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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2022
The great urbanist Jane Jacobs details how urban planning impacts the social interactions and social networks responsible for the economic death or life of a city. How might urban planning impinge on the moral values that underlie that development? I draw on Jacobs’s work on the moral foundations of commercial society to identify two “urban values” (tolerance and innovation). I then examine how these values support the social networks and processes that facilitate urban-based innovation and how urban planning can strengthen or undermine those values. I use the examples of urban planning in the 15th Ward of Syracuse, New York and of city building in the private development of Cayalá in Guatemala City to illustrate these points.
Department of Economics, Purchase College, State University of New York, sanford.ikeda@purchase.edu. Competing Interests: The author declares none. I wish to thank David Schmidtz and the other contributors to this volume for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I am especially grateful to an anonymous referee for his/her informed and cogent editorial comments and suggestions. The usual caveat applies.
1 Quoted in “The Destruction of Syracuse’s 15th Ward,” Onodaga Historical Association, https://www.cnyhistory.org/2018/02/15th-ward/.
2 Alana Semuels, “How To Decimate a City,” The Atlantic (November 20, 2015), https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracuse-slums/416892/?utm_source=SFTwitter.
3 There is no better source for these accounts, with emphasis on New York, than The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of the “Masterbuilder,” Robert Moses. See Caro, Robert, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)Google Scholar.
The Center for Architecture in New York City also recently curated an exhibit, “Fringe Cities,” which focused on the impact of urban renewal on smaller cities, https://www.centerforarchitecture.org/exhibitions/fringe-cities-legacies-of-renewal-in-the-small-american-city/. See also this commentary by the Congress of the New Urbanism: “As written in a March 2016 article in The Atlantic, ‘The completion of the highway, I-81, which ran through the urban center, had the same effect it has had in almost all cities that put interstates through their hearts. It decimated a close-knit African American community. And when the displaced residents from the 15th Ward moved to other city neighborhoods, the white residents fled.’” Quoted in https://www.cnu.org/highways-boulevards/campaign-cities/syracuse.
4 Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).Google Scholar
5 I am certainly not the first to make a connection between urban planning and ethics. See, for example, Paul Kidder who, however, looks at ethical values different from the ones I examine here. Kidder, Paul, “The Urbanist Ethics of Jane Jacobs,” in Ethics, Place, and Environment 11, no. 3 (2008): 253–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Jacobs, Death and Life, 30.
7 Jacobs, Jane, Systems of Survival (New York: Vintage, 1992).Google Scholar
8 Jacobs, Jane, The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage, 1969), 262 Google Scholar.
9 Jacobs, Systems of Survival, 215.
10 Ibid., 215.
11 Ibid., 35.
12 In a unpublished paper, Jacobs’s biographer Peter Laurence has also noted the theme of urban values or “cosmopolitanism” in Jacobs’s work along the same lines I have identified here: “She believed in cities’ cosmopolitanism, and, as she wrote in Systems of Survival, her treatise on ethics, she associated them with tolerance, trust, cooperation, and invention.” Peter Laurence, "Jane’s Urban Ethics: Jane Jacobs on Racism, Capital, Power, and the ‘Plantation Mentality’,” unpublished essay in Academia 2018; emphasis added.
13 This is related to the studies of Bettancourt and West on the “super-linearity” of large cities. See Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, “Regardless of Our City’s Size, We All Live in ‘Villages’” in News (Santa Fe Institute, July 1, 2014), https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/interface-bettencourt-west-village-networks
14 Jacobs, Death and Life, 145.
15 See Ikeda, Sanford, “Economic Development from a Jacobsian Perspective,” in Hirt, Sonia, ed., The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs (New York: Routledge, 2012).Google Scholar
16 Jacobs, Death and Life, 29.
17 Ibid., 30.
18 Ibid., 34.
19 Whyte, William, “The Design of Spaces” [1988], in LeGates, R. T. and Stout, F., eds., The City Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996): 109–18.Google Scholar
20 Quoted in Ivan Klaus, “What Would a More Ethical City Look Like?” in Bloomberg Citylab (April 24, 2018), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-24/what-an-ethical-city-looks-like
21 Sanford Ikeda, “Urban Diversity and Cohesion: A Jacobsian Solution,” in Cosmos and Taxis 8, nos. 8/9 (2020): 28–45.
22 Ibid.
23 Individual communities (Gemeinschaften) within the great city (Gesellschaft) are often communities of immigrants that may be fairly homogeneous economically, culturally, or ethnically, at least initially. (See Ferdinand Tönnies [1887], Community and Society [Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft], trans. Charles P. Loomis [New York: Dover, 2002].) That was probably true of the 15th Ward, which was a refuge not only for refugees from the South but for African-Americans from other parts of Syracuse looking for a safe place to live and to work free from discrimination. Though it was a slum, it was at least tolerated and allowed to flourish within its limits to some degree.
