Jane Jacobs: 4 Rules for Fostering Good Urbanism
In the fast-urbanizing South, Jane Jacobs’s common denominators for vibrant cities still apply | by Aaron Lubeck
This piece was originally printed in Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
Jane Jacobs was an enigma in that she was, in most ways, an anti-intellectual intellectual. She had little taste for the top-down administration common within the elite society of her day. Her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, leads by throwing a roundhouse punch to that effect: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”
The “current” version referenced was a mid-century effort that underwrote heavy-handed urban renewal and freeway projects, which leveraged eminent domain to demolish massive swaths of old cities and the deeply rooted ethnic neighborhoods (of all wealth levels) upon which they were built. In establishing her full-throated objection to this type of planning, Jane Jacobs identified four critical ingredients for vibrant urbanism: The need for (1) density, (2) varied buildings, (3) mixed uses, and (4) short blocks. The good news is that these principles still apply. The bad news is that Southern cities are failing to fulfill all four. Let us unpack each one.
l. Density
Density is the prerequisite to all the other benefits. It’s hard to have entrepreneurial success, affordability, mixed uses, or short blocks in a sprawling city. Density has a multiplier effect: The more buildings, the more interaction, trade, and collaborative innovation.
The South is remarkably not dense. Most cities have a density of 2,500 people per square mile, and the denser areas (all platted pre-zoning) are rarely more than double that. The density required for vibrant cities simply isn’t here.
Jacobs wrote primarily about the North, living in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood and later in The Annex in Toronto, neighborhoods with 30 and 10 times the average density of Southern cities, respectively. Not coincidentally, both of her homes were directly serviced by heavy rail, which requires a density of 10,000 people per square mile. It’s a measure that no Southern city comes remotely close to.
Failing to densify has many costs, including the challenges of supporting small retail, an inability to fund viable transit, and the continued, seemingly endless reliance on the automobile.
In contrast, density links causally to dramatically reduced emissions, because fewer residents drive private cars. Density precedes healthy, sustainable cities. On this, Dixie fails.
ll. Varied buildings
Jacobs wasn’t against anything new. However, she insisted on proportionality. Too many new buildings, and neighborhoods would become inaccessible. They would also become homogeneous. Jacobs knew that old buildings bring two key benefits to neighborhoods: First and foremost, they establish history and place. Second, they serve as a lower-cost space where young businesses can begin to thrive.
Striking a balance between old and new isn’t easy, though some regions have long-standing advantages. Cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, and St. Louis have a seemingly endless array of old buildings worthy of rehabilitation. The supply of old buildings in the South, however, is smaller to start with. Of course, notable historical buildings begging for rebirth do exist in the South. But they are less ubiquitous than in the North or Midwest, mostly by virtue of the South’s less urban, less industrial, and more agrarian history. Further, most of the largest adaptive-reuse candidates, such as mill buildings, have already been renovated. Two decades ago, they appeared to be everywhere. Today, in the most booming cities, those opportunities are largely gone.
When old buildings disappear, Jacobs posited, it becomes a tax on grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship.
This shortage is alarming because of where innovation happens. As Jacobs said, “New ideas often need old buildings.” She identified such structures as ideal candidates for low-cost use, noting that artists and start-ups sought them out for their low overhead and organic feel. When old buildings disappear, Jacobs posited, it becomes a tax on grassroots innovation and entrepreneurship. The South has precisely such a problem. Relative to their denser Northern brethren, Southern cities urbanize more through filling in “gap teeth” than through fixing old buildings. While the result is urban and can be wonderful, it inherently requires new construction. And while the South does boast more space for new buildings, modern zoning codes across the region (and country) prevent this kind of infill from happening.
While downtowns like that of Durham, North Carolina, are now being unleashed through form-based codes, neighborhood commercial districts remain mostly shackled by poorly-thought-through, if well-intentioned, sets of rules. These restrictions run from parking mandates to use complexities, buffers, design reviews, and stormwater regulations. Each one is wrong-sized, designed for large developers and often incompatible with small actors. The upshot is that they are ruinous for small business and the incremental, scrappy entrepreneurial life Jacobs celebrated and desired.
lll. Mixed uses
Jacobs knew that the “sidewalk ballet” she so famously observed depended on a variety of neighborhood activity. In a place serving only one function at a time, streets become dead when that function isn’t happening.
