Li Wenshuo, Department of World History, Shanghai Normal University
Guard Life: A Biography of Jane Jacobs, by Robert Canigal, translated by Lin Xinru, Shanghai People's Publishing House, January 2022, 632 pp. 128 yuan
When jane Jacobs is mentioned, even ordinary readers have heard of this name; as for professionals in the field of urban studies, especially in the field of planning, I am afraid that everyone knows. But almost all the guides and guides in the field will be selected for her articles, and who would have imagined that there would be no Jane Jacobs in such a book? On May 4, 2016, the centenary of her birth, Google even set the search page theme to Jacobs. In the eyes of her contemporaries, Jacobs was simply a layman who was always out of the ordinary; over time and her continued critique of mainstream urban planning, her views were gradually accepted and she became the most respected urban thinker of the era. Throughout her life, Jacobs remained skeptical of large-scale construction projects; her opposition to a top-down urban planning model never fought back. As a thinker, Jacobs' greatest contribution was to raise the importance of social, cultural, and economic life playing out day after day on the streets of cities, and to criticize destructive planning for threatening the very foundations of urban life. But Jacobs seems to have only one face in the public eye—an old lady who didn't have a college degree but left behind the famous book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"; she wasn't pretty, but she wasn't ugly; she published a lot of articles in the newspaper media and went to the forefront of protests against Urban Renewal She was active in the civic groups of New York, and after moving to Toronto, Canada, she remained unchanged and fighting.
Jane Jacobs (maiden name Jan Buttsner) did not receive a systematic and complete education, and although he studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies, he was rejected by Bernard College because of his incomplete high school education. This seems to be a huge contrast to what she later became a far-reaching thinker. How Jane Buttsner became Jane Jacobs is an interesting topic. In recent years, three biographies of Jacobs have been influential and representative, trying to answer from different angles. The first was Alice Sparberg Alexiou's Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press (2006). In 2016, the centenary of her birth, two more biographies were published, Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, and Robert Kanigel, Eyes on The Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, New York: Vintage, Chinese edition published by Shanghai People's Publishing House). They tell the story of growing up, the story of a Scranton girl who came to New York to work and live, and the story of a young journalist, Jane Buttsner, who became a thinker, Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs: The Man Who Foresees the Future of the City
Becoming Jane Jacobs
Jacobs had not yet died when Alexius wrote his biography, but he was strongly opposed to others writing biographies for himself, believing that collaborating with biographers would affect his writing plans. As a journalist, Alexius relied more on Jacobs' published articles, monographs, and stories about her. Perhaps sensing Jacobs' struggle with Robert Moses over how the city should be renewed, and his affection for the old community of Greenwich Village, Alexius placed the Patriarch in the context of planning history, intending to show what Jacobs' role was on the stage of urban planning. To this end, the author highlights two experiences in Jacobs's life, one of which was his dealings with Lewis Mumford, one of the most influential urban researchers of the twentieth century. Both are critics of mainstream post-World War II urban planning theory, and are even more critical of federally promoted urban renewal. At a symposium held at Harvard University in 1956, Jacobs attended and spoke as a representative of the Architectural Review, and his views caught Mumford's attention and were shared by him. Their masterpieces, Death and Life and The Culture of Cities, were published in 1961, and both wrote book reviews of each other's work. However, the book reviews are not only praise, but praise and criticism. In Jacobs's view, Urban Culture is "full of perverse rhetoric and a catalogue of biased, urban diseases," while Mumford argues that Death and Life lacks the study of urban society and does not provide viable urban redevelopment solutions. But when Jacobs came out against the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Mumford helped her, with a "valuable open letter of analysis" explaining why the "road" didn't work. Objectively speaking, Mumford's criticism is not untargeted, and Alexius also noticed the shortcomings of "Death and Life", and the before and after the book came out was alecchaugh's second experience. The author notes that Jacobs, in writing the book, had found that the planning community had misread the ideas she had laid out in newspaper articles over the years, accepting her "street corner grocery store" but mistakenly believing that "building a grocery store on the corner" had even formed a prejudice that "good people will come" without caring about what the residents really needed. The author also highlights the value of new concepts such as "guarding life" and "social capital" proposed by Jacobs in the book, and reminds readers that such concepts have long been radiated outside the planning world and affected the general public. At the same time, Alexius points out that Death and Life ignores race and does not discuss how professional planners can reverse the decline of the central city. Overall, however, the book seems to have overrated Jacobs's views and activities. Whether it was in Philadelphia against Edward Bacon's Plan for the Transformation of Mount Thursat, or against Robert Moses in New York, or in Toronto, the author described in a celebratory tone as Jacobs's victory after victory, but in fact, the defense of Greenwich Village in New York exhausted her physically and mentally, coupled with the impact of the Vietnam War, Jacobs had to move his family to Canada. Moreover, the book focuses on Death and Life, and says almost nothing about the other works of the Master.
After Jacobs' death, her son Jim Jacobs, who wanted to bring her mother's life to life to life in fuller detail, agreed to use her profile for biographical writing, so the two biographies of 2016 were more informative and informative, and many of her old memories were visible, especially after her early life and settlement in Toronto.
