Shameless plug to check out, the National Constitution centers and constitutionalcenter. Org. Its a short one. We have elias from leading conservative scholar. You dont have to read a lot of cases. You can get the best arguments on both sides an trade the state constitutional state amendment and the gun rights around the world, download it at the app store or google play. You can buy the book, thats important to me and my wife and publisher. I have a friend here who he and his wife come here from italy and ten years ago he came to the Constitution Center and walked out and said, im going to apply for citizenship now. Great, thats wonderful. Thats an entorsment. I think hes here, rob, stand up. Hes an american zeb because of the Constitution Center. Thank you very much. [laughter] happy bill of rights, everyone. And merry christmas. And merry christmas. Tweet us twitter. Twitter [inaudible conversations] welcome to the synagogue. My name is roberta and im president for the center of living city, founder of the project to restore synagogue and new york in the that tow of robert mosses and jane jacobs. Started in the mid1980s evolved slowly and steadily in the same way that james jacobs taught us how neighborhood and whole cities rejuvenate over time to the efforts of many individuals. 20 years, 20,000 supporters, 20 million is approximately what it took to restore this landmark that was on the verge of loss. This has been the largest, independent Historic Restoration in the city not connected to a larger institution or a public body. Jane actually followed the project through the reports that i would bring her on my reports to toronto over many years and she loved the preservation effort now formerly a museum and functioning synagogue embraced chinatown navy neighbors, if you have been to egg roll, empanada day is one of the most original, fun fascinating party. Author of seven books about cities plus one about the constitution which she wrote while taking courses at colombia ai. Her most famous book, death and life of American Cities, changed the way world view cities and helped understand how the city is a fabric with all of its parts, streets, sidewalks, buildings, connected and interdependent. To celebrate the centenial the center organized lectures to revisit, explore and honor her ideas. To renew a discussion about her ideas. Two years before her death, the center for the living city was established with her enthusiastic approval by a small group of urbanist expressly to build on her legacy, we are now national and international with Board Members from boston, charlotte, new york, salt lake city, toronto, india and brazil. In the ten years since founding, we have sent a young architect as the James Jane Jacobs fellow, created a post katrina exhibit at the museum at the city of new york, help local people all over the world lead jane jacobs and observe their own communities, we published three books related to james work and have now established the lecture series. We have new innovative programming brewing. When you walked in tonight, you might have seen, but you have given a full schedule of the series, the lectures are all free but we depend on the generosity of supporters to help us build on janes legacy. You are inclined, please peck up envelope or see me afterwards and make a contribution no matter what size to the center for the living city. This series is what our executive director Steven Goldsmith calls the trick. This is not just a celebration of janes ideas. This is an invitation to all of you to use reflections to create responses to new problems, jane taught us how to observe, understand and value the urban life around us. Now we have a responsibility to put our own observations to fruitful use and here we are in this glorious 1887 landmark talking about jane jacobs who said old ideas sometimes use Old Buildings and new ideas must use new buildings. Both authors of new books about jane, for decades there have been so many myths about her and her ideas, often perpetrated by people who were threatened by both her and her ideas. She was, indeed, a force of nature and her ideas totally challenged the status quo of city planning and urban economics. Others misrepresented janes history and views to suit their own agenda. Over the years, a lot of untruths and half truths have persisted. Fortunately, both of these books in very different ways challenge tall myths and misrepresentations and each gives us little known details of both her personal and professional life before and after death and life. Robert is an author with a focus on biographies and science rating. His book the man who knew infinity was made into a recently successful movie. His eyes on the street delves into janes whole life. Has been a long time student of jane jacobs. He wrote doctoral thesis on her. Both books by both of the authors are available for sale. Both are fabulous, fascinating and extremely informative and mythbreaking. I will join with both of them after the lectures from questions from the audience, Robert Kanigel will go first, thank you. [applause] thank you, roberta. And thank you for this place. All right, i will talk right into it. Can anybody hear . Can everybody hear . This is an amazing place. To come in here and see an old thing made new in a way and made so beautiful is selfinspiring what vision and energy and money can do and its truly an honor to be in this space. I guess my grandfather arrived not too far from here 1895. Maybe he was here once, thats a thought. James jacobs is a story for the world and also a new york story. Some of her early critics complained that she was trying to impose her vision of new york on the rest of the world and maybe from a certain standpoint thats truth from the standpoint of americas suburban and rural heartland, theres something to that. Its hard to track james analysis of 20 and 30foot wide sidewalks, when most americans think of sidewalks are thinking of strip that two people can fit in. Or its hard also to square her funness for the old and for things old when american is so routinely turns to things that are new. James was born in scranton and lived the last 38 years in toronto and theres something new york about her and we as new yorkers in a sense claim a little bit of change just by being new yorkers. I grew up in brooklyn but not in one of the cool neighborhoods. A neighborhood called flat land and nobody would willing i will go there, i think. My dad had a shop of the second floor of a left building right next to navy yard. The timing of when i was in high school was from 1959 to 5962. Any of you who are familiar with janes story know thats almost exactly coin kiddent with the time when jane was writing the death and life of American Cities. Needless to say a teenager but i think during those years i was absorbing new york sensibilities, city sensibilities, jane jacobs sensibilities all the while and when the time came in 2010, when i was thinking about what my next book would be, i didnt call her jane then. Thats kind of presumptuous and learned in the book, everybody calls her jane, i had lived in cities all of my life. I lived in brooklyn and baltimore and san francisco, so even