From the CBC Radio show The 180:
City building guru Jane Jacobs’ legacy is high house prices and sprawl, says former Vancouver Mayor Jane Jacobs ideas about ‘mixed use’ and ‘eyes on the street’ have been embraced by cities across North America. For years, Sam Sullivan worshipped at her altar. But when he served as Vancouver’s Mayor in the mid 2000s, Sullivan says he stopped.
For the audio feed, click here.
http://positivemoney.org/issues/house-prices/
Excellent points Roger
Marshall Berman makes a similar argument in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982, pp. 323-325):
“Any careful reader of The Death and Life of Great American Cities will realize that Jacobs is celebrating the family and the block in distinctively modernist terms: her ideal street is full of strangers passing through, of people of many different classes, ethnic groups, ages, beliefs and life-styles: her ideal family is one in which women go out to work, men spend a great deal of time at home, both parents work in small and easily manageable units close to home, so that children can discover and grow in a world where there are two sexes and where work plays a central role in everyday life. . . .
“But for some people who seem at first to speak her language, family and locality turn out to be symbols of radical anti-modernism: for the sake of the neighborhood’s integrity, all racial minorities, sexual and ideological deviants, controversial books and films, minority modes of music and dress, are to be kept out; in the name of the family, woman’s economic, sexual and political freedom must be crushed . . . the ideologues of the New Right have more than once cited Jacobs as one of their patron saints. . . . is there something in Jacobs that leaves her open to this misuse? It seems to me that beneath her modernist text there is an anti-modernist subtext, a sort of undertow of nostalgia for a family and a neighborhood in which the self could be securely embedded, ein’feste Burg, a sold refuge against all the dangerous currents of freedom and ambiguity . . .
“Sometimes her vision seems positively pastoral . . . Her inventory of the people in her neighborhood has the aura of a WPA mural or a Hollywood version of a World War Two bomber crew . . . there is no “Washington” in Jacobs’ bomber, i.e., no blacks on her block. This is what makes her neighborhood vision seem pastoral: it is the city before the blacks got there. Her world ranges from solid working-class whites at the bottom to professional middle-class whites at the top. There is nothing and no one above; what matters more here, however, is that there is nothing and no one below.
“It was clear by the late 1960s that, amid the class disparities and racial polarities that skewered American city life, no urban neighborhood anywhere, not even the liveliest and healthiest, could be free from crime, random violence, pervasive rage and fear. Jacobs’ faith in the benigness of the sounds she heard from the street in the middle of the night was bound to be, at best, a dream.”
I included this last bit about crime because it is so clearly of the time when Berman is writing. As a child, I think I was actually in New York for a week or so that year. My parents impressed on me that the street was too dangerous to walk along. Obviously things have changed (maybe because of unleaded gasoline). But it does point to the continuing difficulty of incorporating in the city the people above and below. I think this is a useful critique of where Jacobs’ ideas can be taken, even as it seems to me that it is unfair to Jacobs personally.
Mr. Sullivan blames Ms. Jacobs for restricting supply because she and her adherents “disliked towers”. This is not true. She disliked isolated towers with no street connection or contribution to the traditional street network. Mixed use towers that permitted street-level interactions within the traditional street pattern were fine, despite her admitted dislike for chain stores.
And to further blame her for sprawl? Amazing. Mr. Sullivan contends that historic demand for car-dependent development in the suburbs would’ve been stillborn if only Ms. Jacobs’ narrow-minded disciples had permitted more towers in East Vancouver? Rolling my eyes at that one.
Kareem Adbul Jabbar wrote a piece defending political correctness for the Washington Post a few months back. It’s a good read. Part of his defense stated that just because some people have taken it to a silly extreme, that is no reason to disregard basic politeness and sensitivity towards others. This is no different. Just because some folks in San Francisco, and to a lesser extent Vancouver, have taken some selectively-interpreted elements of Ms. Jacobs’ writing to a silly and misread extreme, that doesn’t refute any of the basic tenants of her observations or arguments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/22/kareem-abdul-jabbar-in-defense-of-political-correctness/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
I agree Dan. I found Sam Sullivan’s interview to be a self-servicing load of nonsense and he seems to blame Jane Jacobs for everything, while local and provincial politicians get off scot-free.
Did you notice how many times he said “I” when referring to his time as mayor and the actions the city took, as if he was acting alone.
