Deplanning the Planners

U.S. planners and redevelopers, in trying to save U.S. cities, are in reality destroying them. Attached to the outmoded ideals of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City and Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they are creating a future wilderness of standardized, monotonous never-never lands. This is the contentious charge of Critic Jane Jacobs in a new, passionately argued and well-documented book (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), which has planners all shook up.

What is a city? demands Mrs. Jacobs in effect. It is, among other things, the shriek of children scooting in the streets, the clamor of crowded living; the neighborhood butcher's, where the housewife can leave her door key, and the corner delicatessen that stays open past midnight; the locksmith and the cobbler, and the florist's potted sidewalk garden; the front-stoop squads with time and chitchat on their hands; the old man gazing like a mute portrait from the frame of his second-story window; and the strangely silent Sunday morning, sweet with the smell of freshly washed streets.

Marvels of Dullness. What have the planners put in its place? Low-income projects that "become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general hopelessness than the slums''; middle-income housing projects that are "truly marvels of dullness and regimentation"; cultural centers that are "unable to support a good bookstore"; civic centers "that are avoided by everyone but bums"; promenades "that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders."

Obsessed with statistics and blueprints, city planners and rebuilders forget to find out what the people whom they transplant by the blockful really want. Author Jacobs quotes a tenant from a Manhattan housing project set in the customary grassed areas dear to all rebuilders: "They threw our homes down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don't have a place to get a cup of coffee or a paper even, or borrow 50-c- . . . But the big men come and look at that grass and say, 'Isn't that wonderful! Now the poor have everything!' "

Down with Superblocks. Successful neighborhoods, Mrs. Jacobs argues, may have all the earmarks of slums but paradoxically have great vitality. In Boston's North End district, for example, rents are low, the blocks are small but densely populated, and small shops prosper. Streets and sidewalks sparkle with activity; everybody knows everybody else, and outsiders like to stroll there. And in the face of all the city planners' tenets, North End has the lowest delinquency, disease and infant mortality rates in the city. Yet planners keep talking of the need to "redevelop" North End, and bankers almost always refuse to lend money there for local construction. Why? Explains one banker: "It's a slum!"

Critic Jacobs would rebuild successful neighborhoods in all their diversity, so that the apartment dweller can get a shoe fixed, buy a record, pick up a newspaper, get a drink or go to a movie--all within easy strolling distance of his front door. Blocks should be short (the superblock is a bleak abomination, says Jacobs) and population dense. Such streets are "policed" by the people themselves--shopkeepers, strollers, housewives glancing out of parlor windows. Mrs. Jacobs points out that the deserted streets of housing projects have a far higher rate of assaults and muggings.

The planners, dreaming of the Garden City, remain oblivious to such realities in city life, and build on. Snaps Mrs. Jacobs: "This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities."

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