Rereading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs's book captures not just the rich density of urban life, but the craft of fiction

In Donald Barthelme's 1974 short story "I Bought a Little City", the narrator decides one day to purchase Galveston, Texas, where he then tears down some houses, shoots 6,000 dogs, and rearranges what remains into the shape of a giant Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle visible only from the air. As with much of Barthelme's work, the premise seems so absurd that one can't help but shake it until a metaphor falls out, and here one might well assume that, in the words of the novelist Donald Antrim, "I Bought a Little City" is "a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story – playing god, in a certain way". But Barthelme first arrived in Greenwich Village, where he would live for most of the rest of his life, in the winter of 1962, just as local campaigners were narrowly defeating an attempt by the despotic city planner Robert Moses to run a 10-lane elevated highway through the middle of Washington Square Park. For decades, Moses really did play god with New York, and for anyone who ever lived within his kingdom, "I Bought a Little City', which was first published in the New Yorker, might not have seemed so absurd after all.

Those local campaigners were led by Jane Jacobs, another great Greenwich Village writer. Her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is now 50 years old. For a rigorous and polemical manual of urban planning, it achieved a remarkably wide readership, perhaps because it's such a rare joy to read a book about cities written by someone who actually seems to appreciate what makes them fun to live in. As Lewis Mumford, one of Jacobs's opponents, wrote at the time: "Here was a new kind of 'expert', very refreshing in current planning circles, where minds unduly fascinated by computers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question that computers can answer and are completely negligent of the human contents or the human results. This able woman had used her eyes, and, even more admirably, her heart." Today, urbanists argue about "what she really meant", as if the book were an ambiguous holy codex, but most of Jacobs's prescriptions remain clear and relevant. And when she derides, for instance, "the extraordinary governmental financial incentives [that] have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility, and vulgarity", you think straight away of a dozen recent cases where the words hit just as hard.

Quite often, however, I find myself considering Death and Life not as a book about cities, but as a book about books. One of the two epigraphs to my novel Boxer, Beetle, which contains a character based on a young Robert Moses, is a quotation from Jacobs: "We are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality." My historical interpretation of Barthelme's story does not, of course, push out the more obvious symbolic one, and Antrim is quite right that making up stories can sometimes feel like urban planning. Which is one reason why Death and Life will be a delight to just about anyone with an interest in the craft of fiction.

Jacobs, who died in 2006, never published any fiction herself, but she certainly had a novelist's sensitivity to human relations. She argues in Death and Life, for instance, that one of the paradoxical advantages of urban existence is privacy. In contrast to the suburbs, a dense neighbourhood has lots of convenient places to stop and chat, so you can be on friendly terms with dozens of people who live or work near your home without ever feeling the slightest obligation to invite any of them inside for tea. "Under this system, it is possible in a city-street neighbourhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offence, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships." If these things had truly been lost to New York, we would never have got Seinfeld, but the point still stands. How many professional city planners have considered everyday life so carefully that they've remembered to take all the nanophysics of social awkwardness into account?

My favourite passage in the whole book is Jacobs's account of a day in the life of her local newsagent. "One ordinary morning last winter, Mr Jaffe, whose formal business name is Bernie, and his wife, whose formal business name is Ann, supervised the small children crossing at the corner on the way to PS 41, as Bernie always does because he sees the need; lent an umbrella to one customer and a dollar to another … gave out information on the range of rents in the neighbourhood to an apartment seeker; listened to a tale of domestic difficulty and offered reassurance; told some rowdies they could not come in unless they behaved and then defined (and got) good behaviour … advised a mother who came for a birthday present not to get the ship-model kit because another child going to the same birthday party was giving that …"

The chronicle goes on for more than half a page, too long to quote in full, and we get a sense here of the pleasure that Jacobs probably would have taken from writing fiction. It reads like Dickens – in the omniscient warmth and precision of the prose, and in the sense of a whole city crammed into one shop. And also in the character of Bernie, who seems to be almost supernaturally benign, after the fashion of so many Dickens characters. (In any modern novel, he would have to beat Ann with that umbrella.) Finally, it's like Dickens in the magnitude of the disparity between Jacobs's urban experience and our own, which is so great that it would be easier to believe she was writing about 1861 than 1961. When I used to live in Bethnal Green, I felt a tender appreciation for the unjudgmental 24-hour shop near my flat, but then I wasn't about to ask for a loan or wail about my ex-girlfriend. As Sharon Zulkin argues in her recent book Naked City, "Jacobs romanticised social conditions that were already becoming obselete by the time she wrote about them."

But that doesn't detract from the usefulness of Bernie when he's reconsidered as a lesson in writing. "The social structure of pavement life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters," Jacobs writes. She is not – of course – employing the term "character" here in the literary sense, but for our purposes she might as well be. Nearly all novelists will have learned to make use of "public characters": secondary figures who can plausibly appear in almost any part of the book, who have good reasons for making those appearances, and who can therefore help to knit together all the curly fibres of a slightly disorganised narrative.

Plenty of the requirements Jacobs sets out for building a healthy and diverse urban community can be applied with real success to building a vivid and plausible fictional community. Death and Life, in other words, is a sort of accidental creative writing textbook – perhaps appropriately so, because Jacobs's beloved West Village was itself full of writers. Early on, Jacobs says: "Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance." But the art form of the city is not really dance. The art form of the city, described so well in that passage, is the novel.