before i did my very earliest research into jane in 2010, long after peter had started doing his research on jane jacobs, i think i was halfway there to signing onto jane jacobs as my next writing project. I felt inside an affinity for this subject, for jane that i didnt have to explain to myself. It was selfevident. It was something in jane jacobs that felt i needed to do something with her and i think its this attachment or affinity that so many city dwellers, city dwellest from city lovers have from jane jacobs that i would like to about. I was one, roberta warned me that not many people will know about jane jacobs but some might not and i shouldnt ashove that we are all perfectly cognizant of jane jacobs. I will give a 90survey of her life. She was born in scranton one of four children, actually five, one of them died when he was young. Father was a doctor and mother had been a nurse. All of them were successful. The whole life was terrific, in school, you know, she said first and second grade teachers were terrific and downhill from there. [laughter] perfected her typing and she was proud of this. Dont mistake this. She was pleased with herself that she had this worker day skill. She always wanted to be a writer, though, her first writing job, she did freelancing for vogue magazine who wrote about certain sections of the city, later, she did take courses at colombia but never got a degree. During the war she worked as propagandist. After the war she continued in that realm, regime, she worked for the state department for a magazine called america. She wrote her articles about american cafeterias or american high schools and translated into russian and off to the solve soviet union. Soon after she went to work there, she had two seminole experiences that, i think, set the stage for writing, thinking about and writing death and life in American Cities, one was in philadelphia where ed bakon, the planning of pennsylvania took around and showed around what they had established accomplished in philadelphia and jane nodded and said, this is beautiful at the new sections that bakon was showing off to her. Where are the people . They are on the stoops, on the streets, they are carrying on and here in your neighborhoods there are no people. That was one of the first moments you jane found her questioning after post world period. The other important moment was when she got involved with a man bill kirk who was watching the big projects go up which ordinarily you say thats a good thing. Ratinfested were being knocked down and he was saying, and so she hung out with him for a while. He showed her around in east har harlam. In her description came away seeing a hidden order behind the seeming chaos of a confuseing urban neighborhood. She gave a talk at harvard in 1956 which put her in attention to the architectural. She battled robert moses and earlier, i think moses was not directly involved in trying to make, maybe he was, im not sure, trying to make her neighborhood an urban renewable area but she fought against that. That came earlier. And then she moved to canada because her children, the war is going on, the vietnam war and the choices were either they go to vietnam and they kill people, theyre killed or they go to jail or as it turned out, they move to canada and they move to canada and spend the rest of their lives in canada and the kids are now all the kids, her children are all canadian citizens leading canadian lives. She wrote six other books that are sometimes forgotten but are really interesting about economics, she wrote a book called systems of survival which is her what she described what she called moral syndromes where people have in different groups have different assumptions about how they want to run their lives in the marketplace or outside. For example, police and priests and military would be what she called guardians and she talked about how the world needs both of these and she came to this conclusion rather resistantly and didnt think that there ought to be a place for the guardians. Characterristically jane, her eyes opened the way the world really works and came to the conclusion that the world need both of these kinds of people. I think i have gone beyond my 90 seconds. Its worth saying something about this, i use the word reverence. Reverence is for other people that might admire, most influential urban thinker of all time. My stepdaughter gave me like a political button that has jane black and white and says wwjjd, what would jane jacobs do. This might seem like a really good thing for your subject to be called such a thing but its not really because first the list itself comes kind of weariness. I had a whole life, the jane file. In my book theres only a example of them to try to give a flavor. When you say long live the queen or equivalent of that, too many times its unthinking and uncritical and uninteresting and and seductive, i think. A nice review by belafonte. Tries to counter around jacobs cultural standing leaving us with the work of appreciation and adds that perhaps not weary enough. I love that. Praising but pulling back. Its easy to come under janes spell, so many people, i did. I try to bring balance to the story of jane jacobs, first by pointing out trying to look for what accounted the reverence. She was a woman in the mans world. She had no academic position, she had never graduated from college, she almost didnt graduate from high school. The years she did graduate, her mother asked, whats the highlight of your year, getting jane through high school, she said. [laughter] i think in the end what accounted for janes hold on so many people basically comes down to her ideas and her words. Tomorrow beginning to talk to another kind of a group where i will be talking about professional problems of doing biography and bringing up some questions and wasnt of them is what is a biographer to do when the first of janes books, the life and death of American Cities has had such a continuing, monumental longstanding influence when the others, well often praised and some of them winning awards do not. Do you give the books, do you give all the books equal play . Do you ignore them . Its a question. The short answer is, i think, it would be willful and silly to treat all her books equally, the fact is the death and life of great American Cities and its ideas so profounded effect on people. The book is filled with ideas, one after the other about the way cities work, about housing density and about how to come people still you think of densities, you think of overcrowded slums and jane analyzed successful sitting neighborhoods and found of them were most of the most, quote, crowd, highest density and whereas some slums were actually and talked about short blocks, more interesting and more reward to go take a walk where you get to a lively new street corner, new corner sooner rather than later. She goes on and on like analyzing the features of the city keeping her eyes open, look really, really hard, harder than any of us can at what and how cities worked. To learn more, i recommend that you go back to death and life. Jane can occasionally be hard slogging and chances are youll be the fiduciary one aha moment