Tuesday PM Linkage: Jane Jacobs Edition

1.

What is it with you blogs writing about the deaths of people most of us don't know or care about?
First it was gothamist reporting on the death of the jewish grand poobah yesterday, and today you folks with jane jacobs.

sheesh. enough already.

2.

So start your own blog and write about people you know and care about. It just so happens that Jane Jacobs has influenced a great many people, at least those who influence people who influence people. Let's just say she was greatly influential.

3.

#1, you're both clueless and ill-informed, and I can't imagine why you'd want to brag about that as you have done in your posting.

Maybe you need to educate yourself about Jane Jacobs and what she did in NY and elsewhere -- she had the guts to defy (and defeat) Robert Moses' idiotic ideas.

New York would be a vastly different place today if Jane Jacobs had not existed.

What have YOU done for NYC lately?

4.

Agree that #1 is a total moron, probably don't even know who Robert Moses is either. Sad that nowadays most people only know "celebrities" on the cover of US Weekly.

5.

Jane Jacobs was a needed antidote to the ethos of Robert Moses, which held that the long term regional interest always trumped the short term local interest.

Unfortunately, New York City took an overdose of the antidote, from which it has only now begun to recover. 30 years on, JJ has been used to justify NIMBY and BANANAs policies that benefit the tastes of the incumbent affluent at the expense of everyone else.

Is balance possible, or will NYC either go overboard in the other direction or retreat into stagnation?

6.

Anonymous, if you don't care about Jane Jacobs, I don't care about you.

7.

Jane Jacobs was not a NIMBY. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" clearly recognized that cities are alive, that they grow and change. She simply argued that that growth should occur organically, not in the form of massive urban renewal projects that proposed to demolish the city and start over. She argued that the old urban fabric had value. All those condos popping up everywhere -- not just in New York -- show that developers learned that lesson, too. Nobody's doing megablock developments anymore; everyone's doing infill. You may hate it anyway, but it's a big change from the 1950s.

8.

(Jane Jacobs was not a NIMBY.)

Didn't say she was. But NIMBY's use her theories as a justification to oppose all change and all construction, not just subsidized urban renewal and massive highway construction.

As I said, NYC got an overdose of the cure, until recently. That said, it is always possible that the "principle of oscillating stupidity" will turn the policy practice back to Robert Moses way in the future.

9.

hmmm..really, so she was that influential to the planning, development and growth of NYC? Bloomberg didn't seem to pay much attention.

Why don't we take a poll of NY'ers and see how many have even heard of her? My guess is not many at all, I'd be surprised if it was even 1%.
Probably because like SHE DID NOT EVEN LIVE IN NYC SINCE LIKE 1969!

10.

#9 WTF does Bloomberg have to do with Jane Jacobs?