Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow argue that to complete Jane Jacobs’s urban vision, we must overcome community objections to change:
We should honor Jacobs’s memory today by redesigning our cities as she might have. It’s not just a matter of livability or quality of life, but a long-term strategy for a denser urban future, one that is environmentally rational and economically vital….
But the process to fulfill Jacobs’s vision may require revolutionary action instead of a merely evolutionary course. As city leaders attempt to adapt their cities for the future, they must face down passionate resistance from residents who perversely invoke Jane Jacobs and cite environmentalism, safety, local economics, and community autonomy not merely to oppose out-of-scale mega-projects, but to defeat proposals that Jacobs herself may have supported. Known as NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard), local residents at official city meetings reliably oppose dense new housing, new public space, bike lanes, or redesigned streets to combat dangerous driving. By using Jane-Jacobs-like language of neighborhood preservation as a decoy to oppose Jane-Jacobs-like projects, many communities are effectively fighting to keep streets exactly the way that Robert Moses left them….
The impact of this NIMBYism doesn’t end with a defeated apartment building or bike lane. Opposing dense, accessible neighborhoods pushes residential development into ever-expanding suburbs and shrinking greenbelts around cities. The fight to leave our streets as they are condemns our nation to a sprawling future, longer and more congested commutes, and escalating infrastructure costs that combine for a $1 trillion drag on the national economy.
Would Jacobs support this? Maybe, maybe not. She has been claimed both by pro-development urbanists and NIMBYs, and has been called out by some as a NIMBY herself. Her legacy lives on in community groups which have both stopped freeways and keep them up. She had some personal experience as a developer and the results were widely panned. Perhaps this taught her about the compromises necessary in development? She also helped create the zoning that infilled the King-Spadina and King-Parliament areas in Toronto:
The results have been breathtaking — and might surprise those for whom Jane is a hero for stopping bulldozers. Not only have the “Two Kings” not lost jobs, as many industrial lands taken out of production have, but the number of jobs has increased by 58%. Even more impressively, 46,000 dwelling units have been permitted in the Two Kings, many of them in very large new high-rises.
The truth is that sometimes stopping development is the right thing. Everyone is glad that the Golden Gate freeway was stopped and that Marincello never despoiled the Marin Headlands. But making our cities better will require repairing them, and that means new development, and it should follow the urban template that Jane Jacobs described so well.