after another. Its difficult to say and i think its true, that you learn more about jane stay in jacobs. Listen to his music and you will get into touch with bob dylan in the way that no biography could. The same applies here. But for many readers, jane was almost like a conversion experience and some in this audience today didnt need to be born again and jane herself recognized this group. Those who already knew what she was trying to do who had appreciated cities, lived in cities, enjoyed cities but maybe a ritle out of place because all their friend were off to the suburbs and talking about how great that was. They were recognized and collaborated with foot people by giving legitimacy to what they already knew for themselves and i sometimes thought, i often thought actually that this notion of the legitimacy of vital diverse, vibrant, pedestrian city life is the most important legacy of death and life of great American Cities. I think i will stop there and turn the mic over. Thank you very much. [applause] first, thanks roberta and thanks to all of you for joining us here tonight. Im here with lawrence and absolutely delighted at the end of what has been a remarkable day, earlier today i had the chance to speak to a group of architecture students at cooper union about jane jacobs in one of my scholar heros. It was an amazing opportunity in part because my grandfather studied architecture about a hundred years ago and he almost certainly visited this building, all of which makes this a very extra special day and evening for me. In my brief talk this evening, i would like to reflect on jane jacobs legacy in part by asking, how do we understand her now. Both after the passage of time and now that we have some new books about her, is there a new jane jacobs now and is there a jane jacobs yet to be discovered and to be learned from in new ways. Im actually certain that there is. To explain why, i would like to share with you some of my discoveries about her life and work and some of my intentions in writing becoming jane jacobs, discoveries and intentions which, i believe, offer new understanding not just of her life and work but her experiences and ideas and most importantly, i think, the development of those ideas. Ive been a student of jane jacobs for the better part of 20 years. I first encountered her in the mid90s as architecture student at Harvard Graduate School of design. The place where she had made a historic speech 40 years earlier. When i was there, there was no recollection of that event. In fact, the moment i decide today study her thinking influence, the death and life of great American Cities in particular was when i realized she hasnt mentioned and the great transition from modernism to post modernism. This evolved into my graduate thesis, the first of three drafts or versions of my book. At the time, my particular obsession was with jacobs place in a check chuirl and urban history, in those years the post war, post modern period seemed to have been launched in 1999 1996 with a treaty, specially concerned with cities and urbanism. In reading it i became very interested in how conceptual of complexity corresponded with jacobs understanding of it and even shocked me in reading them side by side. First, although i discovered that jacobs had immediately made impact on architecture culture in 1960s and even at harvard despite having criticized the school by name, contemporary scholarship at the time barely considered impact because so little was known about the sources and development of her ideas. Second, in a much bigger context as first discussed in my thesis and lathe in a 2006 publication, jacobs pioneering publication of the science of complexity to cities and urbanism was largely missing not only from histories of cities but from histories of science. Jacobs was one of the first people to take Complexity Science out of the sciences. It is a contribution that merits further consideration more than 50 years later specially in our Digital World where we increasingly hear talk of technological driven small cities, jacobs invited me to her home in 1999. We spoke quite a bit of architecture and cities and relatively new and provocative urban design approach called the new urbanism. We didnt talk much about the past or her past, you see jacobs never wanted a biography and instructed her longtime publisher not to cooperate with such efforts. And at the time i was more concerned with late 20th century legacy and contemporary extensions of her ideas. I was son so convinced that i wanted to understand where the book in its ideas had come from. I simply didnt believe the myths and stereotypes. I did not believe that someone, socalled housewife with no College Degree as shes been called, no matter how brilliant could write one of the most important books ever written on cities, enduring book that connected Complexity Science and cities for the first time while taking care of three children just by watching life go by on hudson street by her kitchen window. To me, it didnt just add up. In a brief biography, soon after death and life was released, jacobs mentioned freelance writing two years at Colombia University and something of an early writing career. She mentioned working for the office of information in a magazine called america illustrated and then magazine called Architectural Forum where she wrote about hospitals and schools. Downtown is for people, which gained the Rockefeller Foundation and grants leading to her book. Although this account did more or less add up and accepted for 40 years to explain where death and life came from. Seems to me that theres more to the story. How often does the Major Foundation give a major grant to people on the basis of one single magazine article. What were her sources . Shows it to be about much more than hudson street. How did she know so much and what happened in the process of writing it. Jacob said she initially we wanted to write articles and this became the first few chapters of total of 22. What experiences and knowledge were to make books worth of chapters and experiences not mentioned in short account as giving lectures at places Like Harvard University of pennsylvania. By 2006 i was able to offer a better explanation of jacobs experience before writing death and life, by that time i decided to go back to school to continue the research started in my thesis and now had training as a historian and a much deeper knowledge and i spent a lot of time in the Rockefeller Foundation archives, the archives of jacobs boss, haskell, architectural and Society Archives among others. What i discovered absolutely amazed me. What i explained in a long article published after her death, jacobs to write about American Cities had been part of a much larger Academic Initiative to develop new knowledge about cities, this Foundation Research initiative not only put her in contact with the most notable a tech City Planners of her time, the Research Program itself had no lesson ambition to help create the new field of urban design. This made jacobs the whole new field of study, remarkable accomplishment with someone with a College Degree themselves. I discovered not only that the Rockefeller