Cities: May 2016 Archives
Roberta Brandes Gratz shoots back at detractors of Jane Jacobs and citizen involvement in the planning process.
"My favorite assumption, put forth by several commentators, is that Jane's belief in the importance of public process and the need to involve the citizens who will experience the greatest impact of a proposed change has given birth to NIMBYISM. This argument comes from people who seem to want to advance whatever official plan is on the table and who resist acknowledging the wisdom often found in citizen critiques of official plans. Most citizen objectors to official plans care deeply about their place and are not against change per se nor, most absurdly, against 'any change whatsoever in the urban landscape,' as one commentator said. Mostly, the objectors resist the configuration of the change being offered, not change itself, and, in most cases, have offered alternative proposals the impact of which would be less overwhelming to the targeted area.
"As Jane said: 'If you take the time to listen to people at public hearings, you will understand their fears.' She did not argue that those fears should STOP change but should, instead, help SHAPE change. Instead, today, especially in New York, we have a pretend public process. Significant, large-scale, Moses-style projects run through a state approval process that overrides city review and throws communities crumbs, called Community Benefit Packages, while advancing the original, usually over-scaled, neighborhood replacement plan. Projects that get delayed by lawsuits do so because they are promulgated by developers with no public input and approved by the City Planning Commission with an occasional minor tweaking.
"Invariably, citizen fears about traffic congestion and parking - and why shouldn't they fear such problems? - usually come to pass, causing predicted problems for everyone."
Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning
Provocative comments from a professor of urban planning, but some of the best ideas are rebuttals in the comments: "...what does it say about our profession when a group of citizens -- most with no training in architecture, planning or design -- comes up with a very good idea that the planners should have had? When I asked about this, the response was: 'We're too busy planning to come up with big plans.' Too busy planning. Too busy slogging through the bureaucratic maze, issuing permits and enforcing zoning codes, hosting community get-togethers, making sure developers get their submittals in on time and pay their fees. This is what passes for planning today. We have become a caretaker profession -- reactive rather than proactive, corrective instead of preemptive, rule bound and hamstrung and anything but visionary. "
An Illustrated Guide to Jane Jacobs - Curbed
Graphic illustrates key principles of urban design in Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Population density, mixed uses, old buildings, short blocks, eyes on the street, cities as organized complexity.
