Citizen Jane: Jane Jacobs

By the 1960s, iconoclastic authors were questioning the organizations and institutions that govern our lives. But one figure stands out in particular for her rebellion against the so-​called rational planning of cities. Jane Jacobs was a journalist and intellectual who spent the majority of her life contemplating why cities are such complex, unique, and productive places. But despite the complexities of her research, Jacobs continually returned to one major principle: “leave cities alone and let them develop by themselves.”

Jane Butzner was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Though Scranton was a coal mining town, she grew up in relative wealth, with her father working as a doctor and her mother a nurse. Jane’s parents imparted to her a strong sense of intellectual dignity. She fondly recalled that her parents gave no praise for “conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment” and that “simple conformity results in stagnation for a society.” According to the Butzners, the American experience of progress was owed to the unprecedented opportunity for experimentation and the initiative of the average person.

Growing up at a time when women’s roles were greatly restricted, Jane was thankfully surrounded by counterexamples of independent career minded women. Her mother was a trained nurse and teacher, one of her cousins was a college professor, and another a Quaker writer. They were educated, valued, and independent. Jane grew up under no illusions that women were in any way not capable of tackling the world head-​on and making up their own mind.

Despite all these good influences, the monotony of education dulled Jane’s academic interests. While sitting in class, she read completely unrelated books. Not paying much attention, Jane’s grades were lackluster. Jane was not interested in learning things by rote. She was more interested in understanding how the world functioned in practice. In her youth, she enjoyed watching locomotives, especially when they were painted in a manner that exposed their pistons and wheels. Jane did not appreciate more modern trains with metal skirts that hid their mechanisms —a foreshadowing for her intellectual career.

Foregoing college at 19, Jane followed her sister, Betty, leaving provincial Scranton for the cosmopolitan New York. Though Jane arrived during a depression, she used it as an opportunity to explore the city. Jane accepted any jobs she could find as a journalist or secretary. And when she couldn’t find work, she took long walks through the city for job interviews.

Jane’s parents had set aside money for her to attend college. After five years of working, she enrolled in Columbia University’s School of General Studies. Jane was not considered a matriculating student, which gave her the freedom to pursue whatever she fancied. She studied geology, economics, geography, and her personal favorites, zoology and biology. Jane used her newfound freedom well, and to her surprise, became an honors student for the first time. But Jane suffered from success. Now, she was to take classes the faculty told her to attend. Thankfully for Jane, the administration decided her high school grades were too poor to qualify, allowing her to study freely again.

Looking back on her education, Jane later commented that if she could improve education, she would have a standing assignment every week of grade school that each child should bring in something said by an authority that they disagree with and refute it.

After a slew of temporary jobs, Jane found steady work at a trade journal. At the outset of America’s involvement in World War II, she worked for the State Department for a magazine named Amerika, that is, with a k, not a c. Jane was an ardent anti-​communist who suspected the Federal Workers Union of communist sympathies.

While working for the State Department, she met her husband, an architect named Robert Jacobs, who was working on designing fighter planes. After meeting, the pair quickly married in 1944, giving Jane the alliterative name she is known by most, Jane Jacobs. After the war, they moved to Greenwich Village in New York, which Jacobs found on one of her employment search/​exploration missions. The newlyweds bought a home nestled in the heart of the village. While fixing up their cozy home, Jacobs gave birth to three children. At a time when married couples tended to move out of cities into suburbia, Jacobs shrugged convention and chose to raise her family in the heart of New York.

When her magazine Amerika’s operations moved to D.C., Jacobs refused to abandon New York. She began to work for the magazine Architectural Forum, shifting her interests into the orbit of urban planning. Getting her up to speed, Robert taught her important concepts in architecture and design. Combining her experiences with New York with her writings, Jacobs began to ponder how such a complex city functions daily without central coordination.

Writing for Architectural Forum, Jacobs criticized government efforts to revitalize neighborhoods such as East Harlem, saying state intervention was a death blow to community efforts.

