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Looking back to move forward

Updated: Nov 26

November broke my streak of book of the month posts. I had all the best intentions, but October was such a whirlwind that I just didn’t have time to read. And November brought a lot of surprises.


When the future feels uncertain, it helps me to lean into history, identify similar periods from the past, and find examples of community resilience and perseverance. In other words, I’m looking back to find a way forward.


Image: book cover of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs


Fitting, then, that the book I had already chosen for November is The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, Vintage Books) by Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential urban writers of the mid-20th century whose sharp, incisive criticism of urban planning still informs the field today.  Pulling no punches, her opening sentence reads:

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.

Jacobs famously took on Robert Moses, who wielded his bureaucratic power to displace thousands of people and reshape New York City with his vision of parkways and highways snaking through neighborhoods and covering the Bronx River.


In fact, Robert Caro’s sweeping 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, is my book of the month for December – only I’m off the hook for reading it in all of its 1200-page glory! In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, the podcast 99% Invisible has been posting monthly episodes breaking down the book approximately 100 pages at a time. You can find the Power Broker playlist here: 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker


Image: book cover of The Power Broker by Robert Caro


Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan take the listener through Robert Moses’s remarkable life, chapter by chapter. Every episode includes an interview with a notable public figure or celebrity or journalist. Many are New Yorkers. They’ve had some real powerhouse guests on the show, including Robert Caro himself, comedian Conan O’Brien, television showrunner Michael Schur, USDOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and more. I would say my favorites so far have been the author Robert Caro, political writer Jamelle Bouie, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and urban planner, real estate developer, and author Majora Carter.


AOC in particular offers fascinating insight into how power can be wielded for both good and bad purposes, and the role of personality in congressional politics. As for Robert Moses, he may have started off with noble intentions, but he wasn't very far along in his career before his bullying tactics and abuse of bureaucratic power became the hallmarks of his leadership style. I suspect we've all encountered a Robert Moses in our own lives.


Image: Robert Caro (credit: JFK library)


Let’s return to Jane Jacobs. Known for her lyrical descriptions of concepts like “sidewalk ballet” and “eyes on the street,” she spoke to the organic nature of what makes up the fabric of a thriving neighborhood. She had little use for planned gathering spaces or suburbs, which felt sterile to her. 


She was also sharply critical of auto-centric infrastructure, writing:

Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that these hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow, staggered-signal systems are installed for faster movement, a bridge is double-decked as its capacity is reached, an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways. More and more land goes into parking, to accommodate the ever increasing numbers of vehicles while they are idle. (P455)

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A few pages later, she delivers a statement that rings as true today as it did more than 60 years ago when she wrote it:

…the more space that is provided cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them (p457)

Image: black and white aerial view of Milwaukee highways


I admit that I still haven’t finished The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is a long book, the prose is dense, and I have had neither the time nor capacity to give it the attention it deserves. Still, I am inspired by Jane Jacobs’ fierce tenacity in defending the people and places she loved and her insistence on speaking her mind and writing her truth. Her words were powerful. In many ways, she was a woman ahead of her time.


Image: Iconic black and white photo of Jane Jacobs


Since the original publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, the United States has experienced major institutional and cultural changes too numerous to list here. Jane Jacobs died in Toronto in 2006 just a few days short of her 90th birthday, and I wonder what she thought about the changes she saw over the course of her life. That Jacobs’s writing remains prescient is an indicator of both her insight into how humans and cities interact and the fact that so little has changed in the intervening decades between then and now. You know the saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes"? Much of what she wrote over a generation ago still resonates today. 


Susan Gaeddert is Community Programs Director at 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, where she runs Active Wisconsin, facilitates the Community Transportation Academy, and coordinates the Wisconsin Climate Table. Have you read any good books lately? Send your recommendation to: susan@1kfriends.org 


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