Jane Jacobs Would Have Chanted: “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
06.09.2020
Architecture affects every living person—and even every un-living person! We depend on buildings and homes to help us sleep, eat, take care of our heath, to educate, to socialize, to make money, to make progress. Shelter—an obvious form of architecture—has been defined as one of humankind’s basic needs. Even people who aren’t fortunate enough to have a home require the support of architecture and design.
Jane Jacobs, in the 50s and 60s, fought tremendously against Robert Moses. Moses wanted to replace black neighborhoods in New York City (he called it “slum clearance”) with a highway and to leave a targeted section of lower Manhattan’s Black population without house, businesses, and public spaces. He was going to intentionally displace people who were already marginalized. Wayne Lawson wrote about this for Vanity Fair in 2017: “He saw himself as the builder of a brave new world, where the poor would be hosed in tall, clean, uniform super blocks on the outskirts of cities. The filthy slums they vacated—‘cancerous growths,’ in his words—would be torn down to make room for parks, art centers and expressways. If the uprooted tenants didn’t want to move, or didn’t like the airy towers they were moved to, too bad. ‘Out single problem is tenant removal.’. . .[Jacobs] saw Moses’s housing projects as sterile fortresses of concentrated poverty, which sucked the souls out of people robbed then of normal communication on normal streets, and fostered stigmatization and crime. ‘This is not the rebuilding of cities, this is the sacking of cities.’”
A book called The Power Broker accused Moses of “restricting the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families,” discouraged Black people from visiting Jones Beach, and made it impossible for buses—primarily bus routes filled with people of color—to park near particular parks and beaches. Jane Jacobs gathered groups, protested, and fought back relentlessly and won the battle against Moses’s race-fueled design plans.
In an article she wrote for the New York Times in 1967 (sadly, it went unpublished), Jacobs called out white liberals for being too complacent—they were ignoring these brutalities of slum clearance, public housing, and welfare programs. She was shaming these white people for turning a blind eye to the people who were unlike themselves.
Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1962, explaining the design of sidewalks, the lengths of city blocks, park systems, etc. and made the case that these city elements could be redesigned to restructure systems of American life. This included her examinations of the parts of Black neighborhoods that promoted happiness and a tighter sense of community, such as: mixed-use small businesses and housing, shorter blocks and larger sidewalks to gathering and easy transportation by foot, and most importantly, the social importance of keeping your eyes out onto the street and knowing and supporting your neighbors. She started to notice that streets were being widened to accommodate white people and their cars so that they could drive through Black neighborhoods faster and “safer.” The result cut into the sidewalks in front of homes and businesses—the spaces people live and work within.
As I witness so many of us trying our hardest and giving so much great effort while trying to defund the police system all across the United States, I notice that we are taking a close look at city budgets in a way that I’ve never seen my peers do. It’s incredible! When you’re plotting where you think police funding should be redirected, this about the architecture and design of our cities.
Seattleites: think about how beneficial it would be to redirect more money to the Office of Housing the help with affordable home rentals and ownership, and to stop residential displacement from happening when a developer wants to seize homes and small businesses for the construction of luxury condos or high-earning businesses. Think about transportation. Think about the basic way our streets and sidewalks are built: how certain citizens feel uninvited to use a street because of their lack of access to a car, or how some sidewalks are stripped of greenery or benches because people are not welcomed to linger.
Can we learn from Jane Jacobs? ALWAYS! How? By thinking more critically about how we design our cities down to the microscopic level. By examining the way our resources (money and time!) are being directed. I am so proud of our generation right now for being a vehicle for change. Let’s keep it up! BLACK LIVES MATTER.