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?