Foundation regarded jacobs as the next montfort. I understand why. Jacobs had not had a minor role and i did not understand how someone could be hired in a senior editorial position based on what she had said of her prior career. I discovered that she had done a lot of writing for the magazine and had covered urban redevelopment and renewal in many cities. Not only was her intellectual geography much broader or even new york, the depth of her experience with the subject was much greater. In reading this previously unknown body of work, i came to realize two things. One, when people said jacobs had done little writing before death and life, they were flat wrong. Much of her prior writing that i found had been published without a byline, she had made a name for herself as one of the best writers in the city in 1958. Two i learned that not only had jacobs ideas evolved over time, she had been influenced positively and negatively by a long list of notable people from whom contact was previously unknown. I learn that had jacobs had idealized and had supported urban renewal, the evolution of her thinking before the writing of her great book and other serious of discoveries allowed me to understand jacobs came to be hired at the magazine, in jacobs federal employment records and fbi files which documented extensive multiyear investigation of her during the mccarthy era, which i first wrote about in the book, reconsidering jane jacobs, i learned that it had been developing the writing career in a serious way all through the 1940s, i found articles that she had written for the magazine, freelance newspaper articles and most importantly that during her work for the office of information and state department she not only rose to the role of editor in chief, america illustrated, she had written about architecture, cities and urban redevelopment for that magazine already before Architectural Forum. In fact, i found that in 1950 she wrote what seems to be one of the most comprehensive articles of the at the time about the history of u. S. Housing and urban redevelopment published anywhere. So what i have discovered was unknown jane jacobs, jane jacobs whose first book was called constitutional whose career had developed over many years before death and life. A jacobs what was in contact with the most notable figures in architectural urbanism and academia of her time to influence in a number of case, in a number of cases supported her work, a jacobs whose ideas about cities evolved over time even while writing death and life. A jacobs who directly contributed to urban design and architectural criticism, jacobs who is writing and activism grew together and jane jacobs whose qualifications were much greater than we have given her credit for. I have thought in other words not only to explain where the death and life of American Cities came from and to provide a foundation for understanding the books that followed, but to try to understand and explain how jacobs became jane jacobs, as a synthesis of many years of work and becoming jane jacobs, i presume a very high level of intelligence of my subject and all my readers, i thought to dispel a list of stereotypes and myths, some based on sexism and prejudices and some hero worship and some stiming from ideological biases. I thought to show what was contextual and what was original in her thinking. I placed jacobs story in the context of American Cities to show how her thinking related over the course of 20th century and by showing that even jane jacobs could be swayed by certain seemingly compelling ideas. I suggest that we can become more like jane jacobs by being rigorously critical of her own beliefs and biases. In conclusion, i must say that neither becoming jane jacobs nor eyes on the street will be the last books written about her. There are other books that need to be written. There needs to be a book about her economic thinking and probably by someone with a teep knowledge of economics. There needs to be a book about the moral and political philosophy that she discussed in systems of survival and by someone with deep literacy and philosophy and Political Science. There needs to be overarching analysis of her thinking. In these efforts, my hope is that future writers will be tbieded by the words of the 17th century pascal which have long guided me. A good portrait can be made by reconciling all of the features and not enough to follow through a series of mutually compatible qualities without reconciling their opposites, to understand an authors meaning all of the contradictory passages must be reconciled. Thank you. I look forward to our conversation. [applause] before i take questions, i just want to add a little thing, there are a lot of people who say and they often ask me, what would jane think and she would be furious at the question because she if you ask jane, what do you think about something, she would say, what do you think, and she really wanted people to think for themselves and understand that you were all intuitively as smart as she as long as you observed, observed. Thats number one, number two, the reason she never graduated from colombia was because she took all the sources that interested her, everything from, you know, physics and chemistry and constitutional history and so many credits that she was called bo the office, listen, youve taken all the credit courses, you have to ma maticulate. She never got her degree. Shes the most she was the most educated person i have ever met who with or without a College Degree, i also find it so interesting and this is particularly true in the New York Times. Everybody is looking for a way to be weary of jane jacobs and theres this whole thing blame jane, blame her for wanting everything to be, this is ridiculous. I know gene in the spells of ed galzier without preservation we have Affordable Housing and all these ridiculous things. If anybody has had real critical point, please, im waiting to hear it. So in the meantime weve got two terrific people who understand jane in really deep ways, so we are ready for questions. Who has questions . You must have questions. Wait a minute. Wait for the mic, okay. Thank you. So what you think jane jacobs would think of the current overdevelopment of new york city . You want to start with me, the question . Yeah. [laughter] well, let me begin by saying this, when she was writing, the trend was to abandon the city and quite a bit the background of the book, which is death and life, which is difficult to render and reconcile what todays experiences is and it was in the time when the middle class was departing cities for the suburbs. Today, of course, we have the opposite phenomenon. Whether or not and what she should describe as overdevelopment, that i think was your term, i would like to say that it depends about one it means by overdevelopment, the growth of the city, the vibrancy. I dont think she would have an issue with it. Theres a very important and, i think, under considered discussion in her book which is directly concerned, concerned with oversuccess and selfdestruction of diversity and she said then and im sure would say now that if overdevelop means oversuccess in that way, then there is a