When Jane Jacobs died at age 89, a little over a week ago, the last custodian of the mid-century, pre-modern city, it was almost inevitable that even worshipful elegies would concede her irrelevance. The author of 1961's The Death and Life of Great American Cities had little to say about suburban growth. Some would note that her New Urbanist acolytes had merely seeded the exurbs with theme-park travesties of neighborhoods.
As it happens, Jacobs, the longtime champion of authenticity and serendipity, and scourge of modernist trophies in windy plazas and freeways that flatten lively districts, addresses suburbia in her last book. No surprise —she does not think much of it. Her worldview was formed by the densely active streets of Manhattan, circa 1950. She sealed her fame by helping lead a late-'60s coalition that thwarted New York planning czar Robert Moses' scheme for an expressway, even though by then she had decamped to Toronto.
In 2004's Dark Age Ahead, she sees sprawl as symptomatic of more worrisome trends. As the title suggests, Jacobs presages a reprise of barbarism for Western society. Dark Age Ahead is a literate, graceful warning about the future-fears Kevin Phillips outlines in his new book, American Theocracy. But the eclipse of reason by untested assumptions, in Jacobs' view, could be religious or simply arrogant. She cites, for instance, the certainty of some planners that an urban staple, the tree-lined boulevard, would not work in the suburbs, a judgment resting entirely on modernist orthodoxy about segregated land uses, not on observation.
While she predicts inevitable density growth for suburbs, she allows that "Suburbanites... have a point worth heeding: Things can be made worse, not better. They often have been, under the banners of good intentions."
Planners, urban, social and political, should heed this. To question the business of sprawl is not to bless any government scheme to shape it. Neither would Jacobs accept that government should resign itself to the all-wise hand of the market. Her loyalty was not to an ideal but to people. She valued the close-grained local involvement of individuals. Her reason was common sense, grounded in observation, whether organized or anecdotal. This should please cyber-libertarians such as Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit blogger and author of An Army of Davids, who cheers networks of wireless individuals sweeping aside Big This and That.
Like Reynolds, and Phillips, Jacobs regrets the decline of science and science education. She also blames dark forces that undermine the commonsense principles that lifted Western culture from the murk, such as accountability. Discussing the Nixonian notion of "plausible denial" in a chapter titled, "Self-Policing Subverted," she takes to task both business and government. "Behind the success of plausible denial is an already long-standing North American disconnection from reality: the substitution of image for substance. The idea that a presentable image makes substance immaterial."
And in this point lurks another warning: "False image making has become a very big business throughout North America and is a staple of the U.S. government. Legions of hired liars labor to disconnect reality from all manner of images ... "
In Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It, Thomas de Zengotita plumbs this very thought. He finds well-infiltrated troops harassing Reynolds' cheerful, flash-mob army. In our postindustrial, postmodern society, individuals are conditioned to expect attention and options, he says, delivered by artful fictions that everyone knows are false, but which are so much fun to play along with. Or to perform, as he sees it. De Zengotita accepts that choices and representations have always confronted humans but argues that "a qualitative threshold has been breached," rendering most people mere performers in the show starring themselves, produced by Big ... who, really? Business? Media? Brother? In any event, he demands that you recognize and dismiss the simulation "as a matter of routine processing."
This thought's object is as premodern as Jacobs' urbanism. In architecture, Jacobs's ideas helped nourish postmodernism, at least its rejection of airy abstraction and its affinity for the vernacular. Whether she praises busy, mixed-use streets in the suburbs or condemns the advance of media-reality, her viewpoint is ante- more than anti-. With De Zengotita she decries the torrent of inauthenticity tickling us every day. With Reynolds she extols the good judgment of individuals in small-grained contexts.
Although premodern, her approach is not romantic. Her death reeled through the blogorama while George Pataki took a spade to downtown Manhattan, to launch yet another hyper-planned development, the ground-zero "Freedom Tower." The flurry of September 11 films, and the date's approaching fifth anniversary, should remind us how easily mediated sentiment distracts us. As Ron Rosenbaum notes, critiquing the United 93 movies for Slate, our need for redemptive narratives, richly served by postmodern media, might cloud our judgment when we most need it.
This is an observation worthy of Jane Jacobs.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.