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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
The Death & Life of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs died Tuesday. With her passing at age 89, cities lost one of their most intelligent and eloquent advocates, and the world lost an important voice for truth, beauty and rational thought.
Jacobs made a life and a living thinking about cities—how they work, why they work, who makes them work. She had no formal training for this livelihood, which is to say she did not have an advanced degree in urban planning or sociology or economics. In her last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs had hard words for modern higher education, writing that today it has devolved into mere credentialing. “… [A] degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous,” Jacobs wrote. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Instead of relying on credentials with no real education backing them up, Jacobs read on her own, observed, thought about what she saw and wrote what she thought. An early result was her devastating critique of Modernism and urban renewal, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was Jacobs’s first major work and is today considered the bible of modern urban planning … which is ironic since Jacobs professed little use for professional planners.
The Indignant Citizen still remembers the first time he read “Death and Life.” It was a revelation. Jacobs put into simple words many things the Indignant Citizen had observed about his own environment but lacked the language to explain. The importance of lively sidewalks. The advantages of mixing building types and uses. The Indignant Citizen isn’t going to go into all the brilliance of “Death and Life.” Read it yourself. You’ll be glad you did. It will change forever the way you look at and think about cities.
Of the many things Jacobs wrote and said, only one sticks out as having seemingly been proved wrong. In “Death and Life,” published in 1961, Jacobs wrote: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”
She was right on the first part. But we turned out not to be so deserving of her optimism. Jacobs was decidedly more pessimistic by the time she wrote “Dark Age Ahead.”
“The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears,” Jacobs wrote. “We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”
Jacobs identified five “pillars” of culture she believed were in danger: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental power in touch with needs and possibilities; and self-policing by the learned professions.
“They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.”
That’s so like Jacobs. Simple, elegant prose conveying highly complex and well-thought out ideas that make the reader react with forehead-slapping recognition. Who else would dare to write a book warning humanity of an impending Dark Age, and explain so clearly exactly what she meant?
Even in “Dark Age,” Jacobs managed to convey a sense of hope that perhaps if we were to heed her warning, the Dark Age could be avoided. The book was published in 2004. Recent events could not have provided much in the way of hope for Jacobs in her last days. Oil prices continue to rise, and in response we are using more gas this year than last. Elected officials should be talking about realistic alternatives to a mass motoring culture, like rebuilding the railroad infrastructure, but are instead calling for probes of oil companies to investigate possible price gouging. We seem to be blowing each other up with increasing frequency. Intolerance is on the rise.
And all the while our vapid culture celebrates style over substance and embraces ever more emptiness. The Dark Age looms. Thankfully Jacobs won’t have to see it envelop us. If we’re lucky her message will penetrate just enough to ward off the most serious effects. It worked with “Death and Life.” Urban renewal and the Garden City movements were exposed as frauds, and New Urbanism was born.
The pessimist in the Indignant Citizen says it’s too late to save ourselves. With Jacobs gone, a great advocate for us has been lost. Her voice has been silenced, and we are left with only her work to guide us. Will it be enough?
Jacobs made a life and a living thinking about cities—how they work, why they work, who makes them work. She had no formal training for this livelihood, which is to say she did not have an advanced degree in urban planning or sociology or economics. In her last book, “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs had hard words for modern higher education, writing that today it has devolved into mere credentialing. “… [A] degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous,” Jacobs wrote. “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.”
Instead of relying on credentials with no real education backing them up, Jacobs read on her own, observed, thought about what she saw and wrote what she thought. An early result was her devastating critique of Modernism and urban renewal, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” It was Jacobs’s first major work and is today considered the bible of modern urban planning … which is ironic since Jacobs professed little use for professional planners.
The Indignant Citizen still remembers the first time he read “Death and Life.” It was a revelation. Jacobs put into simple words many things the Indignant Citizen had observed about his own environment but lacked the language to explain. The importance of lively sidewalks. The advantages of mixing building types and uses. The Indignant Citizen isn’t going to go into all the brilliance of “Death and Life.” Read it yourself. You’ll be glad you did. It will change forever the way you look at and think about cities.
Of the many things Jacobs wrote and said, only one sticks out as having seemingly been proved wrong. In “Death and Life,” published in 1961, Jacobs wrote: “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”
She was right on the first part. But we turned out not to be so deserving of her optimism. Jacobs was decidedly more pessimistic by the time she wrote “Dark Age Ahead.”
“The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears,” Jacobs wrote. “We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.”
Jacobs identified five “pillars” of culture she believed were in danger: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science and science-based technology; taxes and governmental power in touch with needs and possibilities; and self-policing by the learned professions.
“They are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness.”