problem. I think one of the things she said is that the high prices, highrent districts, mean like places like this are in demand and therefore we need more much places that might potentially become attractive to people who love cities. Unfortunately she added, i dont remember exactly when she said this. Unfortunately she added so much of the Development Since the war has been deal oriented and some most of the development is not even potentially does not lend itself to the jacobs like neighborhood that she favors. I think also its fair to say one of the critiques of jane she didnt like Tall Buildings which is ridiculous, she would be appalled at today because of the global economy. This is not about Tall Buildings. This is about a lot of 90story Bank Security box that is are empty and places to park money and she couldnt have anticipated that, but she also felt, she walked about ways that if the city really cared there were ways that the city could deal with these issues and we dont see any inclination in the public will to really do it. If we did we would start on 90story buildings. Who is next . I just we wanted to ask peter, whats your explanation for why jane jacobs was dropped from the entire curriculum that you were studying at harvard and maybe you could just say ive sort of forgotten what when she came to talk at harvard . Let me repeat the question because it might not not have registered, why was jane dropped from the curriculum at harvard . Im sure it wasnt the only place but why do you think it was . You also asked about the 56th conference so perhaps i will start there with that story. It actually begins in around 1955, in 1955 Architectural Forum was big issue of the magazine and concerned and looking forward, American City forward 20 years and they called it their big city planning issue and they are gearing up for this already in 1955 and one of the things thats happening at the same time was that the william kirk was trying to spread the message of what was going on up in east harlam and contacting newspapers and New York Times and ran a couple of stories and he was reaching out to magazines and asking them to come up there. Essentially in the end of 55, early 56, jacobs made her first trip to east harlam in part because it was seen that it could contribute to this feature article of city planning and the future of cities and thats when she made that those trips to harlam and discover what had you saw there and in east harlam was a very important place and highest concentration of housing projects anywhere in the u. S. And probably anywhere in world. So a few months later, douglas, her boss, editor of Architectural Forum was invited to among the select group to talk about the 56 conference at harvard which was also interestingly the Harvard Design conference. Haskell couldnt go and asked jane to go. She was the best person covering urban renewal at the magazine. She was the most knowledgeable. Thats part of the reason she went. It wasnt like who is free, we will just ask jane. So at the harvard conference she told the story of east harlam and whats interesting in the way that she interested the story was that she already understood it to be a much bigger phenomenon than east harlam. So the talk that she gave there was a huge success. When i was there, the archives were downstairs and i found out that an alumni news letter that she was the highlights of the conference and the inauguration of the program, first Degree Program in urban development in the country. It was a big moment. Lewis montfort, among other people sung her praises. Lets strike that as a kind of enterprise. I think that partly what was going on in the history of that time was that it was a, i think, architectural history, kind of all history was less inclusive than it is today in terms of its considerations beyond discipline and sort of underrepresented minority voices of all different kinds. So it was, you know, a time to kind of i think we have reconsidered. Theres a list of other reasons but i dont wanting to on. Part of it was generational in term of the people teaching architectural history the people that were my teachers, they were the generation of 68. Their experiences were not so much within the memory of the 1950s which, you know, had this reputation of being the dull period, corporate, saburban mentality which was not at all. The social revolutions of 68 were built on what happened specially in the late 50s but as i say, historians that and my teachers, i dont think their perspective was so much, much more with the 60s. I want to add a personal note. I was a reporter at the old new york post, i say old because you know what that means, premurdoc, he came, i left. I was writing about the city in the late 60s and early 70s, at some point in the early 70s when things were pretty bad in the city, 12 of us reporters were sent to the neighborhoods in which we grew up to write about. I wrote about village and i did not write about jane jacobs. I was really unaware of jane jacobs, she was not at that time front and center. She and her husband, they torn in half and they were each reading and giggling over come listen to this. But she never felt that she was left out. So we have to remember that she was not front and center in a a particular time, and she was female. And both of these guys do a great job of exploiting this myth, the untrained housewife. Give me a break. So dont look for nefarious things. It was just not necessarily appropriate or thought to be at that time. Thank you very much. , all of you, for this very enlightening talk. Just for the record, ive been do start with jane jacobs. Today. In 1984 when it took my masters in graduate school. I teach at, every semester so urban studies students also get it. The other element i wanted to ask is when she aware of her audience courts can you talk a little bit about her audience . It seems to me that the early part of the baby boom generation, one of them, or two of them are up there, and we are looking at the 50s way of doing planning and saying something, it was like reading jane jacobs was like permission to do something different, to do it a different way, followed by dr. Oz and other new york city focused theorists. Can you talk about her audience she thought she was writing for . Its possible i misunderstand what you mean by audience, but my notion of audience is that she was a highly skilled writer. She was a writer. She always wanted to be a writer, and in the work she did as propagandist, the work that she did for Architectural Forum. The very nature of the work is to imagine what a reader is thinking. Not to impose your ideas without thought to the audience but to consciously all the time be asking yourself what will be the effect of these ideas and these words on my readers . I think as a writer she was supremely aware of her audience with every step that she took and every word that she wrote. Which is not to say that she always succeeded. I think sometimes she did get caught up on ideas to such an extent that she would momentarily forget her readers. But most of the time she was very much aware of her readers. Thats a great question. Because i think behind that question is