Last week I read through New York Review of Architecture #45. In the Wrecking Ball column, so named for its provocative articles, Andy Battle took a sledgehammer to that monument of 20th century urbanism: Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The article is here in full. While I applaud NYRA’s ability to make me squirm and confront my own biases, I nonetheless wanted to respond to the article. I emailed the following rant to Nicolas Kemper, NYRA’s founder and publisher.
Nicolas,
I just read through Andy Battle’s piece on Death And Life in NYRA#45. My spines stood on end. Compulsory snark aside, his piece hinges on a reading of Jane Jacobs which I believe is misplaced– it’s not that common sense and intuition are all that matters, it’s that invisible forces are NOT all that matters. Instead of reading in a coffee shop or lecturing, going out to interact with fellow New Yorkers (and not by accident) is an act of “reading” and “making” the city that many of us have forgotten. Being present, actively listening and interacting without pretense is how the “eyes on the street” see the world. Just ask Cassim Shepard. Just ask the black folks in the Bronx who cite safety (the same safety Mr Battle tiptoes over) as a primary political issue.
Broadly, Mr Battle’s whataboutish take on Death And Life is a tired analysis: that her upper class white experience of Greenwich Village is only a privileged slice of the mid-century urban picture has been said before and needs further development by now. Mr Battle bristles at Jacobs’ abstract use of terms like vitality and diversity, but doesn’t admit the fact that nowadays we use it just as abstractly. I don’t get the sense that even a rigorous street-level data-gathering exercise á la Jan Gehl to concretely describe “diversity” would deter his argumentation.
Further, Mr Battle’s counterpoints to Jacobs’ are all brought in the form of other urban writing or philosophy, from Adorno to Mau. I wish he had also taken some more contemporary examples from either beat journalists (whose business it is to go out and speak to people on the street) or his own walks and observations of the city (look no further for inspiration than Owen Hatherley, who documented his street-level observations in a book reviewed in this very same NYRA issue by Samuel Stein). Without a writing that feels present and in situ, the complaints come off as detached and academic.
May I write a mid-form piece as a rebuttal to Mr Battle’s? I want to confront the cynicism with writing that is more present and on-the-ground. I hate to think of young readers coming away from this article with only heightened suspicion toward the public realm, and their vulnerable place in it. Instead, the power of the pen should encourage people go out, do the melting part of the melting pot, and seek the optimism and joy in what Mr Battle himself calls the “complexity and discord”… “of a society in which, like it or not, I am inextricably connected to those unlike me”.
I hope the launch party went well.
