Today's Google Doodle honors Jane Jacobs

[Cirrus]

Today would have been her 100th birthday.

Here's the doodle: https://g.co/doodle/fcgkpj

[HomeInMyShoes]

Hooray!

Nice to see for someone who made many think about cities differently.

[themaguffin]

I just saw that.

Very cool.

[ChargerCarl]

Stephen Smith changed my mind on her. While she was right to oppose a lot of the terrible top-down planning initiatives in the 60's, she was also a huge NIMBY.

[Cirrus]

Heroes need not be perfect to be heroes. It can simultaneously be true that Jane Jacobs is a hero for revolutionizing the way we see and understand cities, and that she had NIMBY tendencies that aren't to be emulated. Regardless of the latter, her role in the former was absolutely indispensable to the urbanist movement. She's a hero, NIMBY or not. We only have the luxury of thinking of NIMBYism as a problem at all because her teachings on urbanism have so successfully revitalized cities.

That said, NIMBYism in the 1950s and 60s was a dramatically different animal than NIMBYism today. Cities were declining and new development was making them decline faster. Something had to change and the first step in stopping the bleeding was stopping the cycle of ripping out good city neighborhoods and replacing them with less-dense, less-walkable new ones. It wasn't comparable to today's NIMBYism at all, which is rooted more in classism.

I see all the @MarketUrbanism tweets about her. The problem isn't so much that they're untrue. They're true. The problem is that they're applying a 2016 context to someone who very much lived in 1961. They're like blaming someone who lived in the middle ages for being too religious.

[brickell]

Originally Posted by ChargerCarl

Stephen Smith changed my mind on her. While she was right to oppose a lot of the terrible top-down planning initiatives in the 60's, she was also a huge NIMBY.

NIMBYs are needed and on balance a good thing. I think we've swung too far in their favor lately. The problem is that they're mostly concerned about the wrong things. We're all NIMBYS to some extent.

But anyway, like Cirrus said, different times with different tactics.

[ChargerCarl]

Originally Posted by brickell

NIMBYs are needed and on balance a good thing. I think we've swung too far in their favor lately. The problem is that they're mostly concerned about the wrong things. We're all NIMBYS to some extent.

But anyway, like Cirrus said, different times with different tactics.

Depends. IMO, real estate markets are mostly efficient, so I'm opposed to the efforts on the part of NIMBY's to use the government to subvert the natural market processes. While I'm glad they were there to oppose the demolition of neighborhoods for highways and housing projects, they unfortunately turned on just about all new market rate housing as well, which is why we find ourselves mired in a terrible housing crisis which no end in sight.

[softee]

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