this, lets say discrepancy between the selfconscious ambition she had for death and life, and a way that we dont really see that when we read the book. So let me explain that and let me say another thing about death and life as a project. As mentioned earlier, this article published in fortune magazine, was diverted from Architectural Forum to the sister magazine which would to have a bigger readership. Theres an audience question right there. When that kept the Rockefeller Foundations attention to begin a series of conversations that jacobs had with this particular Program Director at the foundation. And in the course of conversations in the summer of 58, when he asked her what do you think needs to be done on behalf of cities, and again, gill patrick was the leader behind this ongoing initiative which began in the early \50{l1}s{l0}\50{l1}s{l0} and he was looking for people to pull into this Research Program. When he met her he said what he think we need to do . She said we need to develop more critics, more people writing about the city. And that was exactly what the foundation wanted. They had a series of different types of projects. One of them was really a Pure Research on the city project. This was headed up by kevin lynch. He was, his was really a Pure Research project. They had a history project going. One of the things that they recognize they needed was a new lump furtive. He was understood to be antiurban, not a big fan fan of the city. So they needed someone that was as good as him to write for a broad audience as he did. But to write more favorably. To say not just promote this antiurban message. So thats what they found in jane jacobs. Two things come out of their conversations. The first and was a conference, an conference in 1958 this was the pin conference, and that conference was called the conference on urban design criticism. What that covers was specifically and explicitly about was expanding both the number of writers and the audience about American Cities and their future and the present and so on. And then the death of the American City was exactly that, a book that would be generalized. Generalized. That was all a little bit the sort of external jane jacobs at some level. But as she developed the book, she was very conscious about the audience in terms of writing to both a professional audience and to a general audience. This was an explicit agenda. When you read death and life it does not have the jargon of the day, but she knew that jargon. She couldnt write that jargon if she wanted to. She was an architectural critic. She read all that stuff. The interesting thing about it as well, it could never the jargon. Interestingly, its not dated because she used kind of normal language. So, for example, when she talks about the uses of sidewalks, the use of streets and neighborhoods, what she has in mind is an architectural debate about functionalism. But shes putting it into everyday language. Spirit are you saying that she translated ideas, that she was formulating an architectural historical terms into language t ordinary readers would understand, that it was a sort of a conscious act of translation . They werent exactly, yes, except they were not really historical terms. This was just the terminology in the field. Modern architecture was really closely associated with functionalism, a kind of concept of function. Everybody knew in whats called the late modern. Modern architecture had become a stone. So interlinked architects were in crisis about the state of things. In her critiques of modern architecture that are read as antimodern, they are not that so much as they are, we could say maybe they are not that, period. They are a critique of modern architecture not living up to its functionalist promise, or process. She made new functionalist critique of modern architecture. She wanted it to be functional. The last thing i will say about this point about the sort of background engines of architectural culture and the context, her context as an architectural critic and journalist, which is she is formulating the idea, is that the summary description of that book project is called a study of the relation of function to design in large cities. So in other words, the agenda for death and life was a study of function, which again takes this idea of architectural functionalism, which kind of gave us also importantly, was related to this functionally segregated city, which also included, not just a functionally segregated city of work here, live there, recreation here, separate the traffic, separate the desk and from cars, but in her might also social segregation, racial and ethnic segregation and economic segregation as well. Also for those of you who have read the book and those of you who havent and will, in the very first page of death and life, she says there are no pictures in this book. The illustrations are all around you. You must look, observe, and while you are there stop and listen. Shes basically, i dont think she was purposely using or not using the language. She was trying to write for people who she trusted your she always emphasized local wisdom at a time when it was pretty high salute the language. The language of planning and architecture in those days, and still in many ways today, is an insiders view. And she was saying, its not the way we should be thinking about it. You know what she says of what you see. Trust your instincts. I dont think she was purposely rejecting the language but she was purposely trying to get people away to view the city for themselves. And i think thats really what makes her book so amazing. And by the way, you should all know a documentary called citizen jane is going to premiere on november 10. It will eventually probably be on television and in theaters. But the foreign rights have already been sold all over the world. You saw the posters as you came in of the stacks of books. Those are all translations. So whats so interesting is that she was writing and speaking in a language that ordinary people could relate to. And if youve ever tried to have a real ordinary conversation with the architect or professional planner, you know the frustration. May be, you may be different, but another question. Hitting on sort of the same thing, which is partly the reason, or perhaps partly the reason for the lack of recognition of women professionals is something she would take pride in. That is to say, as a writer and as a human being she believed in observing and building it up from detail. Even when you already had the conclusion as a writer, used to build i up some details for your audience. And theres an academic tendency to value the theory and to think about the details as antidotal, feminine. But she would take pride in that, shes building at some details both a writer and as an observer. She might take a certain pride in certain academics anyway, say, this is not real theory. This is nothing. She might take pride in it just as you would take pride in all of us saying she showing us her city. Its wonderful. She gave us a chance to see it in some terms that make our everyday walk have theory attached. I have an important question. Do either of you want to answer . Just to your