24 Jacobs devotes a chapter to each of these factors. Jacobs, Death and Life, chaps. 8, 9, 10, and 11.
25 Of course, if we learn that we don’t like the person, the ties can grow weaker or disappear altogether.
26 Jacobs, Death and Life, 38.
27 Thus, one way of interpreting Jacobs’s criticisms of urban planning approach of Robert Moses (see footnote 24) is that Moses didn’t consider that a large-scale commercial Gesellschaft is actually composed of many highly integrated informal Gemeinschaften (such as the 15th Ward). Plans for a street widening or a border-vacuum-generating sports facility should appreciate that the interconnections among neighborhood residents create the safety and freedom of mobility necessary to preserve the urban values that connect neighborhoods to the greater Gesellschaft.
28 Granovetter, Mark S., “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Ibid.
30 Jacobs, Death and Life, 139.
31 One example was its Dunbar Center. See https://www.syracusedunbarcenter.org/.
32 Jacobs, Death and Life, 270.
33 Cited in Zipp, Samuel and Storring, Nathan, Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (New York: Random House, 2016), 353Google Scholar.
35 From “How To Decimate a City” in The Atlantic, November 20, 2015: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/syracuse-slums/416892/?utm_source=SFTwitter
36 A more detailed discussion can be found in Ikeda, “Urban Diversity and Cohesion,” 28-45.
37 Small plazas adjacent to sidewalks can sometimes serve this purpose.
38 Jacobs, Death and Life, 72.
39 Quoted in David Haas, “I-81 Highway Robbery: The Razing of Syracuse’s 15th Ward,” in Syracuse Times (December 12, 2018), https://www.syracusenewtimes.com/highway-robbery-5-decades-ago-syracuse-neighborhoods-were-razed-to-construct-interstate-81/
40 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 11–52 Google Scholar.
41 From my personal experience, Fiesta Mall in Mesa, Arizona, where I grew up, began to decline when another, even larger shopping center opened in 1997 in nearby Tempe. When it opened in 1979, Fiesta Mall itself had pulled the economic rug out from under of an even older mall, Tri-City Mall. See, for example, https://www.constructionreporter.com/news/once-thriving-now-abandoned-fiesta-mall-in-mesa-may-see-redevelopment
42 Scott, Seeing Like a State.
43 Le Corbusier, , “A Contemporary City,” [1929] in LeGates, R. T. and Stout, F., eds., The City Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996): 367–81Google Scholar.
44 Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Montacelli Press, 1994).Google Scholar
45 Krier, Léon, Architecture: Choice or Fate? (London: Papadakis Publisher, 2007 [1998])Google Scholar.
46 Lynch, Kevin, “The City Image and Its Elements,” [1960] in LeGates, R. T. and Stout, F., eds., The City Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), 98–102 Google Scholar.
47 To the great regret of some. See Campanella, Thomas J., “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Page, Max and Mennel, Timothy, eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011)Google Scholar.
48 Carmona, Michel, Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002)Google Scholar. All references to the Kindle Edition with locations given by “Loc.”
49 On the private nature of Cayalá’s development see “Guatemalan Capital’s Wealthy Offered Haven in Gated City,” The Guardian (January 9, 2013), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/09/guatemalan-capital-wealthy-haven-city.
50 Krier imposes a strict norm of walkability in which “the pedestrian must have access to all the usual daily and weekly urban functions within ten minutes’ walking distance, without recourse to transport.” Léon Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate? (London: Papadakis Publisher, 2007[1998]), 128).
51 Ibid., 125.
52 Ibid., 129.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 19.
55 Ibid., 156.
56 Ibid., 143.
57 Associated Press, “Guatemalan Capital’s Wealthy Offered Haven in Gated City,” in The Guardian (January 9, 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/09/guatemalan-capital-wealthy-haven-city
58 See “Guatemalan ‘Safe City’ Recognized after Reforming Its Security System,” in asmag, https://www.asmag.com/showpost/24205.aspx.
59 Jacobs, Death and Life, 31–32.
60 Krier, Architecture, 117.
61 Ibid., 207.
62 It should be noted that the renowned urban planner Alain Bertaud is highly critical of such masterplan approaches, not because they are useless but because the overwhelming tendency on the part of politicians and urban planners is to assume that their job is done once the masterplan is in place and implemented. This approach has proven to be useless or worse. What Bertaud argues is that the planning, implementation, and follow-up should be an ongoing process, data-driven, and economically informed. See Bertaud, Alain, Order without Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 353–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Krier, Architecture, 113.
64 Héctor Leal, engineer and general manager of the Cayalá project quoted in “Crean ciudad Privada” para los Ricos en Guatemala” por Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, Associated Press, (January 9, 2013).
65 A colleague who is an architect for the Cayalá project related both the expansion plans and confirmation that the financing is totally private, although the city operates the streets and the developers work with city government for public thoroughfares. But see also https://news.yahoo.com/crean-ciudad-privada-para-los-ricos-en-guatemala-231448179--spt.html and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/09/guatemalan-capital-wealthy-haven-city
