One Year for Jane (career to follow)

The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world. “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p13)

It would be nice if I could report that much has changed since Jane Jacobs tore into the spurious nature of my profession. I highlighted these words long before planning school, the yellow fading well back into the background.

She holds back little in her introduction - required reading for any student of city planning theory. Fortunately or unfortunately, the 400 pages of observations she offers up after hooked me on the profession she criticized. I’m a certified member of it. And despite much studying and personal observation, I can’t help but confirm the club-footed foundations of it. That ill-influence still persists.

It’s been just over three years since we lost Jane Jacobs. This week, people across North America are walking in support of her legacy. She’s quite the inspiration. This venture - this blog - is further support of her legacy, putting her work beyond the subtext of my own.

We’ve oversimplified her work, made a part stand for the whole. She saw it happening before her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and even wrote about it there. So I’m headed back to the primary source, unpacking her words, comparing my own observations with hers, reading the works I haven’t yet had the excuse to read.

It should make for an interesting year.