Jacobs Urban Community

During the mid-20th century, many communities in the United States were razed down and built back up by urban planners, who claimed they were transforming the spaces for the better. The planners often neglected to consider the needs and priorities of the people who had and were expected to live in their projects, and thus they ended up destroying rather than improving community life. Activist and urban studies writer Jane Jacobs explored instances of urban renewal in neighborhoods across America during the 1950-60s, and documented important findings about the movement in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs argues that urban planners destroyed communities because they exhausted the same plans regardless of past success …show more content…
She says that the North End sector survives the period of urban renewal because its solid Italian population and physical environment unwavering in the face of change enable it to stay unified. The West End, on the other hand, represents what happens when a community is destroyed by urban planning. It was completely broken down and developed into expensive residential and commercial buildings in the 1950s, robbing residents of both their spirit and homes. The plight of neighborhoods like the West End, Jacobs argues, was the direct result of urban planners who “have ignored the study of success and failure in real life … and are guided by principles derived… from anything but cities themselves.” Planners thought their textbook tactics to enrich and modernize the West End would work, but their efforts were for naught because their calculations on paper didn’t factor those living in the community. It was the planners’ project, not the peoples’. This use of cookie-cutter ideas based on textbook evidence by urban planners is the very thing that Jacobs disdains, so later in the work, she offers her own opinion on how to make …show more content…
The language she uses to introduce and then explain her conditions is when Jacobs truly starts to contradict herself. She writes that the four conditions she’s set out are simply “indispensable” and that “[a]ll four in combination are necessary to generate city diversity…” Jacobs falls right into the trap that urban planners did when they applied textbook techniques to all projects. Such confidence and assumption of correctness on both ends of course has the potential to create ignorance and rigidity in the eyes of the planner. Jacobs is so convinced that having seen cities across the country and lived through her own neighborhood being pressured from urban renewal, that the generalizations she makes must be true. While they have the potential to be useful and utilized by many cities, it is simply incorrect to say they’re useful for all. The fact that a generalization is based on evidence, no matter how well researched or personal, makes it neither perfect nor always applicable, and Jacobs’ implication that it does clashes with the overarching purpose of the book. So how is it that an author so aware of the dangers of generalizations makes this contradicting