In 1965, Jacobs delivered a talk at Harvard addressing architects and urban planners. Sharing her experiences with East Harlem, she urged her audience to “respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.” Despite her critical stance, her talk was well-​received.

Shortly after, the urbanist and sociologist William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article for Fortune magazine about downtown New York. Jacobs ended up writing “Downtown is for People,” where she advocated the life of the thriving downtown while contrasting it with the orderly yet miserable designs of city planning authorities, mainly Robert Moses, the most powerful urban planner in New York.

“Downtown is for People” contains many themes Jacobs would grapple with for the rest of her life. For example, the irreconcilable conflict between the top-​down rationalism of city planners and the bottom-​up evolutionary urbanism of grassroots communities. City planners like Robert Moses solidified for Jacobs that government alone was not the solution, and quite often, it was, in fact, the problem.

Robert Moses was one of the most powerful men in the history of American city planning. Over his lengthy forty-​year career, he held numerous positions, at one point holding 12 simultaneously. Moses had lofty plans to renew New York by demolishing the low-​income housing and the slums of New York to make way for multi-​lane highways and public parks. For Moses, cars represented a modern and efficient worldview, one which would lead the vibrant downtowns Jacobs admired through a few rounds of what Jacobs called “bulldozer renewal,” tearing down structures to work on a new blank canvas of concrete, usually to build a large highway. Moses’s master plan envisioned speedways across Manhattan, demolishing thousands of homes. However, Moses was rarely bothered by residents’ concerns and at times showed his disdain for protesters, calling them “selfish and shortsighted” for getting in the way of his personal plans for New York’s wellbeing.

Months after her article was published, Jacobs received a call from the Rockefeller Foundation, offering her a grant to expand upon her themes in “Downtown is for People.” Being offered such a prestigious grant is even more impressive because Jacobs held no degree or even academic job. She was, first and foremost, a journalist. While detractors of Jacobs have always bemoaned her lack of credentials, she would later write, “Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.” Influenced by her parents, Jacobs was never one to blindly believe an expert. She had begun to suspect the intellectual climate of city planning was a collective delusion. In this regard, Jacobs’s lack of formal training might have been a benefit. She had no sacred cows or skin in the game to sway her toward intellectual conformity. Coupled with her willingness to splice knowledge from all fields, it is no wonder Jacobs had a desperately needed fresh perspective on city planning. This book from an untrained outsider revolutionized the field of urban planning while solidifying herself as a household name in the field. Today, Jacobs is widely quoted amongst city planners and academics, and for good reason.

In 1961, she published her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs’s masterwork is a love letter to the intricacies beneath the surface of everyday life in New York City. Using her experience in journalism, Jacobs vividly describes why some cities thrive and others fail. For Jacobs, the city was not an abstract entity, but a living entity, obviously from the book’s title. Inspired by her interest in zoology and biology, she interpreted the city as an organism. According to Jacobs, Cities are not just spatial expressions of economic growth but the engines of economic growth itself.

With this biological metaphor in mind, it is easy to see that city planners were tinkering with an ecosystem they did not fully comprehend. Cities are densely populated and highly complex, not just with infrastructure and bricks and mortar, but the ineffable social relations that bind neighborhoods together as communities capable of action and settling conflicts.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, two big themes stick out to libertarians: Jacobs’s critiques of government planning and her account of what she termed “organized complexity.”

Jacobs’s fundamental insight was that when left to develop organically in line with local interests, cities thrive. Cities die when they are made to fit the mold of abstract theories devised by city planners such as Moses, who had a completely alternative understanding of cities as mere conduits of traffic. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a scathing critique of the hubris of government managed by figures like Robert Moses. Jacobs had a firm belief that ordinary people were more than capable of organizing their communities. In all discussions of power, Jacobs always defaulted to the local level.

Though, Jacobs was no libertarian. She believed that, in many cases, it was justified for the government to regulate the economy and intervene when necessary. However, she argued that the wrong kind of political power was being used in cities. Jacobs believed many of the problems of cities are caused by national policies that do not cater to the uniqueness of each city. For Jacobs, cities should be left to their own local governments because they understand the intricate networks of relationships and deals that comprise a city’s dynamics, something national policy is inherently blind to.

