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July 17, 2006
Jane Jacobs Revisited
On finally reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Metropolis Magazine
The passing of Jane Jacobs and recent criticism by NY Times architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussof prompted Karrie Jacobs (no relation) to finally read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the book that revolutionized urban planning.
Will Jane Jacobs' legacy be her ideas, or the influence she had on the modern planning movement, which often contradicts those ideas? Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan seems to be a perfect case study for considering this question.
Ouroussoff’s dismissal of the critics of Atlantic Yards is a misreading. I don’t know whether Jacobs, circa 1959, would approve or disapprove of Ratner, circa 2006, but her take on the project would likely be a bit more nuanced than the simple declaration “too big.” In certain ways the Ratner plan, with its arena, density, and mixture of residential and office uses is influenced—albeit indirectly—by her thinking. The project’s substantial number of “affordable” housing units adds to its overall heterogeneity. On the other hand, a huge project by one developer and one architect cannot be diverse, and it’s possible that Jacobs would have reacted to Gehry’s irregular forms much as she reacted to Googie-style coffee shops: “virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different.”
The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”
Posted by lumi at July 17, 2006 10:18 PM