point about the organization of the argument. There is an excellent, and amazing record of our discussion about the writing of the book, and she had a great line that she wrote to kilpatrick. She said, i cant just go these ideas at the reader like a basket of leaves. She was extraordinarily conscientious about the way the argument would be built up incrementally, just as you suggest. May i . Living at the downtown brooklyn, where witnessing the onslaught of current planning and concepts, my question is, to put in a nutshell, where are the schools, they are teaching and urging implementation of a jane jacobs most brilliant ideas, unique insights and powerful philosophy. Where is that coming out in what we see being built in our urban cities . I just want you to know the last thing that jane ever did publicly was the critique of the greenpoint, williamsburg, city plan. If you go back and read it you will see that she was a big critic of what the city approved, and trying to point out trust the local. And there were local plans that would not have produced what, you know, game. You cant see any application of her ideas in anything thats going on these days. This reliance or turning to local citizens, which worked so well in the west village. I wonder whether it always works so well . I think sometimes local people dont have the body of expertise that you would hope them to have. I remember, i interviewed one person who worked with the jane in the west village, and he said Something Like even the most mundane aspects of putting together the fight for the west village against urban renewal, the press releases, the announcements, the every day, the presentations before city boards were all done so professionally, and they all have the stamp of jane jacobs. And i wonder, youre saying, and i would like to think also, that we have trust in the local and disdain for the experts. Because the experts often get things wrong, and they so often dont listen to local people of any stripe. Sometimes may be you can go too far the other way. For me those are writing words. [laughter] fighting. First of all, she wasnt saying that the locals dictate. What she was saying is that you must listen to the locals first and put them at the table first, and dont ignore them first. And over the years, and ive written five books on the subject and i found all over the world that everything she says about trust the local is really true. And i write, what i write is that successes from the bottom up and failure is from the top down, right through my last book about the recovery of new orleans. And in recent months the turn down over the low Income Housing plan, and that east harlem came up with their own Affordable Housing plan. Its happening now and its ignored now, as much as it ever was. And as i included her full critique of the Greenpoint Williamsburg plan in the battle for gotham book, and she wasnt saying that there wasnt a role for a planner or the city, but that look at what the locals have proposed. And she showed the value of everything they proposed. It wasnt first and foremost about real estate. Its only gotten worse, and if you look at all the local proposals, you cant help but see the wisdom is being ignored. Not that it should be dictated, you know, the final word, but it shouldnt be ignored and it should be considered in the beginning. Thats the big difference than saying well, you know, locals dont always have the expertise. Thats the point she was always saying. Their expertise is about where they live. And a planner in city hall doesnt have that expertise, so he should listen, it is usually i. E. , he should listen to what they are saying, and then develop a proposal together. I think your question had a kind of educational dimension. You used the word schools i think. Well, i thought, i understood the question an issue of training, wheres the training of people to sort of understanding her ideas. I would say that i think the field of city plans today, i gave a talk maybe three or four weeks ago at an american regional American Planning Association conference, actually with one of janes nieces. It was exciting and kind of fun to talk about her at a planning conference where 50 years ago she, both wouldnt have gone and wouldnt have been welcomed. But what i saw as a very diverse field in many ways, at least in terms of gender, which is a big change, fortunately. And i think a field that has incorporated her idea. But i do have two thoughts about education that i think are really, remain pretty critical. One of them has to do with this history of urban design. One of the kind of historical sub specializations that it developed was about the history of this field of urban design, and this relates to the 56 harvard conference which helped formulate this new field of study. The weight urban design was conceived of was as an advanced degree. So in other words, you would first be trained as an architect or a Landscape Architect or a city planner, and probably the first two because they are design oriented, and then you would go on to get this advanced degree in urban design. That has always seemed to me as quite the wrong way around, that the understanding even then in formulating this Degree Program was that it was a discipline where the specializations would come together. Thats a good idea such as it is, but the fact is that very few architects or Landscape Architects or city players go on to get the specialized degree. So if the pyramid is upside down, and it has been since they created an academic discipline. The more logical approaches evan is designed to train as an urban design and then you decide to specialized. Thats not the way the pyramid is set. Number two, if you look at the accrediting standards for architects, even today, the standards of what architectures didnt need to know about urban design is very little. So it could be built into the curriculum of architecture and Landscape Architecture but its not very robust. It needs to be. We have time for two more questions. When it comes to the distant trust for the experts, when it comes to, i went on a jane jacobs walk with an economist who is a big fan of jane and is specifically asked him, what has been put Forward Center economics books . And he couldnt come up with something and he pointed me to gthe lasers a book which is obviously not the right way to go. When it comes to distrust of the experts and economists in the way that they are so ingrained in the own thought, peter, you said and economics book needs to be written by an economist. Doesnt really need to be or is it possible to be written by somebody else better in a jane sort of way . Im surprised, im surprised at th sandy was on the board ant teaches a course about janes economics. He shouldve had some answers to that. He was referring to something i said. Right . [inaudible] spirit okay. Go ahead. I would like to think that it is possible that a gifted writer who are immersed himself in the economics [inaudible] pardon . Or herself, thank you. A gifted writer who immersed himself or herself in economic thinking could write a book for ordinary readers that would be as full and as deep and as rich and as interesting as an economist