That’s so like Jacobs. Simple, elegant prose conveying highly complex and well-thought out ideas that make the reader react with forehead-slapping recognition. Who else would dare to write a book warning humanity of an impending Dark Age, and explain so clearly exactly what she meant?
Even in “Dark Age,” Jacobs managed to convey a sense of hope that perhaps if we were to heed her warning, the Dark Age could be avoided. The book was published in 2004. Recent events could not have provided much in the way of hope for Jacobs in her last days. Oil prices continue to rise, and in response we are using more gas this year than last. Elected officials should be talking about realistic alternatives to a mass motoring culture, like rebuilding the railroad infrastructure, but are instead calling for probes of oil companies to investigate possible price gouging. We seem to be blowing each other up with increasing frequency. Intolerance is on the rise.
And all the while our vapid culture celebrates style over substance and embraces ever more emptiness. The Dark Age looms. Thankfully Jacobs won’t have to see it envelop us. If we’re lucky her message will penetrate just enough to ward off the most serious effects. It worked with “Death and Life.” Urban renewal and the Garden City movements were exposed as frauds, and New Urbanism was born.
The pessimist in the Indignant Citizen says it’s too late to save ourselves. With Jacobs gone, a great advocate for us has been lost. Her voice has been silenced, and we are left with only her work to guide us. Will it be enough?
Monday, April 24, 2006
Reality Bites
Sometimes on days like Friday, when the tulips stretch toward the warm sun and the air is filled with the sound of chirping birds, it is possible to forget for a moment just how doomed our culture is. But then, like a wad of shit dropped from the ass of a passing pigeon, reality smacks us in the face.
Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.
Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.
“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”
As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.
At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”
Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.
The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”
Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.
Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.
This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.
All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.
Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”
No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.
Take Friday’s centerpiece story in the Wall Street Journal “Strangers on the Train: Highway Work Forces Chicagoans Off Road—Commuters Bemoan the Loss of Quality Time in Cars; Ms. Dennis Lugs In a Cake,” by Ilan Brat. (Note: The Journal is like that, with the long headlines and two-phase subheads. It’s kind of fun, actually.) The story is all about how car addicts, who used the Dan Ryan Expressway as their daily fix, have gone cold turkey on mass transit while the road is being rebuilt over the next two years. The $600 million Dan Ryan reconstruction project has essentially halved the capacity of the city’s busiest expressway while it is rebuilt from the road bed up.
Things are not going well for many of these new transit users. The quotes in the WSJ story make one wonder “How did they find these morons to interview and say these things?” But then, finding them probably wasn’t that difficult. In fact, all the Journal reporter probably had to do was get on the train and pick the first person he saw.
“‘This was a very, very big step for me,’ says [Ann Schue], 42 years old, who has never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service ,” according to the Journal story. “‘I’m still very. . . ,’ she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. ‘I miss my car.’”
As we learn in the article, Schue owns a 2003 Ford Expedition and makes a 90-minute, one-way commute from her home in Homer Glen to her job at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, a a distance of about 33 miles – one way.
At the end of the story we learn that Schue now gets her driving fix on the weekends, hopping in her Urban Assault Vehicle and driving 34 miles (one way?) to a mall just for the hell of it, even though there’s a mall six miles from her house. “I don’t even know why,” she says. “I went just to go.”
Such is the pathetic state of the American Way of Life. We are so addicted to driving that when forced onto mass transit by circumstances beyond our control we seek to retake control by making unnecessary car trips to malls 30 miles from our homes just to feel the contoured seats caressing our backs and the vibration of the road in our leather cradled asses. It’s our little way of sticking it to the man, except we’re really sticking it to ourselves.
The WSJ story takes a sympathetic tone toward those struggling to give up their cars. Brat observes that Chicago is an unusual Midwestern city in that it has a well-developed mass transit system, but it is a typical Midwestern city in that hundreds of thousands of commuters would just as soon stab themselves in their own eye with a rusty fork than abandon their gas-sucking commutes in heavy traffic and take the train or the bus. “The change for many of the new riders is wrenching,” Brat writes, observing that Schue was among those “forced to trade” her SUV commute “for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.”
Another poor soul, David Pettiford, gripes in the story about losing the cocoon of pleasure provided by his Dodge Durango SUV and having to take the Metra instead.
