Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs had no formal training in urban planning. She was a journalist living in Greenwich Village in the 1950s when she began to notice a gap between what the dominant theories of city planning said good urban form looked like — superblocks, separated functions, towers in parks, expressways — and what actually made her own neighborhood a place where children played safely and strangers behaved decently. Her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities turned that observation into one of the most devastating critiques ever written of an entire profession's confidence.

Jacobs argued that cities are not problems in simplicity (a few key variables to optimize) or problems in disorganized complexity (statistical aggregates). They are problems in organized complexity — many interacting variables, locally specific, knowable only through close street-level observation. The reformers who bulldozed neighborhoods to build expressways and the planners who designed sterile public housing had failed not because they were corrupt or stupid, but because they had brought the wrong epistemology to the task. They had treated cities as if they could be designed from above when they could only be understood from within.

Jacobs later extended the argument from cities to economies (The Economy of Cities, 1969) and to broader theories of how complex systems learn (Systems of Survival, 1992). The through-line was constant: local knowledge is not parochial knowledge. It is, for many of the questions that matter most, the only useful knowledge.

Further reading

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
• The Economy of Cities (1969)
• Systems of Survival (1992)
• Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (2016)

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