Mixed-use development is a fairly simple concept. It inherently implies a diverse set of residential and commercial offerings—a scenario in which residents can reasonably walk to a majority of needs rather than having to rely on automobile transport to reach separated and highly segregated offerings. Anglo planning has evolved since the early twentieth century to separate uses. As a result, people have been separated too. Offices go here; retail shopping, there. Rich people live here; poor people, there. Without mixed uses, there is no opportunity for the encounters that bring cities to life.
So, how bad is the current state of things? While minor reforms are encouraging walkable downtowns and neighborhood commercial districts, few new developments feature mixed uses. Private industry has bent to the whims of the codifiers, specializing in monolithic, use-separated development.
In most Southern cities, residents can do literally nothing without getting in their car. Such cities have codified a near-totalitarian reliance on the combustion engine. And switching to AC power does little to make cities more resilient—or reduce emissions.
With a few nascent exceptions, the South is experiencing total system failure on these counts.
lV. Short blocks
Jacobs thought short blocks increased exploration and cross-pollination. Long blocks are isolating, she said, offering “a monotonous, always-the-same path to a given point,” a common feature of highly engineered suburbia. Short blocks offer alternate paths and increased opportunities for encountering neighbors. Such encounters are vital to the social fabric of a neighborhood.
Southern street grids are fascinating to look at, mostly because they urbanized so late and because the original urban grid, for most cities, is small. You can tell the breakpoint in centrally planned streets, because the traditional grid disappears. These maps reflect the fact that in 1936, central planners at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) released a booklet on neighborhood design, demanding reductions in cut-through traffic and connectivity. It offered favorable federal funding contingent on these principles being followed.1
Sans government interference, builders were not so wasteful. Efficient street grids and small setbacks (if any) were the norm. This approach is consistent around the globe—and the pre-Euclidean South.
Today, segregation of uses continues. In the greenfield sprawl that dominates the Southern landscape, new developments are required to be buffered from old, further underwriting an us-versus-them bias.
These developments are required to provide open space, which consists mostly of undeveloped forest. Such areas also buffer the edges of the development and make new housing even more sprawling and car-dependent. Additionally, stormwater controls are handled project by project rather than as a public utility, accelerating the problems mentioned above. Stormwater also encourages the mathematical minimum in road surface to be built, encouraging cul-de-sac design. The result is a segregated, unsustainable world.
So, what to do? Jacobs’s ideas were basically right. They are also integral to the future of healthy Southern cities, who now must adopt them through political and planning processes. Doing so will require multi-year cycles of code reforms and repeals. After 60 years of code expansions, the first task is to eliminate the ordinances that prohibit these principles. There are many. But the South’s great cities have begun working to repeal their mistakes. These efforts represent green shoots, even amidst clear and present failures and despite often messy lines of attack. Jacobs would have applauded that.
It’s true that Atlanta’s messiness is more tangled than that of Greenwich Village, but it’s a distinction of design. The Village may feature continuous block faces with no side setbacks, but Atlanta’s streetscape is unique and exciting, and the Beltline is encouraging of comparable adventure. When you go out, you can explore. You expect to see something different. You feel alive. And so Atlanta captures the same vibrancy as its Northern counterparts, just with more gap teeth in its urban fabric.
The South will continue its boom, and along the way, we must bring these principles back—front and center. Jacobs published them in 1961. (For context, she released them closer to the year 1900 than to modern day). As planners repeal rules that ruined downtowns, Jacobs is watching. As we re-codify neighborhood commercial districts, first rehabilitating them and then helping them grow, Jacobs is watching. And as we continue to create sprawl with single-use greenfields, Jacobs is watching. On each count, we can do better. Substantially better. In Jacobs’s image, we must.
Aaron Lubeck is Founder of Southern Urbanism.
For more context, see: Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph, “Street Standards and the Shaping of Suburbia,” Journal of the American Planning Association 61, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 65-81,http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/doc/JAPAv61n1.pdf.
Amazing and always as insightful as it gets! Thank you
Hopeful signs. Thanks for the insights