Good read! Yoni Appelbaum writes about Jacobs at length in Stuck. While its clear that many learned the wrong lessons from her work, it seems she did, too. Her activism on behalf of historic preservation halted incremental development in her own neighborhood, which then metastasized across New York through historic districts. So, if history misrepresents Jacobsian Thought, it's in part because of the legacy of Jacobsian Action.
That may be true but on the other hand, based on two neighborhoods I know and love New York's East Village and Boston's South End I would estimate that by virtue of saving those neighborhoods from freeways she's responsible for the creation, or maybe non-destruction is a better way to put it, of several hundred billion dollars of value. How many people can say that?
I also wonder how fair Appelbaum is to Jacobs legacy in the sense that often tactical solutions to problems like saving neighborhoods requires actions that one's strategic goals, like those articulated in her books, might not approve.
I enjoyed Why Nothing Works (and Abundance) but I was frustrated that the only two viewpoints examined were "harness the power of government to do great things" (the Hamiltonian approach) or "use the courts/ bureaucracy to stop government from running roughshod over the people" (the Jeffersonian approach). I would have at least like to hear a third option: guarantee some basic minimum protections for people and the environment, but otherwise allow individuals and businesses to do what they want. I get that the book was specifically looking at two strands of progressivism, and the third option I suggested isn't progressivism, but I think it would have been worth examining, even if Dunkelman would have ended up rejecting it for one reason or another.
Tokyo is a civilizational calamity for Japan in the long run, because it draws everyone from higher fertility places to the lowest fertility place in Japan.
You can come up with a list of benefits of cities a mile long, but fertility in most of these high rise-centric urban cores is below 1.0, and in the long run, that one negative overwhelms all the postives.
It's interesting that Jacobs has remained iconic for so long, even though she's writing about a city that no longer exists. She was a comfortably middle class woman raising her kids in a townhouse that they owned, in a neighborhood full of cheap places to live. Now that modest rowhouse is worth nearly $7m and the cheap places to live are gone. I am curious if she would have approached things differently now, or what she would have thought about the public hurdles to build housing vs. the invisibility of removing it; the multi-unit to single family rowhouse conversions that have removed 100k apartments from the city without public input requirements.
Good read! Yoni Appelbaum writes about Jacobs at length in Stuck. While its clear that many learned the wrong lessons from her work, it seems she did, too. Her activism on behalf of historic preservation halted incremental development in her own neighborhood, which then metastasized across New York through historic districts. So, if history misrepresents Jacobsian Thought, it's in part because of the legacy of Jacobsian Action.
That may be true but on the other hand, based on two neighborhoods I know and love New York's East Village and Boston's South End I would estimate that by virtue of saving those neighborhoods from freeways she's responsible for the creation, or maybe non-destruction is a better way to put it, of several hundred billion dollars of value. How many people can say that?
I also wonder how fair Appelbaum is to Jacobs legacy in the sense that often tactical solutions to problems like saving neighborhoods requires actions that one's strategic goals, like those articulated in her books, might not approve.
There is an epic takedown of her in Yoni Appelbaum's book Abundance. She basically wrote the NIMBY advocacy playbook.
I enjoyed Why Nothing Works (and Abundance) but I was frustrated that the only two viewpoints examined were "harness the power of government to do great things" (the Hamiltonian approach) or "use the courts/ bureaucracy to stop government from running roughshod over the people" (the Jeffersonian approach). I would have at least like to hear a third option: guarantee some basic minimum protections for people and the environment, but otherwise allow individuals and businesses to do what they want. I get that the book was specifically looking at two strands of progressivism, and the third option I suggested isn't progressivism, but I think it would have been worth examining, even if Dunkelman would have ended up rejecting it for one reason or another.
I don't get all the panic about being "car-centric".
Tokyo is a civilizational calamity for Japan in the long run, because it draws everyone from higher fertility places to the lowest fertility place in Japan.
You can come up with a list of benefits of cities a mile long, but fertility in most of these high rise-centric urban cores is below 1.0, and in the long run, that one negative overwhelms all the postives.
It's interesting that Jacobs has remained iconic for so long, even though she's writing about a city that no longer exists. She was a comfortably middle class woman raising her kids in a townhouse that they owned, in a neighborhood full of cheap places to live. Now that modest rowhouse is worth nearly $7m and the cheap places to live are gone. I am curious if she would have approached things differently now, or what she would have thought about the public hurdles to build housing vs. the invisibility of removing it; the multi-unit to single family rowhouse conversions that have removed 100k apartments from the city without public input requirements.