Arquitectura

An Introduction to Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of American Cities
for use by MFA Students
in Graphic Design,
The Maryland Institute College of Art
February, 2008

Jane Jacobs in 6 words:

Jacobs loves sidewalks . . .

. . . . and hates parks.

Let’s try that again:

Jane Jacobs wants to restore dignity to
streets and sidewalks by understanding
the kinds of activity andrelationships they
support,
while re-evaluating parks and open space,
including their dependence on streets and
sidewalks for their vitality, interest, and
safety.

JANE JACOBS
:: Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1916
:: Moved to Greenwich Village in New York City,
1928
:: Associate editor of Architectural Forum, 1952
:: She wrote The Death and Life of American Cities,
1961
:: In 1962,she was Chairperson of the Joint
Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan
Expressway.
:: Protesting the Vietnam War, she and her family
emigrated to Toronto, Canada in1968, where she
continued to work as an urban activist.
:: She died in Toronto, in 2006 at the age of 90.

THE RADIANT GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL:
or, what Jane JACOBS hates about
urban planning
In the opening sentence of TheDeath and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
declares war on the major schools of urban planning:
“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and
mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding,
different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools
of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplementsand women’s
magazines.
She names three major targets of urban planning.
:: the Garden City
:: the Radiant City
:: the City Beautiful.
Learn about each one on the slides that follow.

THE GARDEN CITY

Ebenezer Howard, 1850-1928
:: traveled in America
:: a reformer appalled by the living
conditions of London’s poor

Scenes of the London slum life that
appalled Howard. Majorproblems included
overcrowding, disease, filth, and crime.

LONDON “SLUM”: Market Court, Kensington. Demolished late 1860s.
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/london/56.html

LONDON SLUM: c. 1901?
http://www.victorianlondon.org/houses/slums.htm

Ebenezer Howard
The Three Magnets
Howard’s “magnet” compares the attractions
of town and country, and suggests a synthesis in
the idealof a Garden City.
Jacobs writes,
“Howard set spinning powerful and citydestroying ideas. He conceived that the way
to deal with the city’s functions was to sort
and sift out of the whole certain simple uses,
and to arrange each of these in relative selfcontainment. He focused on the provision of
wholesome housing as the central problem,
to which everthing else was subsidiary;
furthermorehe defined wholesome housing in
terms only of suburban physical qualities and
small-town social qualities... He conceived of
good planning as a series of static acts; in each
case, the plan must anticipate all that is neeeded
and be protected, after it is built, against any but
the most minor subsequent changes.”

Letchworth Garden City, north of London,
is the “first planned city.”Letchworth Garden City, built in order to
demonstrate Howard’s ideas, became the model
for a bunch of “New Towns” and “Garden
Cities” in England and the United States,
including:
Chatham Village (Pittsburgh)
Garden City, New York
Baldwin Hills Village, Los Angeles

REMEMBER LEWISH MUMFORD
LEWIS MUMFORD
1895-1990

Like a construction gang bulldozing a site clean
of all habitations,she bulldozes out of existence
every desirable innovation in urban planning
during the last century and every competing
idea, without even a pretense of critical
evaluation. ..The Death and Life of American
Cities is a mingling of sense and sensibility, of
mature judgments and school girl howlers.
-- Lewis Mumford, from review of The Death
and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

THE...