I saw it is a something worse then self-serving. Mr. Sullivan was once a Mayor, but he is now an MLA sitting in a BC Liberal cabinet. Through this interview, he blithely ignores his own government’s failure to initiate any meaningful response to the burgeoning housing affordability crisis, it’s ambivalence towards funding capital investment in transit that would allow transportation (and therefore housing) choice to a wider diversity of the population, while they are rushing ahead to expand the very freeway systems that Jane Jacobs would spend her formidable career fighting.
When will Sam Sullivan and his cabinet colleagues from Vancouver answer for their inability to stand up for this region?
Sam Sullivan was a good councillor and therefore seemed like he’d make a decent mayor. The transformation once he took office was incredible. He acted like he alone spoke for the city council, like he alone spoke for the NPA. We’ve seen plenty of other leaders display egos the size of Nunavut once elected, seen others act like the king of the world, but I don’t think anyone expected Sam Sullivan to turn into Mr. Hyde.
In Victoria he isn’t the dictator anymore, he’s merely one of the minions obscuring the truth and he knows he must stay in line or risk being ejected. He, along with Susanne Anton and the other Vancouver sheep, will stay in his place and keep his mouth shut as long as it looks like the Liberals can continue to win with Christy at the helm. That’s how party discipline works.
I would like to give Mr. Sullivan credit as a City Councillor and Mayor for consistently trying to find ways to add density, housing choice and affordability to Vancouver.
OTOH, I don’t believe Mr. Sullivan is in cabinet now and likely won’t be under the premiership of the woman he beat out for the NPA mayoral nomination. She knows how to hold a grudge, as the City of Vancouver, TransLink and our public schools know all too well.
If I had to pick heroes, Jane Jacobs (and Richard Stallman) would be at the top of my list. Her core insights and values are untouched by Sullivan’s criticisms. While he is wrong about Jacobs, he nevertheless points to an important issue: Jacobs’ ideas are often associated with urban elitism.
Berman refers to those above and those below. These are the key flashpoints for debate in Vancouver: wealthy investors and gentrification. The new urbanism, or whatever it’s called these days, has run into real trouble around these issues. Planners design cities for people: in practice, the largest beneficiaries of good planning are the rich and the well-off, many of whom already benefit from historic buildings in streetcar suburbs. There are whole areas of scholarship about the network of global cities occupied by transnational capital.
Proponents of motordom like Jordan Bateman have cast themselves as defenders of the salt-of-the-earth working man against the incursions of snobbish cosmopolitan elites (wearing Birkenstocks and Che berets no doubt). They cast transit, bicycles and walkable neighborhoods as preserves of privilege. Elites can afford to bike: working men need their cars. Their campaign has been successful because it is supported by powerful interests: but also because it contains a kernel of truth. This was crystal clear in the transit referendum, which I believe was really (and unfortunately, though by design) a vote against arrogant technocratic elites. Opponents consistently shouted that they thought this was a money-grab by wealthy Vancouver.
On the one hand, we have people in the suburbs rejecting urbanism because it’s not benefiting them. On the other, we have urbanists ignoring the suburbs, and sometimes mocking their urban pretensions. I see it here all the time. The City of Vancouver, home of the experts and decision makers, with its money for amenities and innovative architecture, is at the centre of almost every discussion. Rare is the map with anything but blank space beyond Boundary Road. The suburbs are ugly, and not particularly interesting; they are for those not successful enough to afford Yaletown. I’m not blaming Mr Price for this: he consistently and admirably strives to expand the discussion. But the sources he has to draw upon, and the people who are engaged on urban issues, are focused on Vancouver.
Yes, Sullivan is wrong to blame Jacobs for a problem that could not even matter until after her ideas gained purchase (which mostly seems to have required generational turn-over). I think it is far too easy to dismiss him without trying to find whether there may be some useful insight to be gained from his argument. However accidentally, he touched on (or tried to exploit) the tension between urbanists and the people they claim to by trying to help.
(Incidentally, while I am not against towers per se – I’m happy to see them go up in my neighborhood – I suspect Jacobs would be critical of how we build them: not because of their density, but because they are essentially gated communities. I seem to recall Death and Life talks about the problem of dark, hidden stairwells in the projects. Her ideal streets are spaces where public and private space interpenetrate. Towers I have seen lack that healthy interface. They are not communities, but aggregations of strangers who avoid one another’s gaze in the elevators.)