Jane Jacobs - Criticism

Criticism

Jacobs was not professionally trained in urban planning; her ideas were developed through personal experience and observation.

The planners and developers that she fought in order to preserve West Greenwich Village were among those who initially criticised her ideas. Robert Moses has generally been identified as her archrival during this period. Since then, Jacobs’ ideas have been analysed many times, often in regards to the outcomes that their influences have produced.

In places like West Greenwich Village, the factors that she argued would maintain economic and cultural diversity have instead led to gentrification and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Arguably, her own white-collar family’s conversion of an old candy shop into a home was indicative of the gentrifying trend that would continue under the influence of Jacob’s ideas.

However, gentrification was also caused by "the completely unexpected influx of affluent residents back into the inner city". The extent to which her ideas facilitated this phenomenon was at the time unimaginable. For example, she advocated the preservation of older buildings specifically because their lack of economic value made them affordable for poor people. In this respect, she saw them as "guarantors of social diversity" (Klemek, 2011:76). That many of these older structures have increased in economic value solely due to their age was implausible in 1961. Issues of gentrification have dominated criticism of Jane Jacobs’ planning ideas. But her concepts have also been criticised more broadly. For example, although her ideas of planning were praised at times as "universal", they were criticized as inapplicable when a city grows from one million to ten million (as has happened many times in the Third World). Such arguments suggest that the ideas apply only to cities with similar issues to that of New York, where Jacobs developed many of her ideas.

In respect to Third World cities, her ideas have been criticized for not addressing problems of scale, or explaining how infrastructure should be built. Perhaps her support of bottom-up and small-scale development initiatives would indicate that all urban areas are different and require individualized initiatives, as opposed to major projects of urban renewal.