Urban Life

In the centenary of her birth, Jacobs has been remembered as our Solon of cities: a shrewd theorist who revealed how cities work, why they thrive, and why they fail. Jacobs lived to the age of 89, long enough to see her renegade theories become conventional wisdom. No one questions anymore that lively neighborhoods require diversity of use and function, that more roads lead to more cars, that historic buildings should be preserved, that investment in public transportation reduces traffic and promotes neighborhood activity, that “flexible and gradual change” is almost always preferable to “cataclysmic,” broad-stroke redevelopment.

Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.

In a year when American democracy has courted despotism, Jacobs’s work offers a warning and a challenge. Her goal was never merely to enlighten urban planners. In her work she argued, with increasing urgency, that the distance between New York City and Higgins is not as great as it seems. It is not very great at all, and it is shrinking.