Alexius's Jacobs is a precocious small-town girl who, in her hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, became aware of the reciprocal symbiosis between the different economic sectors of the city. The two later biographies are more detailed. Carniger describes Jacobs' upbringing in detail and comprehensively, and as the author says, jacobs was just an obscure little man before the advent of Death and Life, and although many articles appeared in the press, many did not even sign. It can be said that Jacobs before 1961 was a rebellious student who aspired to become a freelance writer, a journalist who served in several media outlets, a columnist for a professional architecture journal, a mother who cared for several children, and a New York citizen who took to the streets with her neighbors to protest urban renewal. Like Alexius, Carnipegus made the writing of Death and Life the highlight of the book, with chapters nine through twelve introducing the development of the book's ideas—beginning with a Harvard symposium in 1956, an article published in Fortune magazine in 1957, and funding research by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1958. But Caniger did not ignore her other books, which also covered The Urban Economy in 1969 and Jacobs' The Wealth of Cities and Nations after he moved to Toronto. The former takes the regional economy as the starting point, and Jacobs believes that the city is the real place of innovation, "innovation, growth and progress all begin with seemingly inadvertent attempts", and the specialization formed by the division of labor is actually nothing more than the reorganization of industries. The book is extremely controversial, especially her proposal that cities appeared before agriculture, subverting conventional wisdom. The latter, which lasted for fourteen years, advocated the city as the basic unit for understanding the national economy. Of course, Carniger did not let go of Jacobs's "bar spirit" physique and "shocking" story. It was Citizen Jane's repeated assaults on the hegemony of antiquated modernism and planning, especially her battle with Robert Moses over a transportation plan. According to Moses' plan, an elevated expressway would run through Lower Manhattan in an L-shape, and the Greenwich Village where Jacobs lived and nearby Washington Square would be empty. Not only will thousands of people have to find other places to live, but more importantly, the "social capital" that Jacobs cherished will be uprooted. Jacobs called for more people to join her in protest, serving as head of several community organizations and releasing pamphlets to thwart Moses' plans. New York made several attempts to build the highway in the 1960s, but each time failed because of Jacobs' protests, and she was even arrested for it in 1968.
Death and Life in America's Great Cities
Caniger's rich details give us a glimpse of the growth of a thinker who came from the coal town of Pennsylvania and lived in the most traditional neighborhood of cosmopolitan New York City. Here, Jacobs attempts to unearth the mysteries of urban functioning from the practice of daily life, changing the fate of New York and Toronto with her actions, and changing the way the planning community has understood cities for half a century with "Death and Life in America's Great Cities", "Urban Economy" and "City and National Wealth". If "Guard Life" answers how the Penn girl grew up with her own efforts, "Becoming Jacobs" tells us how New York became the Jacobs it is today. Although professionals recognize Jacobs' academic status and influence, she is always difficult to get rid of the image of a family woman, and even Mumford, who also has no systematic education, regards "Death and Life" as "a family remedy prescribed by Jacobs's mother". Although Carniger details Jacobs' early life, he still does not change this image. In contrast, Lawrence prefers to understand Jacobs' growth from within the academic world, starting with the modernist planning concepts and practices that were all the rage in the twentieth century, combined with the poor housing situation in New York City, showing the broad stage for the formation and change of Jacobs's urban ideas - the smart small-town girl who was exposed to professional knowledge in college, met professionals at work, criticized mainstream theories from the reality of New York, and wrote "Death and Life". Her experience in the media, her long career in professional architecture journals, and her contacts with scholars in the field of architectural planning have enabled her to acquire sufficient knowledge. Becoming Jacobs is not so much a biography of Jacobs as it is a history of the city of New York, because the central question Lawrence has to answer is why Death and Life was born in New York. To this end, he slowly unfolded a picture of the city of New York in the twentieth century, while using Jacobs as a clue to connect a group of large and small figures who were active in the urban planning and policy circles of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. There is the surprising resurgence of old communities in the 1920s, the efforts of the planning community to stop the decay of cities in the 1930s, and the formation of a consensus of all sectors of society to support the demolition and construction of urban renewal before and after the end of World War II. There are big names like Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, as well as smaller figures like Douglas Haskell, editor-in-chief of architecture forums, and William Kirk, head of the Concorde Community Improvement Movement in East Harlem. New York city influenced them, and they shone in the history of the city, or like the bright stars, or like the dark candles, like Jacobs, changed the cityscape of New York, and changed the lives of thousands of people. What Lawrence wants to tell the reader is this kind of interaction between the city and the people. The small-town girl who was still named Jane Buttsner when she first arrived in New York became Jane Jacobs, the author of "Death and Life" as she walked around the city.
Citizen Jane's Defense of New York
Jane Jacobs' life experience proves her point that diverse, inclusive urban living influences the worldview of urban people. Her story is by no means a book review, and while not a heroic legend, it is also interesting and intriguing. In addition to the three biographies mentioned above, Jacobs' experiences appear at least in Robert A. Caro's masterpiece Power Broker, in Judd Greenstein's opera A Marvelous Order, and in the documentary Citizen Jane: Battle for the TheOry City). Her research and writing have always been outside the academic world, but that doesn't mean her views are unrelated to the various urban theories and the debates surrounding them. Her writings share common themes and clear logic, placing "man" at the center of social progress and change, while grand institutional power is seen as a roadblock. Although these works are often defamed when they come out, time has always been on the side of Jacobs, and from Richard Florida to Oscar Newman, more and more scholars are accepting or surpassing Jacobs. Rightly or wrongly, Jacobs has brought about a dramatic change in the shape of cities, especially in the United States.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Luan Meng