NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 30, 2006
Jane Jacobs
I last saw Jane Jacobs struggling up Albany Ave., where she lived in Toronto, with one of those walkers we give to the oldies these days. Her head was in the clouds. More precisely, that magnificent white-topped head was trained at the third-storey level of the houses along Albany. I said hello to her, timidly, thinking, what if she doesn’t remember who I am. (We had been co-conspirators in my Idler magazine days.) She remembered my name and was very warm.She told me to look towards a turret on one of the houses. “Isn’t that wonderful!” she said. I thought, yes, turrets are nice, I like Victorian houses, too. But she wasn’t referring to that. Rather, she was pointing to a course of decorative brickwork, about 20 feet above ground-level. “I’ve lived on this street for decades, and I never noticed that brickwork!” She proceeded to extol the advantages of her walker, which, because it assured she would not trip forward, left her free to tilt up her head. I suddenly remembered, and so did she, that we had once talked about how to look at shops, and other small commercial buildings hugging the sidewalks along urban streets. I had mentioned being driven in a station wagon, flat on my back with a slipped disc. From my automotive bed of pain, I could not see the street level of any building, only the floor above. The unusual angle made Toronto more attractive. It restored the Victorian fabric of downtown. This was because shopkeepers had long since altered their street-level facades, to make them louder -- installing nasty display windows, screaming signs, and all kinds of unmatching appliqué. It was typical of Mrs Jacobs to contradict me, to put in a word for the delicious chaos at street level. And then to admit that she, herself, actually preferred most of the buildings “from the waist up”. Whenever a friend dies, as Mrs Jacobs did on Tuesday -- especially a dear old friend, as Mrs Jacobs could be even to people who had hardly met her -- we are seized by the memory of missed opportunities. I was too shy to pursue her friendship after common projects had been completed. But one thing I did get right: I had the chance to tell her, while she was still alive, just how much I owed to her -- not as an “urban theorist”, but as an example of someone who sees with her eyes, and asks her own questions, is alive to paradox and allergic to cliché. Few people one ever meets seem fully alive. Mrs Jacobs was triumphantly among the living. The obituaries are elsewhere. Read any of the more detailed ones, and you will find she was a bundle of splendid contradictions. My own original encounter with her had been over her book, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992). To my mind, it was an even more important contribution than The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) -- the book that made her famous. The later book takes an idea out of Plato, that there are two apparently contradictory sets of moral and social values -- one based on honour, one based on enterprise -- which are in fact complementary and necessary to each other. And yet they should never be mixed, or slurred. Corruption comes from mixing and matching these two moral codes. Unfortunately, as clearly as she laid the thesis out in her delightful book-length dialogue, the idea remains beyond the reach of glib minds, which insist on imposing artificial unities. So like her last book, Dark Age Ahead (2004) -- the most cheerful doomsday prophecy I have ever read -- it is still not making the right sort of waves. It is no longer the “television age”, but Mrs Jacobs recognized, and tried to subvert, the terrible clamp that is put on thinking by the TV approach to public issues. Much of her fame came from being such a likeable person, a “beloved aunt”. She had the gift for making all kinds of old, “rightwing” ideas sound “leftwing” and chic. But people responded as they do to TV -- to the face, and not to the argument. Nevertheless, she did accomplish one good and important thing. She threw a giant spanner into the works of the city planning profession. That alone was a public service worth a monument in the city square. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top