Reflection by Ken Greenberg, Architect and Urban designer, at Jane Jacobs: A Public Celebration held at Trinity St. Paul’s Church in Toronto on June 12, 2006
Monday, June 12th, 20061916-2006
Jane Jacobs
Below are excerpts from reflections by Ken Greenberg, architect and urban designer, at Jane Jacobs: A Public Celebration held at Trinity St. Paul’s Church in Toronto on June 12, 2006.
Jane moved to Toronto from New York with her family in 1968 and for Torontonians she became a remarkably accessible neighbour and friend for the next four decades. The city was hanging on a cliff when she arrived; major demolitions were planned for Old City Hall, Union Station, and St. Lawrence Market, along with
On November 1, 1969, she told the Globe and Mail: “As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options. Few of us profit from the mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto will prove to share this disability. If so, I am grateful at least to have enjoyed this great city before its destruction.”
The remarkable thing was that Jane’s ideas resonated immediately. Death and Life in Great American Cities (1961) was the opener and the dialogue never stopped as she shifted her attention from one fascinating problem to another. Her arguments were built from the ground up, with in-depth observations of everyday places. Her appreciation for complex “self- organizing” survival mechanisms was coupled with a frustration for institutional wrong-headedness.
She opened our eyes to the magical interplay in the transactions of daily life. It was to be found in ‘eyes on the street’ and life on the sidewalk. Mix, density, diversity: these words and phrases are now so common.
Jane gave us the confidence to allow cities to be cities. Her web of ideas provided credibility, inspiration, and guidance for my own and subsequent generations. She was the scientist and we were the engineers, finding new ways to test and apply her concepts.
She followed Death and Life with explorations of the economic underpinnings of cities, and the generation of wealth in The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), of the ethical underpinnings of commercial and guardian structures in Systems of Survival (1992), and of the great synthesis of economic, social and natural systems in The Nature of Economies (2000).
And then Dark Age Ahead (2004). With each iteration, her tapestry of ideas and concepts became stronger and denser. Right up to the end Jane continued to focus her unyielding critical attention on the forces and events shaping our world, ever on the lookout for tell-tale improvisations that elude a heavy-handed forcing of the facts and may point to new strategies that can forestall the Dark Age Ahead.
There is no ‘Jane Jacobs world’ and no recipe for one. She took us from a preoccupation with analysis and mechanical models to synthesis, a whole new way of thinking. She celebrated indeterminacy accepting that cities are perpetually unfinished and open-ended. We have only begun to mine the richness of her thinking; the power of organized complexity with its endless permutations and possibilities.
Jane strenuously resisted the temptation to freeze her thinking into cult or dogma. She was famous for not taking any crap, de-bunking nonsense, and relentlessly asking hard questions. Hardly the sweet little old lady!
It is so hard to say goodbye. The unique gifts she brought us are of incalculable value – her insatiable curiosity and generosity of spirit, her unrelenting gaze and challenge when things didn’t make sense, and the twinkle in her eye when they did. We were indeed privileged to have her with us. Now we have to carry on by ourselves.