Frank Pierson lives five blocks from the el, but prefers driving to work and paying $18 dollars a day to park. Now he’s resigned himself to the train. Mary Dennis lives in Northwest Indiana and has been driving the 72 miles round-trip to and from her job in the Loop for the last 20 years. (The story, by the way, says her trip is 36 miles, but that’s misleading because 36 miles is the one-way figure. It’s the same throughout the story, which is to say it’s misleading.) In the article, Dennis complains of having to tote a three-layer cake in on the train for an office birthday party. By the time she got downtown, the cake had shifted and settled. Is there no bakery in the downtown area capable of baking a birthday cake and delivering it to the office? Maybe she’s just that stupid. But the Indignant Citizen thinks it’s not so much a question of intelligence. It’s habit. She never stopped to think outside the bubble of her 20-year experience, which has been to buy the cake in Indiana, put it on the back seat and drive in. When confronted with mass transit, she tried to apply her old behaviors to the new environment.
This is going to be a common problem as oil prices rise and people are faced with living lives very different than the ones with which they have become comfortable. In the post-cheap oil era, we are going to have to make other arrangements, as Jim Kunstler says. The old models for doing things aren’t going to work. Living five blocks from the el and driving won’t be a choice for Frank Pierson anymore. He’ll be lucky to be able to take the el to his same job. Driving won’t be an option, the choice having been made for him by market forces beyond his control, and perhaps beyond his understanding.
All of the people in the WSJ story, all of us for that matter, face the prospect of leading very different lives by the time the Ryan Reconstruction is finished. We are not prepared to hear this, to accept it or deal with it. Stories like this one in the Journal don’t help matters by airing the whinings of a few people who’ve grudgingly given up their cars for mass transit. Politicians, our elected “leaders,” aren’t preparing us, either. Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative to the bullshit and lies of the past six years by confronting Americans with the New Reality and offering Solutions, but there is no indication any liberal is up to that task.
Instead we will try to ride the status quo to the End of the Line, with people like Ann Schue leading the way in their SUVs and papers like the Wall Street Journal holding their hands. At the end of the article, Schue is told by the reporter that traffic on the Ryan hasn’t been as bad as forecast. “Really?” she says. “Can I go back?”
No, Ann, you can’t. None of us can. And we’d all better get used to it.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Never Saw it Coming
Well, well. What did the Indignant Citizen find when he opened his morning Sun-Times? Why, this story quoting John Stroger’s son , Todd, on his father’s condition. It’s the first hard update on the county board president’s rehabilitation in weeks, and not surprisingly it came from family. And not only that, family with something to gain by going public. Looks like Todd may end up being his dad’s successor. That is shocking. Just shocking.
Chicago News Media Stroger Grade: F
The Indignant Citizen doesn’t want to keep kicking John Stroger when he’s down. There’s only so much abuse one can heap on an elderly stroke victim before people start to call it Unfair.
So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.
In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”
She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.
Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.
According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”
Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.
Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.
The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.
So we will not kick John Stroger tonight. Instead the time has come to direct scorn and ridicule at the Chicago media. In one of the most shameful performances in the face of ongoing scandal since whatever “news” program just ran on Fox News, no one, not a single Chicago newspaper, TV or radio station has dug into the Stroger stroke to find out how the old man is doing.
In fact, a month after apathetic Cook County voters gave the addled Stroger another four-year term as the president of the county board, not a single member of the media has actually laid eyes on Stroger. The only reports of his progress have come from family members. As Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed wrote on April 9, “only family members and medical professionals have had visual access to Stroger, who is recovering at the prestigious Chicago Rehabilitation Center.”
She then went on to relate that she heard “via the Stroger grapevine,” that Stroger was cracking jokes about how when he gets out everyone he knows is going on a diet, him first. Right. If that’s not a planted story the Indignant Citizen has never seen one.
Meanwhile, some hack named James Whigham, the county’s chief of staff, is running day-to-day operations. Whigham is not elected. Yet he’s essentially running county government, with the help of the elected county board members, none of whom have yet brought up at a county board meeting the obvious problems with having the chief executive of a multibillion-dollar organization incapacitated and essentially on a leave of absence of uncertain duration.
According to this story by the Daily Southtown’s Jonathan Lipman, none of the county board members have brought it up “out of fear it’ll seem disrespectful to Stroger.”
Well fuck that. It’s way past time to throw respect out the door. If Stroger will be unable to serve, then Cook County taxpayers have a right to know. Sure, bubba. Just like we have a right to expect fiduciary responsibility on the part of those elected to run county government. That expectation and $2 will get the Indignant Citizen on the el.
Meanwhile Chicago’s news reporters should be ashamed of their performance on the Stroger matter. They can dig up the histories of jurors deciding the fate of the crooked and now convicted former Illinois Governor George Ryan, but they can’t find any sources or records to provide essential information on the condition of a man who may have fraudulently won re-election. They have no trouble breathlessly reporting that Mayor Daley’s wife, Maggie, has had a tulip named after her , but they can’t grasp the fact that the man elected to head Cook County government may never walk or speak a coherent sentence again.
The Chicago news media have totally failed in their responsibility as watchdogs in this instance.
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