Sadly, not many people have heard of Jane Jacobs.
The writer and "urbanologist" died last week at the age of 89. Her 1961 book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," a defense of her Greenwich Village neighborhood and a critique of city planners, was her most influential work. It changed the way we think.
Jacobs was a tenacious thinker and self-educated woman. Drawing many of her conclusions from empirical evidence, she believed that cities thrived through organic growth rather than elitist planning boards typically out of touch with residents.
The antithesis of the pointy-headed modern intellectual, Jacobs also was a character. After being booted from a city council hearing in 1961 for acting up, she dryly noted, "We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around."
When I learned that Jacobs had passed on, I wondered what would she have thought of Denver. A place where a city planning board must approve every patio. Where citizens must often deal with draconian zoning regulations.
What would she make of our countless prefabricated neighborhoods and standardized architecture? What would she make of Lowry and Stapleton?
If you haven't driven through Stapleton lately, you should. It's a mind-boggling experiment in New Urbanism, a movement Jacobs is often credited with inspiring. A pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, high density and eco-friendly - in theory.
Randal O'Toole, director of the Center for the American Dream and a Jacobs critic, claims it's impossible to know what she would have thought about these sprawling city 'hoods, because she wasn't a particularly "systematic or rational person."
Nevertheless, I suspect that she wouldn't have found Stapleton to be exceptionally urban at all. I suspect she would have viewed it as the suburbs being imported into the city.
After all, there's a 750,000-square-foot big-box shopping center in Quebec Square, featuring a Wal-Mart Supercenter, a Sam's Club and a Home Depot. The parking lot accommodates thousands of cars. NorthField in Stapleton already features stores larger than Luxembourg, and more are being built.
Nothing wrong with business. But hardly urban. And then again, maybe urbanites want a slice of the suburbs?
There is an undeniable migration out of the city. Even with the expansions of Lowry, Stapleton and LoDo, Denver population dropped in the years between 2000 and 2004.
And Denver isn't unique. Almost every large metropolitan area had more people move out during that four-year period, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Certainly, Jacobs was no fan of the suburbs. She hated cars. Yet, she never advocated coercing citizens into living in these utopian urban enclaves.
"She specifically said that she didn't want anybody to use her writing to apply to the suburbs, or small towns or smaller cities that aren't great cities," says O'Toole. "Yet, that's what urban planners are doing. They are saying we should make every neighborhood into a walkable mixed-use neighborhood like Jane Jacobs' Greenwich Village."
These days, O'Toole feels that government, instead of imposing low densities on inner cities, has imposed high-density neighborhoods on the suburbs.
"What we see in Stapleton is urban planners who read Jane Jacobs and said: 'That's a great neighborhood! Let's make everyone live that way!"' says O'Toole. "Well, she was writing the book to defend her neighborhood from urban planners who wanted to tear it down."
The closest we come to her remarking on Stapleton is a 2001 interview with Reason magazine. She claimed that New Urbanists "want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet ... they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts. ... They've placed them as if they were shopping centers."
Then again, maybe we've found a third way. A little bit of both worlds.
Either way, Jacobs made us think.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_3755790
