Building Cities That Work

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

Here is another gloss on Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961). Jacobs’s insights, startling in their time,
are now accepted as obvious by the thoughtful—but not, unfortunately,
by a great many developers, traffic engineers, planners, and municipal
politicians, who still think in pre-Jacobs ways and whose vision still
shapes our cities.

What is this vision? LeCorbusier’s great gleaming towers isolated in
deserts of greensward. Frank Lloyd Wright’s half-acre and a house for
every yeoman. Filtered through a corrupt vision of the urban future that
General Motors touted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

And what is Jacobs’s—and Edmund Fowler’s—revision? Cities made
of neighborhoods with high-density, mixed-income housing, short blocks,
small parks and people spaces, and mixed uses for human-scale structures
(shops, offices, residences). Plus replacement of the dominant
automobile with decent public transit and terror-free moving about for
pedestrians and cyclists.

Fowler’s book is very good on the real costs of giant developments;
he argues persuasively that the claimed economies of scale for office
towers, highrise residential blocks, and regional mega-malls are myths,
foisted on the rest of us by the ruthless seekers of power and wealth
who make “development” their game.

He’s not so good on human costs. Do highrises breed crime? Do the
hectares of suburban ticky-tacky lead to alienation and mental distress?
Not proven. But don’t blame Fowler. He has to rely on sociologists for
the facts and sociologists are, at best, pretenders to science (my
opinion, not his).

Nevertheless, he’s right: our cities are awful but we can make them
better. Some of us are trying now, and more will—especially, perhaps,
if they read this book (the significant “they” being city
politicians and planners).

When municipal elections roll around, ask the candidates if they’ve
read Fowler. Or Jacobs. And don’t vote for anybody who says no.