National policy did not serve cities, but neither did city planners. Examining the ideas of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, both divide up cities districts based on function. Jacobs argued that these plans conformed to lovely theories, but their authors had nearly no appreciation for cities as organisms. For Ebenezer, Corbusier, and Moses, their utopias had to be sketched upon a blank canvas and then constructed in perfect symmetry and harmony. But none of this reflects the reality of a densely populated urban environment.

Jacobs observed that great cities have a few hallmarks in their architecture and layout. Though population density is high, building blocks are short and pedestrian-​friendly to help foster community and provide a sense of security through local familiarity. Old and new buildings coexist. Old buildings act as cheap locations for new ideas to be tried out—a mix of buildings but also a mix of functions. In lively cities, Jacobs noted, each area served multiple functions, whether they be residential or commercial. This is part of the reason why cities are so crucial to national economies.

Jacobs pointed out that cities make up a disproportionately large amount of nations’ economies. It is not some coincidence but because they act as colossal entrepreneurial laboratories. Like any good observer of the economy, Jacobs noted the crucial role entrepreneurs play in the economy by creating new ways of doing things. A thriving economy is not a mere accumulation of capital goods but a network of information being processed and synthesized into new knowledge. Large-​scale government spending and redevelopment disrupted these factors that make cities thrive, creating perverse incentives for cities to poison themselves.

Jacobs was writing during the 1960s, when the question of a centrally-​planned government economy was discussed as an alternative to Western capitalism. While Jacobs was no fan of what she saw as the excesses of capitalism, she did not see widespread government intervention as a viable alternative to what she called “organized complexity.”

Jacobs uses the example of her home on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. Being in the middle of New York, Hudson Street was rarely quiet. All day, people use the streets for various purposes without any formal command structure. Despite the lack of coordination, people use the street for all sorts of activities at various times of the day. Jacobs calls this phenomenon “sidewalk ballet.” Each person using the street unintentionally fosters eyes on the streets, meaning people are less likely to commit crimes throughout the day. Many people using the same spaces for their own purposes contribute unintentionally to the development of social networks that promote safety and trust despite the obstacles of city life.

Humans make buildings, but cities are more than mere buildings. They are an expression of vast social networks formed by self-​interested individuals following their own goals, inadvertently establishing the institutions necessary for civil society to flourish and make amazing cities. Cities are not works of art for Jacobs because they are not a result of wholly deliberate design.

This will all sound familiar to libertarians because it is similar to F.A. Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order, an idea crucial to the history of classical liberalism and libertarianism. Hayek’s idea of spontaneous order explains that complex systems, such as economies or whole societies, emerge and organize without central planning. Spontaneous order challenges the idea that only top-​down state-​run authorities can craft efficient and free societies. Hayek emphasizes the limitations of centralized planning while highlighting the benefits of allowing decentralized decision-​making and individual freedom.

Jacobs shares Hayek’s emphasis on decentralized individual decision-​making. When discussing low-​income housing and slums, Jacobs wrote, “To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their own self-​interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities. This is far from trying to patronize people into a better life, and it is far from what is done today.”

Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, though controversial in some respects, became an immediate hit. Regardless of whether her detractors agreed with her arguments, city planners who read Jacobs commented she made them ask more questions about their field than they ever had before.

Though Jacobs undeniably cemented herself as an intellectual with The Death and Life of Great Cities, Jacobs also made a name for herself as an activist. Under the leadership of Robert Moses, numerous state-​led efforts to build housing in Greenwich were initiated. Part of Moses’s project was to create an extension onto Fifth Avenue to improve the flow of traffic. To achieve this, part of Greenwich would need to be bulldozed. An activist named Shirley Hayes founded the Committee to Save Washington Square Park, gathering a coalition of neighborhood groups to oppose the Fifth Avenue extension onto the speedway. By the time the renowned progressive doctor and intellectual Raymond Rubinow took over the organization, Jacobs joined the movement.

