What would Jane Jacobs do?
It’s important to remember as we pay tribute to planner that she was anything but predictable
At the beginning of Wednesday’s city council session, Councillor Joe Cressy stood to pay tribute to the late Jane Jacobs on the occasion of what would have been her 100th birthday.
“Jane Jacobs was an observer, she was a city builder, she was a rabble-rouser, an activist — she cared deeply about this city in particular — and in my case she was also a neighbour,” he said about the woman who died in 2006 and remains one of the most influential people ever to call Toronto home.
Her writing about economics and, especially, how cities work, turned the urban planning profession on its head and changed the way people around the world think about neighbourhoods.
Organizations around the world are paying tribute to her this year, as Cressy did; the same day the Google homepage had an image of Jacobs on it.
As it happens, while Cressy was speaking, I was reading another of those tributes, an essay on Jacobs by my friend and colleague Shawn Micallef on the website Curbed, in which he looked at her influence on this city, her adopted home.
Combing the history books and canvassing friends and relations, he finds her fingerprints on not just the famous Spadina Expressway battle, but also the development of whole neighbourhoods — St. Lawrence Market, Liberty Village, the Distillery District, the Entertainment District (through her inspiration of the 401Richmond Street restoration); she even had a direct role in the early planning of the Eaton Centre.
As Micallef writes, that last one might be a surprise to some people who know Jacobs more for her famous celebration of the “sidewalk ballet” of city retail strips filled with small shops. A good reminder that those who celebrate Jacobs’ legacy might be careful about imagining they know what she would have thought of a particular issue when they invoke her name.
“You could never predict that,” her friend Mary Rowe says of the question, “What would Jane Jacobs do?”
“She was really not an ideological person. She was methodically observant and exceptionally well read. Her brain was just wired differently, and it would lead to unexpected conclusions.”
So it’s hard to know what she would have thought of the decisions before her city’s politicians in the week of her birthday. The Uber-taxi fight, for example — she was often opposed to strict regulatory regimes and sometimes spoke of the need for outlaw jitney cab services to step in when transit fails.
But even if she could be surprising, it’s fair to say, as Cressy did in his speech, that the passage of the Bloor Street Bike Lane pilot project that will run through the Annex neighbourhood she lived in was a fitting tribute to mark the occasion.
For a few things were fairly consistent in Jacobs’ writing and her activism: the importance of the human scale on a neighbourhood street, in how people travel on it and in how it is built; the primacy of the needs and habits of those who live and work in a neighbourhood — rather than the imperatives of the metropolitan car-moving network — in determining how it evolves, and the power of citizens to stand up and tell city hall what they want (and don’t want) rather than accepting topdown instruction.
The Bloor project is the result of nearly four decades of grassroots local activism and is supported by local merchants through their busi- ness associations. It serves areas where bike transportation is the main choice of as many as 10 per cent of residents (more than anywhere else in the city) and it shapes the streets for people on foot, and on bikes, to enjoy and use well.
“The point of cities is the multiplicity of choice,” Jacobs wrote in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. “It is impos- sible to take advantage of the multiplicity of choice without being able to get around easily.”
These protected bike lanes, which will be subject to study for a year before a decision about whether to make them permanent (or, as Councillor Jaye Robinson suggested in championing the pilot project on Wednesday, extending them farther east and west) or remove them, will increase the multiplicity of choices for people in how they get around the city quickly and safely.
In this city, Jacobs’ name is invoked often at city hall — as influential as she has been around the world, she sometimes seems more of a patron saint in Toronto. Yet sometimes it is hard to see her influence in the actual day-to-day building of the place: too many of our new condo developments, for instance, seem to ignore her key observations about how local street life depends on small storefronts and many different kinds of uses on the same block. Too often still, even those who proclaim her name loudest put too much emphasis on planning-room vision and too little on streetlevel observation.
This is a city council that voted to rebuild an urban highway in the same place it is building a new neighbourhood.
But on this one vote, on Jane Jacobs’ birthday, the bike lanes through her old neighbourhood carried the day, and it was not particularly close.
Here’s hoping the close observation of how the life of the street responds to the change over the coming year can be the real tribute to her legacy. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire