My Firstborn Shall Be Called… Jane
Curtsies and the digital equivalent of a fruit basket (what would that be, I wonder) to Rueful Red for sending me this:
I love this line:
Such modernist utopians were treating cities as toys for totalitarians.
Ahhh.
So, Jane Jacobs:
The Radiant City Beautiful conferred unprecedented power on the elites of the new welfare state, notably architects, developers and planners. They had money and a professional interest in new building. Governments could spend billions eradicating slums without noticing that they had been built for free and could be restored for free. Leave the city alone, cried Jacobs, or at least understand which bits worked and why. She accepted that neighbourhoods would gentrify, and un-gentrify, over time, and was relaxed about cars. They were an extension of home and work. Their excessive use in cities was because planners had destroyed mixed-use neighbourhoods and increased the need to travel (even more relevant in the internet age than when Jacobs wrote). Too much traffic was a sign of bad planning. …
On this simple insight Jacobs built her edifice. The classic Georgian grid of streets had never been bettered as an urban form. It offers ease of movement, wheeled or on foot, and embraces mixtures of activity, day and night, rich and poor, “sacred and profane”. Let the local property market oversee its fluctuating fortunes. Destroy the street and ghettos form, social institutions collapse, areas “fail” and fall prey to architectural blitzkrieg. Large modern buildings, said Jacobs, were like chessmen. They move across the urban landscape either killing or being killed. Formal zones make the city rigid. They force residents to travel more than they need, imposing either congestion or blight and leaving vacuums for that urban curse, crime.
! (ninme sputters in agreement) (Or, as Simon says):
I cannot read her The Death and Life of Great American Cities without constantly slamming it shut, hurling it to the floor and shouting, “Yes!”
I don’t think Peter would appreciate if I did that with the G5. Oh, but Central Leeds sounds like utopia. What I would give for American cities to have character.
May 5th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
My. . .are you bucking to do the updated version of Riki Tiki Timbo?
And, since he sent you the link & mebbe will check in here: belated happy birthday to Rueful Red. Did you require a Bloody Mary this morning, Sir?
May 5th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
P.S. I just finished reading Quo Vadis, and you know who the first totalitarian urban planner was? Nero. He had the burn the city to save it.
May 5th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Their excessive use in cities was because planners had destroyed mixed-use neighbourhoods and increased the need to travel
And there you have it. It will be depressing to watch what happens to the perfect neighborhoods in MidTown New Orleans. I figure they’re doomed.
I long to buy a roll of toilet tissue while I walk the dog on the way to scout out the lines at the resturant.
May 5th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
(Not to keep harping on it but) That’s part of Prince Charles’ genius. His Poundsbury, the town he planned like an old fashioned English village? There’s no zoning. So things are sprouting up naturally. Rather than having blocks and blocks of residential, and to get a six-pack of eggs you need to get in the car and drive to the store because the idea of walking is like an unrealized fantasy.
But yes, the whole thing about cars. You know cars exist so you plan around them to make it convenient for car owners but in doing so you necessitate the owning of and driving of cars, which makes pedestrians an endangered species who need poorly planned public transport to make up for it. In London I had to walk a good ten blocks (two of them were the V&A and the Natural History museum, respectively, so take that as the equivalent of) to get from my bus stop to my little quasi-dorm thingie, whereas in Philly, and here, and everywhere else I’ve been, the buses stop every odd block. In London it didn’t matter because you didn’t need a bus to get to the market which was just round the corner, but here it does matter because if you can’t afford a car, but you absolutely need motorized transport, they have to have the stupid things stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, and go about six miles in two hours, plus the time stopping for wheelchair bound riders. It’s just so unnecessary. Then there’s sprawl. I’ve been thinking a lot about sprawl lately, in this time of high gas prices. But never mind that now.
Uh, rikki tikki tembo, no so rembo, kari bari patchi, tik terri tembo? What does that have to do with hangovers? Or have I completely missed the true meaning of that particular and not particularly multicultural children’s rhyme?
May 6th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
I meant your firstborn has so many names now.
I also meant Nero had “to” (not “the”) burn the city.
Hey, and your link made me seem brilliant at a brunch I attended to day at my city delegate’s house. I actually live in a neighborhood with character (used to be the summer escape for official DC before air conditioning), and my delegate’s been pushing to put in sidewalks on the streets where they aren’t, because he’s a big Jane Jacobs fan. And I totally “got” it. Thanks. I gave you no credit.
May 6th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Hussy!
We don’t have side walks where I’m from. Or not on most streets. Not enough cars for them, really. I think they work better in cities, really. I’d never heard of her before this, so I don’t know what her take is on suburban sidewalks vs. metropolitan ones.
May 7th, 2006 at 2:57 am
I will have to bow to Rueful’s expertize in this matter, but this may be the first time that “Leeds” and “Utopia” have been used in the same sentence.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:52 am
It’s all about context.
May 7th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
That’s weird, Erie even.
May 8th, 2006 at 2:03 am
Maybe when Bradman scored 304 in a day at Headingley, Brett! Can’t think of any other. Peter Burge’s 160 in 1964? Underwood and fuserium ‘72? Botham ‘81!
Glad everyone seems to have enjoyed this, it’s all so very important, and I’m glad you were able to support your city delegate, RC2. Happily I needed no pick-me-up before a simple lunch of baked oysters, confit of duck and tarte tatin, and a couple of glasses of something red and dry.
Some points worth making: 1) the outskirts of Leeds – Seacroft – have some pretty grim high-rise council estates into which the city centre poor were decanted in the ’60s, so it’s not all perfect. 2) the Victorian market is a wonderful building, but what goes on in there – people buying and selling fruit, flowers, vegetables, meat, fish, dry goods, hardware, any thing you can think of – makes for the most wonderfully theatrical experience and is really more important than the architecture qua architecture. Stall-holders bawling their wares – I once watched Mrs Red being exhorted by a florist to “dig in, lass” – and having friendly but pointed discussions about the price/value trade-off, not that they called it that. It was just a deliciously human experience. Anyone ever come across an architecture critic and drunk called Ian Nairn? He’d have understood Jane. Leeds is on no known tourist map of Britain.
May 8th, 2006 at 2:58 am
We went to Pike’s Place Market on Saturday. Capitalism at work. The t-shirt vendors supplying hokey designs recycling the same old jokes for such a demand that they didn’t need to smile, much less animate themselves. The weird copper and bead jewelry with nothing whatsoever to do with Seattle and the same lifeless sales people. The hippy standing over his open, and filling, guitar case in his mexican poncho singing a poorly written and executed folk song about the city. No lemon grass, though.
May 8th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Sounds like a sort of “let’s pretend” market, whereas the whole point about the one in Leeds is that it’s used by common or garden Leeds folk who aren’t making any kind of statement, just getting (far) better value than the supermarkets can provide. Or getting a good-value fry-up. We bought a big soup pan for £6 there, whereas the equivalent in Habitat cost £35, but looked sort-of French. 20 years on it’s still in regular use. Dunno if I’ve ever seen a busker in the market, everyone would be rather too busy. Once saw a topless strippagram make her delivery as it were. Everyone fell about laughing.
May 8th, 2006 at 4:03 am
Oh, and if you ask stallholders about lemon-grass one of them will sell some as an experiment, and if it works others will too, but at a cheaper price, so you have a choice different qualities of lemon grass at different prices. That’s waht happened with chinese and other ethnic foods. I think the technical term for it is “market”.
May 8th, 2006 at 4:25 am
Yeah. The place was crushed with over-fed tourists ambling about in rows of five gawking at the roof when I just needed to get to the vegetable stands. The one guy that sells it was out. He expected some on monday. It’s grass, for crying out loud! Not exactly hard to grow, is it!
There was a market in Philly in an old train station (Reading Terminal) that was actually a lot better. A bit food-courty, but still had some nice grocers and meat vendors and things like that. A couple swanky kitcheny sorts of stores around the exits that reminds one that only yuppies shop at markets nowadays, but still, nice. And more centralized than Pike’s Market.
May 8th, 2006 at 4:36 am
In Leeds market the butchers have the carcases on display and they’ll cut whatever you want. Fishmongers gut and fillet fish to order. That’s all part of the theatre too. A chap I knew had a general goods stall on the market and he called it ‘Arrods in deference to the local aitch-dropping ‘abit. Plastic bags similar to those of a place in Knightsbridge, but lacking an “H”. Harrods took him to court and made him stop. Bloke’s son later opened a toy stall. Called ‘Amleys. That’s all part of the theatre too.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:17 am
If I needed a piece of meat cut to spec, I don’t know what I’d do. I suppose you could order it from the butcher up the hill, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have the whole cow back there waiting to satisfy your every culinary whim… I have a couple recipes that would need something cut in a way that Americans haven’t heard of, but I never make them because it’s all a bit of a hassle, isn’t it.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:37 am
But isn’t the theatre of tradesmanship – butchers, fishmongers – part of the whole experience? Ideally, that is.
May 8th, 2006 at 10:45 am
At the Market, yes. Fish. Lots of fish. Butchers, though, I can’t think of anywhere that they actually do the butchering on the premises. Unless I’m just completely missing what’s going on in back.