capital,
the trust, the local economy, they can crumble.
You can't take them for granted. So as we wrap
this up, what is the ultimate legacy here? We
have the books, the saved neighborhoods, the
economic theories. But what is the big takeaway?
I think her legacy is the validation of the citizen's
intuition. Before Jacobs, the expert with the
blueprint was God. the master builder knew best.
After Jacobs, we understood that the person living
on the block knows more about that block than
the planner in the office. She gave us the language
to understand why we feel good in some places
and anxious in others. She taught us about social
capital, that the casual hello to your neighbor
is actually the glue holding society together.
And her legacy is literally alive in the streets
through Jane's walks, right? Yes. Every year,
around her birthday in May, Thousands of people
in hundreds of cities worldwide organize these
free walking tours. And they aren't about famous
monuments or history lessons. No, they're about
observing the neighborhood, walking, looking,
talking, just doing what Jane did when she first
arrived in New York. It's such a cool way to
honor her, not with a static statue, but with
people actually using the city. It fits her perfectly.
She didn't want to be put on a pedestal. She
wanted to be on the sidewalk. So here is the
final thought for you listening. Jane Jacobs
believes cities were habitats we co -create.
And she once asked, when was the last time you
really looked at your block? Right. Not just
walked down it to get to the subway, but really
looked at it. Who's talking to whom? Which stores
are busy? Where do people stop to tie their shoe?
The answers to those questions might tell you
more about your local economy and your local
safety than any government report ever could.
That's it for this deep dive into the eyes on
the street. Thanks for listening and keep looking.
Goodbye.