Mourning Jane Jacobs

If you get a chance to read my Urban Outlook column in Saturday’s Observer (it’s in the Opinion section of charlotte.com, starting Saturday) you’ll see – no surprise – I’m a huge fan of Jane Jacobs’ writing.

At a dinner Wednesday I sat next to a smart, accomplished local architect who was quibbling about Jacobs a bit, saying she didn’t have what he called real world experience, hadn’t ever designed any buildings and even at one point said her writing was essentially “fiction.”

I didn’t stab him with my salad fork, but I was tempted.

Obviously, anyone in any line of work learns from doing, whether it’s designing buildings for clients, drawing up city plans, writing editorials or building stone walls. Reality – whether in the form of structural engineering, planning department budget shortfalls, or looming deadlines – makes almost anything that any of us produce less than perfect. It’s true, Jane Jacobs never drew up city plans or designed buildings. And it’s true the Greenwich Village neighborhood that she observed most intently for “Death and Life of Great American Cities” wasn’t – still isn’t – a typical New York City neighborhood. But that doesn’t make her work fiction any more than it makes Lewis Mumford’s work fiction.

Jacobs wanted us to trust our eyes and our ears. She scorned, for example, urban planners’ veneration of “open space” as an abstract good, regardless of whether the “open space” ever got used by real people for anything other than muggings.

She saved some of her choicest invective for traffic engineers. In her 2004 book, “Dark Age Ahead,” she wrote that traffic engineers “have abandoned and betrayed science as it is understood. ... It is popularly assumed that when universities give science degrees in traffic engineering, as they do, they are recognizing aboveboard expert knowledge. But they aren’t. They are perpetrating a fraud upon students and upon the public when they award credentials in this supposed expertise.”

She called it an “incurious profession” that “pulls its conclusions about the meaning of evidence out of thin air – sheer guesswork – even when it does deign to notice evidence.”

One example she gave: She didn’t drive and had to take taxis, which charge according to time and distance. To get to destinations in downtown Toronto using the elevated, limited access freeway invariably cost more than to get to destinations downtown avoiding the freeway. Her conclusion: Traffic engineers had planned roads without realizing that drivers have micro-destinations, not just the macro-destination of “downtown.” You could get to the outskirts of downtown quickly on the freeway, but you were slowed as soon as you hit the exit ramps and all the one-way streets, no-left-turns and other engineer tricks that were supposed to ensure a “speedy trip.” Instead, they’re impediments to getting where you want to go, she wrote, because someone apparently told traffic engineers the journey (speedy travel) matters more than the destination (getting somewhere efficiently).

She wrote: “In the background of this paradigm I see little boys with toy cars happily murmuring, ‘Zoom, Zooom, Zooooom!’ ”

Jacobs wanted people to see the world as it is, not just as they were taught in class. It's a useful lesson.