The left has suddenly rediscovered Jane Jacobs as its “diversity” heroine and rewrote her works to fit their narrative to help rebuild the Democratic Party after its epic failure and defeat to President Donald Trump. So who is Jane Jacobs? What works did she produce? What philosophy did she put forward? What knowledge can we gain from her wisdom, if any?
In Jane Jacobs’s work: “Dark Age Ahead”, 2004, a couple of years before she died, she talks about how in the United States and countries with rural areas, 70-80% of the people are poor, in contrast to vibrant cities where there are fewer poor people, when those cities are designed correctly.
Unfortunately, and I realize I don’t mean to pick on an old lady, just because she’s old or just because she’s a socialist, but in these statements and conclusions in your work you are mixing and conflating results with perceived causality. She will see, cities absorb from rural areas, they absorb money, water, energy, wealth and tax money. Cities are infinite in their needs; urban transport, social housing and manipulate the markets to keep it going. Like our universities that live in a false economy la la land.
I would argue all points with Jane here if she were still alive today, and I’ve been to every city in the US, and I despise Agenda 21 and socialists who want to cram people into cities, thinking it’s more efficient . Without the rural areas, the city would collapse as they require goods from everywhere to make it work. I’m sorry, but your claims are just nonsense, and if we’re really looking for a way to philosophize about how to approach human civilization, we’d be much wiser to consider Ayn Rand’s philosophy, not Jane Jacobs’s. Also, if we look at urban planning in Portland OR, where she had a hand, it’s not that viable now in hindsight. Though to her credit he predicted her downfall.
What’s the point of building big planned cities if you can’t afford them? How about China, which invested in big cities where nobody lives, with all the comforts, now falling apart, in debt and with weeds growing on the sidewalks without maintenance? . Beware the urbanists, the technocrats, and remember the Urban Plight and Urban Flight of the past, these ideas are not as novel as they claim, nor are they the answer. After reading his final work, it seems that he inherently understood these challenges, but kept his original concepts of walkable cities, with open spaces, parks, and open areas with short blocks to create vitality. That’s not enough.
She acknowledges the complexity of urban planning but constantly returns to committee-based planning that involves everyone, yet all we get when that is done is humane politics, higher costs, and therefore unaffordable developments that cause the need for price controls, more spending and more people unaware. huddled together like rats, and we all know what happens when we gather a lot of rats.
I find it interesting that today’s leftist political base uses his works to promote their growing agenda to put people in small living spaces like college dorms in big cities, and claim that it’s what’s best for everyone and that it will somehow get a better quality of life. Not so, in fact, socialists and leftist political elites are totally fed up with the argument and misunderstand the misreading of the Jane Jacobs story: the typical pretentious leftist intellectual elite talking her ass off.
This work is now used as hate speech against Donald Trump, that is the only reason his books are now popular again. It’s a misreading of his work, plus he also had a misreading of history. Besides Donald Trump knowing a thing or two about building cities, cleaning up slums (check out Atlantic City near the casino he built), or problems with low-income housing, he should know he built several of those great buildings. under government contract.
Those who stood up and elected Trump realize this and the anti-Trump protesters are paid propaganda for a political purpose organized and funded by leftist groups that have more hate inside than we have ever seen. To hell with those who use Jacobs’s work as a starting point for their socialist and PC views against the fabric of America. We celebrate diversity here, but ramming the PC down people’s throats is not noble.
Jane Jacobs is not the pillar of intellect that she pretends to be when leftists in the US try to rewrite what she said from their own rewriting of history and mold it to their worldviews. Ayn Rand was more correct than Jacobs. And cities suck the wealth and taxes from all the surrounding areas to exist, water, energy, food, everything. UN Agenda 21 is nonsense, and it is causing a complete and unnecessary false promise. This is another group of leftist BS, of course the left also enjoys channeling Karl Marx.
Maybe we should allow the left to present these arguments and then show them how their solutions have caused our problems, and they are not the solutions, AKA: “the road to hell is always paved with the best of intentions” why even Hugo Chavez believed that he was doing what was best for Venezuela, we know how that turned out. Perhaps the left needs to reread the works of Jane Jacobs more carefully before using this dead woman’s name to promote her failed agendas. Think about this.
Recommended additional study:
(1) YouTube Video: “Robert Kanigel, ‘Eyes on the Street’: Jane Jacobs Expelled from Harvard,” on CSPAN BookTV Channel. Posted on February 1, 2017.
(2) Urban Gateway Website – Article; “Dark Ages Ahead: Understanding Jane Jacobs in the Trump Era”
(3) World News (dot) com Website – Article; “Jane Jacobs Predicted the Rise of Trump? Always prescient, her latest book described a dark age to come and how to overcome it,” by Richard Florida.
(4) YouTube video: ”
(5) Book: “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, 1961.
