This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. “Introduction,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p3)

Don’t be mistaken. This is a radical woman. Still.

Jane Jacobs tears apart what, up to that point, were the foundations of the still relatively young field of city planning. She accomplished that in the introduction.

She didn’t just take away the big ideas and theories of the day that shaped policymakers’ view of how cities and places work. She took away all big ideas.

City processes in real life are too complex to be routine, too particularized for application as abstractions. They are always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars, and there is no substitute for knowing the particulars. “The kind of problem a city is” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p441)

This, is radical.

Planning history (before and after Jacobs) is riddled with guiding metaphors, where the larger idea guides one’s ideas of how the city ought to work.

Take streets, for example. Everyone has heard the insidious guiding metaphor here: traffic flow. Like water.

Tom Vanderbilt has written a thoroughly endnoted, but quite readable account of Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). It’s not about flow.

To observe and understand a place, you don’t have to dive into the local library’s archives (though I just told you to understand the place’s story when inspecting processes). You don’t always need a long bibliography. The particulars you notice don’t require a footnote. They just are. Look at how they work together. It’s not up to a convenient theory or secondary sources describing what others say.

Observe the primary source. Intuit. Radical, eh?

[P]eople who get marked with the planners’ hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p5)

NORWOOD, OHIO - One house remains in the field that was once slated to become the Rookwood Exchange. It is boarded up, empty.

Back in 2007, when I was last here, three houses remained. The Ohio Supreme Court had recently reversed the city’s blight finding that enabled the use of eminent domain powers to take these properties. That reprieve, it now appears, was only temporary, the neighborhood already mostly destroyed.

The would-be-developers purchased this last house for well over $1 million. It remains like a gravestone, marking this fragment of an urban neighborhood, originally orphaned by the construction of Interstate 71 to the west and subsequent commercial development on the other sides.

Norwood v. Horney. Kelo v. New London. Planners, policy makers, land use attorneys, and property rights advocates in an uproar. Stir vigorously.

Out of a position of desperation, Norwood placed the “hex sign” on these blocks. Ohio municipalities all live and die by the income tax. Commercial redevelopment along one of the major traffic corridors in the Cincinnati metropolitan area made sense, if but only for that reason. The consulting planners labeled the area “deteriorating.” Disputable, yes, but even if true the court found that the area must be deteriorat-ED, as opaquely stated in the Ohio Revised Code.

Most of the residents sold their properties straight to the developer - many for prices well above market value. Eminent domain is a valuable tool for the planner and policy maker. It prevents extreme holdouts from defeating municipal projects. However, it can be too blunt an instrument. The outcry over the US Supreme Court’s findings in Kelo also brings up the question of whether this project could realistically be placed under the figurative umbrella of the “public good.”

The Ohio General Assembly erased the dangerous territory in the Ohio Revised Code that allowed these gray area blunders in Norwood (Substitute Senate Bill 277 of the 127th General Assembly) What is a landlocked municipality to do now?

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p6)

Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no blank slate. The urban renewal programs Jacobs decried made this fiction a reality at great expense. They placed a value on a district, purchased the land and buildings in it, and zeroed it out. All existing value - both that quantified in the official appraisal and the additional aspects observed by Jacobs - got thrown out.

At various points, you might find me on either side of the battle here in Norwood. Today, I am much happier to be found around a table in West Norwood. My friends have been here almost 15 years. They have seen the neighborhood change, and have been a part of that change - incremental, unglamorous - house by house, project by project.

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.