Jacobs pursued an aggressive media strategy, reaching out to local papers and magazines to gain sympathetic coverage. Her efforts eventually paid off, with high-​profile figures like Eleanor Roosevelt supporting her. From 1962 to 1968, Jacobs made a name for herself as a fearless protestor. Jacobs was even arrested on occasion for inciting a riot, though the courts later reduced the charge to disorderly conduct. Though Jacobs’s efforts paid off and the character of Greenwich Village was preserved, the ordeals left Jacobs disillusioned.

After her arrest in 1968, a multitude of factors led Jacobs to move to Toronto, Canada. After 1968, Jacobs was tired of fighting local government and was worried her college-​age sons would be drafted. The Jacobs family moved to Toronto on Albany Avenue, where Jacobs would reside for the next 38 years, becoming a Canadian in her own right. Jacobs even commented on the question of Quebec separating into its own nation. As an adherent of decentralizing power, Jacobs advocated for separatism as a sound economic and national policy.

Jacobs was no one-​hit wonder. In 1969, she published her Economy of Cities, where she claims that “Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” Her point is that without progress and development, poverty is the default of human lkife. That is why Jacobs argues cities are so important as the main drivers of prosperity and economic development, but also as a multitude of innovators of all varieties, whether in industry, the arts, or academia. Cities cultivate— through dense population and cultural diversity— atmospheres of relative tolerance, free association, and autonomy. Cities have always been the place where, in the darkest times of history, the air of genius could breathe freely.

Jacobs makes the point that cities are not artificial but something deeply human that even precedes the existence of widespread agriculture. Jacobs argues that cities might have been the birthplace of agriculture. For Jacobs, every form of economic development has its basis in the city.

Another classic of Jacobs was her 1999 book, The Nature of Economics, where she advocates for “biomimicry,” the studying and imitating of natural phenomena to gain insight and application to other areas of study such as city planning.

Jacobs’s final book was in 2004, entitled The Dark Age Ahead. In it, she warned against the hubris of unbridled progressive thinking. Jacobs identified five institutions she believed were essential to the flourishing of the Western World: the family, higher education, the independence of science, the tax system, and self-​governing by professional groups. All of these she considered fundamental, but everywhere observed their imminent collapse. What she feared most was “societal dementia,” where future generations will be unaware of the essential institutions that make their lives and liberties possible. As always, Jacobs appealed to open-​mindedness with the biblical principle “Explore many things, but keep the good thing.”

Jacobs’s views and style defy the usual political labels, and, as a result, all camps at varying times have claimed Jacobs as their own. Jacobs first came to libertarian notice with Murray Rothbard reviewing her second book, The Economy of Cities, calling it “brilliant, scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development, past and present, of free-​market cities.” Jacobs had a disdain for central planning, something she shared with arch-​liberal Ludwig von Mises. But when asked if she was a libertarian, Jacobs’s answer was lukewarm. While agreeing with their social policies, she condemned laissez-​faire capitalism as a dog-​eat-​dog type system.

But libertarian scholars such as Sanford Ikeda have been working on a libertarian reassessment of Jacobs’s work.

After a lifetime of intellectual contributions and activism, Jane Jacobs passed away on April 25, 2006. Through her iconoclastic work criticizing government policy, she had carved out an almost celebrity-​like status—one she denied at every chance she had. In 1991, she accepted the Toronto Arts for Life Time Achievement award on her own holiday, Jane Jacobs Day, the first weekend of each May. After receiving this award, she refused all prizes and honorary doctorates. She often repeated, “I don’t know who this celebrity called Jane Jacobs is—it’s not me. You either do your work or you’re a celebrity; I’d rather do my work.”

Jacobs revolutionized the field of city planning and has transformed from a gadfly of the discipline to its most famous exponent. Despite not welcoming the label with open arms, there is much for libertarians to admire in the works of Jacobs. At a time when the government organizes more and more of our daily lives, it’s not such a bad thing to follow Jacobs’s advice and reclaim the streets for the people.