Urban Design & Social Justice: Jane Jacobs
At CultureHouse, we believe that urban design can be used for the common good, and that good design should be an essential part of the toolkit for social justice. Social justice issues, be they heterosexism or racism or environmental injustice, are influenced by the built environment of our cities. We think that fact should be at the forefront of the minds of designers, planners, and community organizers.
This autumn, we’re highlighting key academics, activists, books, issues, and theories in the area of justice-focused urban design. We hope that by the end of the year, we’ll all (you included) be a little more knowledgeable on how our work can create the conditions for a just city.
If you know anything about urban design or city planning, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard of Jane Jacobs. She’s inspired a whole generation of urban activists and is seen as a goddess-like figure for those who believe in livable and human-scaled communities.
Check out Alexandra Lange’s piece, “Imagining Jane Jacobs”, to learn more about Jacobs as a cultural figure.
So what’s the big deal? Why is she the figure that many have decided to worship?
I turned to two sources to learn more — Jacobs’ most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the 2016 documentary about her fight against Robert Moses’ urban renewal programs in New York, “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”.
By seeing these two sources in conjunction with each other, it becomes clear that Jane Jacobs exemplifies the intersection between social justice and urban design in two ways.
(1) As an activist
The documentary places Jacobs in her context and demonstrates how, as a women and a mother, she continuously fought stereotypes to press against the patriarchal city power structure. The contrast between her and Robert Moses helped illustrate a larger point about how local community organizers (often women, mothers, and people of color) advocate for their communities in the face of oppressive government projects. Issues of urban design — like highway construction, or the building of new housing, or other zoning & building related issues — are a key battleground for localized community advocacy.
The documentary also put the movement Jane Jacobs was a part of in the context of other anti-authoritarian social justice movements happening at the time. Whether recognized or not, the changing built environment of our cities is inextricably linked with movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, environmental justice, and other social justice goals.
(2) As a writer and theorist
She does not use an explicit justice framework in her writing — but there are a few times where she mentions the larger implications of her proposed interventions. One was alongside the idea of safety — while all members of a city want and need safe streets, it’s especially important for people like women, queer folks, and people of color who are at higher risk for violence. Jacobs writes on page 47 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities that “public right and freedom of movement ultimately depend” on the safety of the city.
She invokes the concept of justice when she writes,
Sidewalk public contact and sidewalk safety, taken together, bear directly on our country’s most serious social problem: segregation and racial discrimination. I do not mean to imply that a city’s planning and design, or its types of streets and street life, can automatically overcome segregation and discrimination. Too many other kinds of efforts are also required to right these injustices. But I do mean to say that to build and to rebuild big cities whose sidewalks are unsafe and whose people must settle for sharing much or nothing, can make it much harder for American cities to overcome discrimination no matter how much effort is expended (71).
This is exactly why we’re interested in the intersection between urban design and social justice. Good design is not going to solve social justice issues alone, but we can’t solve those issues without good design. We don’t stand a chance at building a better world if the built environment that we inhabit every day is working against us.
This is the second post in a series about the intersections of urban design and social justice. You can find the first post here.