who is trained in the field. Thats my prejudice as a writer. Ill have to go back to my transcript and see. I know that when i was talking about the other book that needs to be written by someone with a deep knowledge of philosophy and Political Science can i would say the same thing. Maybe not like an economist per se but someone with the knowledge of the field. I think thats really needed to understand her work and i think as much as one, in order to understand how death and life comes to be written, and anderson at architectural and urban history helps a lot to understand the urban history shes lighting within and architectural culture that she is immersed in. I think any similar way one needs to understand economics, the field of economics and its ideas clearly to separate originality from, you know, less original ideas. I think its not, you know, i think to your point, sort of the point of your question, and a talk with my students about this a lot, is about she made such a big impact on a number of fields coming from them as an outsider. I think thats often the case for paradigm shifts. Look at thomas kanes ideas about the paradigm shift and applies a very well what happens with her thinking in the. Outsiders are utterly important. Let me add that the best book on janes economics is janes book on economics. Its called the economy of cities, and she considered that are most important book. She consider economic writing her most important work. The second book cities in the wealth of nations is also critical but al also her work on her economics. So i think shes the best source for her own thinking. Its worth focusing more conversation on it because its applications for today are really quite interesting and theres a conference coming up in november in charlottesville that should be strictly on her economics. So i think it will be more of a focus on her economics, and some of the most important economist of the day have acknowledged the importance of her economic writing. I think hopefully we will see more about it because it is still relevant today. Lets take one more question spirit so thank you very much. Having the provision of asking the last question i would like to say first thank you for a very interesting evening. You mentioned before the buzzword of smart cities and to think thats one of the most strongest trends of urbanism right now. Something tha is very much in discussion everywhere. I think you can see a lot of similars between the way big tech and smart cities are thinking about cities, the way modernist plans you to think about urbanism. They have a toolbox of solution they think if you bring the solution from the top down they can create an ideal city or solve many of those issues. This train is coming. Its already a reality in many places. A lot of our tax money is invested in it. A lot of the companies are invested in it. My question is what do you think we can learn from janes criticism on modernist planning, can it be applied to criticism and make reshaping this idea of a smart city . Keeping in mind that maybe tech can support urbanism, cant support good urbanism even. How can we apply or can we apply some of our criticism to the smart city concept . Ill begin by making reference to her ideas about Complexity Science, which is related. One of the things, in really one of the first series studies, sort of topics i delved into was this issue of Complexity Science. I actually wrote much more about it in an earlier article that i did in my book. What i came to see over the intervening years is that, did i think that, well, the relative, lets maybe, lack of promise about what might have happened in a halfcentury between Complexity Science being formulated and today is rather minimal. I think in the end, Complexity Science helped to prove to jacobs that cities are more complex than can be predicted. They are too complex to be predicted. If we cant predict the weather, with our knowledge of Complexity Science, and because of forces, then the teams, predicting the outcomes of certain parameters or projections for cities would be equally difficult to predict. What we are after is predictability, the idea that we can understand something and i think that means to some extent were able to predict certain outcomes. I dont really think that that is really too likely. I think in some ways that is a premise and some of the smart cities thinking. I know theres, i do want to make a singular blanket statement about what things we might be able to learn from it, but i think part of your question answers itself in terms of if its topdown and datadriven, then whose data is it . What choices are they making . What do they want to predict . What outcomes are desired . Then its a really, i think it could be really problematic thing for the future of cities to be too invested in some technological hope and savior in smart cities technology. Just briefly. I think theres been a big shift in our cultures relationship to expertise in general. I think at the time that jane was doing her work was in the, after world war ii when generals, army generals, had defeated the nazis and the japanese, and collectively as a culture, i think we trusted in the expertise of the experts. The experts know so we might as listen to them because they know so much more than we do. And i think jane was what are the first comic could be true, but it sometimes seems that way, one of the first to say nonsense, the experts are just as often wrong as everybody else. And in the vietnam war came along and we started hearing about body counts and we start hearing about the expertise of the military saying this and that. It was all bogus. And i think in the years since, weve developed a healthy disinclination to accept as gospel the socalled expertise of any experts and if the smart city people are saying this particular technology will be the solution to our problems, ii think jane and all of us should be highly skeptical. Spirit i just want to add to, jane was a real skeptic of predictability, and that was one of her great criticisms of urban planners, because they were often planning base of what was happening today would happen and it kind of continuum, which was immediately drawn the first day after the plan was published years ago she said something really funny to me, and this was i think even preinternet but it was computer. She said, all these people think because of the technologies that cities are irrelevant. She said, then why are the great plains still empty cracks people need cities. Its about people. And i had observed the first thing that happened after the computer came out was, the internet, was the internet cafe. People need to be with people. That Technology Comes and goes, but cities are people based and thats where jane always came back to. A lot of things she would say well, its great, its useful but its a fad. It still the basic elements are still the same. Do we have time for one more . Okay. Thank you all for coming, and we have another [applause] take the program list with you. Come back. We have more to come, and we will go on. Thank you. [inaudible conversations] heres a look at some authors recently featured on book tvs after words