The early 1960s was a time of urban utopianism. Not because cities were doing so well, but because architects, city planners, and politicians believed that they had the tools to fix them, radically and permanently. The toolbox included bulldozing entire neighborhoods, building new office towers, and connecting it all with superhighways. These changes, in the name of slum clearance and poverty alleviation, altered the aesthetics of American cities forever. Greater in scope, cost, and idealism than any earlier program of urban revitalization, they also required a much larger role for the federal government.



VITAL LITTLE PLANS by Jane Jacobs, edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring Random House, 544 pp., $28.00

The writer and activist Jane Jacobs was one of the first people to sound the alarm against the reigning dogma of urban renewal. Her classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which was published in 1961 and has never gone out of print, begins by announcing an “attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” And attack she did. Jacobs skewered overreaching modernists like the architect Le Corbusier (who once proposed demolishing half of central Paris in the name of renewal), and she took on New York’s infamous urban czar, Robert Moses, when he planned to run a highway through Washington Square Park. “Architecture with a capital A,” she lamented, had created a professional mentality that erased people from the city street.

Jacobs, who lived in a renovated townhouse in the West Village, has long been an idol of bien-pensant urbanites. She challenged the New York power structure in an era before the demolition of Penn Station, when historic preservation was still regarded as misguided slum appreciation. In Death and Life, she advocated for a new kind of urbanism that embraced a human scale and the “ballet” of sidewalk life. But many of her enthusiasts have embraced her with a twinge of apprehension. In the United States, her best-known book electrified conservatives, because it took aim at “big government” from the ultraleft precincts of the West Village intelligentsia. And later in life, Jacobs partnered with libertarians in Canada to privatize the energy industry. Her message of “small is beautiful” can be taken as an expression of her humanism; yet her antigovernment, pro-business stance is more congenial to libertarians than to city-dwelling liberals.

In Vital Little Plans, a new collection of her shorter writings, you can trace Jacobs’s growing appeal to libertarians. Reading some of these essays, it is hard not to feel that they prefigure our own age of radical antigovernment sentiment, when decentralization is invoked as an excuse to do away with all manner of communal programs, from public schools to federal wildlife preserves. It is also easy to see how skepticism toward city planners—and other professional “experts”—can slide into an all-out critique of the professional class and science-based policy interventions. Jane Jacobs’s work once saved our cities. Could it now be used to pull them apart?

Jacobs began writing early, as a precocious cub reporter without a college degree, in her native town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In her twenties, at the height of the Great Depression, she moved to New York and worked odd jobs. Moonlighting as a journalist in the urban flâneur mode, she dug into the backstories of flower markets and gem sellers. “Orchids in milk-bottles nod at field-flowers in buckets,” she observes at a West Side early-morning flower market, where “greenhouse owners declare they would not sell—at any price—the flowers that grow in their own backyards.”