Urban rebel
Let’s start with this simple fact: Jane Jacobs has had more influence on how we think about cities than anyone else since World War II, or at least since 1962, when her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” made a case for the messy vitality of oldfashioned neighborhoods at a time when clean-slate urban renewal was all the rage.
Another fact, less heartening, is that her pungent observations often now serve as sanctified cliches. Such notions as the value of shops and apartments along a city sidewalk are treated as holy scripture by devotees, or fodder for checklists used by earnest planners and cynical developers alike.
And judging by the tone of the first full biography of Jacobs, who would have turned 100 this year, the hagiography won’t end anytime soon.
“She was social activist, gadfly, rogue, and rebel,” writes Robert Kanigel in “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” a birth-to-death account that’s ambitious and cloying by turns. “She was an economist of sorts, and something of a philosopher, and, one hears it said, an expert on cities, too.”
Kanigel sets out to chart the evolution of a physician’s daughter in Pennsylvania coal country into a Greenwich Village working woman and then a lay author of startling originality. She also was a woman of combative convictions — happily getting herself arrested in a (successful) fight to stop an expressway through Lower Manhattan, or moving her family to Toronto on the eve of her oldest son’s 18th birthday so that he couldn’t be drafted to fight in Vietnam.
It’s an atmospheric tale, and Kanigel does it justice, such as when we see Jacobs bicycling to work as a staff writer at Architectural Forum in the 1950s, “wicker basket suspended from its handlebars,” shrugging off catcalls like “get a horse.”
But the author strikes a conversational tone throughout that tries too hard to be engaging. This is most true early on, such as when he quotes from her elementary school poetry, then proclaims, “Whatever we may think of these youthful efforts, she kept at it.” When Jacobs works for the Office of War Information in the 1940s, Kanigel gushes that “her talents, her bristling intelligence, were plain to see” but then frets that “she was still invisible to the great world of literature and ideas.”
This changes as Jacobs uses her post at Architectural Forum to develop the skepticism that fueled the book for which she still is best known. She interviewed celebrated architects and planners who explained how their orderly approaches were saving older cities — and then took the trouble to figure out that the “blighted” targets of renewal often were intricate communities that functioned quite well on their own and that “renewal” destroyed what it supposedly set out to save.
This part of the tale is where Kanigel’s readability is likely to connect with general readers who know Jacobs’ name and are intrigued by her reputation, but find “The Death and Life” daunting with its 450-plus pages of dense paragraphs.
Another path in — the heretical one that I recommend — is to skip the masterwork and instead read “Downtown Is for People,” one of 37 articles, speeches and ephemera in the new collection “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs.”
The piece appeared in 1958 in a surprising venue, Fortune magazine, and it maps out the terrain she would explore much more fully in “Death and Life.” She emphasizes the danger of overscale impositions like cultural centers cut off from their surroundings, and the potential magic of alleyways (using our own Maiden Lane as an example).
Any street that inspires public affection “has old buildings mixed with the new.” The “ultimate expert” on urban conditions can be you or me: “What is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk.”
There’s plenty more of value in “Vital Little Plans,” which ranges from a 1936 piece for Vogue on New York’s jewelry district to an excerpt from the book Jacobs was working on at the time of her death 60 years later at age 89.
The later installments include such surprises as a 2000 lecture where she grappled with gentrification: In small doses it may be beneficial, says the woman who can be seen as having (figuratively) paved the way for the trend, but there’s a tipping point where “so many people want in on a place now generally perceived as interesting … that gentrification turns socially and economically vicious.”
In the introduction, editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring extol Jacobs’ “radical pragmatism.” This phrase captures her vivid force more deeply than all of Kanigel’s prose, and it’s why the best aspects of her work will always stay fresh.
John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron