Jane

Jane Jacobs, was one of the first, if not the first, chroniclers of "this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal", passionate defender of the flaneur and the multitudinous bustle of the street, "foot people" and, of course, the city itself as a form of life.

Jacobs was the author, among other things, of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She died yesterday. I'm grateful that she lived, and reminded that there are aspects of her work that I carry around to this day, though I've not read her later writings. Really very sad to hear of her death.

Described as having a "trenchant writing style", Jacobs declined the ethnographic posture of the Chicago School and its antecedents, as well as the bestowal of honorary degrees. Hers was a writing and politics of the street. One might not agree at all times with her arguments, but you are invited to jostle with them, mingle and wander for a while, as one might with another person in a crowded city street.

It's possible to trace the strands of those encounters, in Hardt's and Negri's affirmation of a quotidian biopolitics, in Reclaim the Street's "disco-socialist activity in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs famous manifesto", and more besides, such as Mark Davis's writings, which are shaped, I think, as much by an antagonism toward one of the "most genteel of anarchists" as by the precondition of having passed Jacobs on the street and headed down another one.

And then there's Marshall Berman on Jacobs, in All that is Solid Melts into Air. The most sustained encounter with Jacobs that I've read. And one which recalls that Marx and Jacobs - whose birthdays were separated by a day and births by almost a century, nevertheless - shared the passions of a critical, streetwise modernity. One that cuts through the distinction between 'public' and 'private', and finds itself on the same side against the efforts of other versions of modernity that would 'kill the street' (Le Corbusier), contain its flows and erect the dull economic repulsions of borders through gentrification.

Here's Jacobs:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city [she means the areas yet gentrified] is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city, and liken it to the dance.

In other words, Jacob's city is one that embraces the presence of strangers on the street as a condition of safety, of freedom and of life, rather than one which battens down with xenophobia, and where the only eyes left on the street are those of security cameras.