A word is hovering on the perimeter of this article, and that word is modernism. Jacobs was strongly against the modernist planning of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses; but on the other hand, a list of the older books that exemplify the lessons of Death and Life could include Ulysses, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Petersburg, Manhattan Transfer and Mrs Dalloway – some of the skyscrapers of modernist literature. Everyone knows that modernism can mean different things at different times and in different fields, but Jacobs helps us to see with great clarity that all writers of fiction, consciously or unconsciously, stand – in one sense at least – in opposition to the modernism of the mid-century city planners. Fiction, after all, is about human difference, and Le Corbusier's futuristic Ville Contemperaine demanded a population as interchangeable as pachinko balls. (Barthelme, whose father was a modernist architect, spoke of Le Corbusier's "not insignificant totalitarian bent".)

For Jacobs herself, the novelist who most convincingly defied Le Corbusier was … perhaps you can guess. "Gradgrind would have loved Le Corbusier's much later definition of a house as a machine for living," she wrote in an essay on Hard Times. "An enthusiastic Gradgrind had already made himself mentally and morally at home in a future where departments of planning would devote themselves to deliberately making the built environments of cities, towns and suburbs monotonous in the name of virtue – the kind of result to which Dickens thought that worship of the eminently practical was pointing."

Dickens, of course, never met Le Corbusier – but James Joyce did. In 1922, the two men were both in Paris completing the works that would define them: Ulysses and the plan for la Ville Contemperaine. Fifteen years later, when they were at last introduced, they should have had a lot to argue about. In fact, they discussed only the novelist's two new parakeets, Pierre and Pipi. Soon afterwards, Le Corbusier wrote that Ulysses was "a grand discovery of life", and drew parallels between Joyce's work and his own.

Le Corbusier had a hostility to the messy urban street so violent that, the architect Michael Sorkin suggests, it "can only be explained by psychoanalysis", and yet most of Ulysses takes place on these streets. As with Bleak House, one struggles to imagine a version of Ulysses set in la Ville Contemperaine, in which Leopold Bloom does not stroll from Sandycove to Phoenix Park to Eccles Street but rather takes an electric lift from floor to floor of a self-contained 600ft-skyscraper, meeting no one and seeing nothing. That, however, is a close approximation to the natural state of any new fictional universe, before the novelist has variegated and populated it. The two duties are complex, and as Barthelme shows in "I Bought a Little City", playing god isn't always easy. But you couldn't hope for a better tutor than Jane Jacobs.

Contributor

Ned Beauman

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Rereading: Great food writers

A series of 20 tiny volumes of text from the best culinary authors reminds us that food writing is not just about food

Bee Wilson

29, Apr, 2011 @11:05 PM

Article image
Rereading Rabindranath Tagore
The work of the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore was once 'shoved down our throats'. Now he is too easily dismissed. Amit Chaudhuri reflects on his modernism, and his prescience

Amit Chaudhuri

08, Jul, 2011 @9:55 PM

Article image
Rereading: RK Narayan | Charles Nicholl
A visit to the city that inspired RK Narayan's fictional south Indian town, Malgudi, on the 10th anniversary of his death

Charles Nicholl

13, May, 2011 @11:04 PM

Article image
David Lodge: rereading Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period is set in 1980 and centres on a plan for compulsory euthanasia for those aged 67-68. David Lodge on an unusual, absorbing novel that has been unfairly overlooked

David Lodge

14, Dec, 2012 @10:55 PM

Article image
Rereading: Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak knew that Doctor Zhivago was explosive. But a new translation to mark the 50th anniversary of the author's death loses much of its force, argues Ann Pasternak Slater

Ann Pasternak Slater

06, Nov, 2010 @12:05 AM

Article image
Rereading: Jerusalem the Golden

This week Margaret Drabble won the Golden PEN award. Lisa Allardice welcomes the return to print of her early novel, Jerusalem the Golden, which deserves to be as well read as its predecessor The Millstone

Lisa Allardice

02, Dec, 2011 @9:00 AM

Article image
Rereading: Works and Days by Hesiod

As Greek economic problems intensify Tariq Ali salutes the first economist, Hesiod, a poet whose Works and Days was written against the backdrop of agrarian crisis

Tariq Ali

07, Oct, 2011 @9:55 PM

Article image
Rereading: Childe Harold by Lord Byron
The overnight success of Childe Harold arguably made Lord Byron the first modern celebrity. But it would be several years before he understood the full significance of his creation, writes Benjamin Markovits

Benjamin Markovits

12, Aug, 2011 @9:00 AM

Article image
Rereading: Late Call by Angus Wilson
Wilson's novel is set in a fictional new town; its grandmother hero, Sylvia, finds herself amid the clean lines and progressive aims of its streets. Gillian Darley on an admirable social experiment

Gillian Darley

06, Jan, 2012 @10:55 PM

Article image
Rereading: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Far from being 'a breather between biggies' as it was described by critics when it was first published 20 years ago, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland is one of his greatest achievements, argues Andy Beckett

Andy Beckett

30, Jul, 2010 @11:06 PM