TAC has an engaging symposium up discussing Jane Jacobs’ urban planning classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” in its 50th anniversary year. Jacobs, as you may know, was the figure most responsible for saving Greenwich Village from Robert Moses, the Great Leveller. Her basic view was that city planning as it was done then rejected the human element that made cities great, and tried foolishly to subject human communities to rationalist schemes. You can well imagine why a certain kind of conservative would admire and treasure her, even though she was a quintessential urban liberal.

In the lead essay for the magazine, Austin Bramwell, a not-uncritical admirer of Jacobs, calls her a “Cobblestone Conservative” . His observation at the end that the kind of urban neighborhoods Jacobs defended are today only preservable thanks to the superrich who can afford to live in them is melancholy. Bramwell also mentions Jacobs and NIMBY-ism. It’s worth considering Burke’s ironic point: “A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation.” Substitute “neighborhood” for “state,” and you’ll see the point. In other words, if you are so dedicated to keeping what you have that you refuse to allow any change at all, no matter what, you run the risk of making your neighborhood uninhabitable.

In the TAC symposium, Ryan Avent points out that as valuable as Jacobs’ perspective was in its time, we have to be careful not to canonize her vision. “Swapping one set of rigidities for another isn’t the way to make today’s cities function well,” he writes. Randal O’Toole from CATO makes the point more explicit:

Unfortunately, Jacobs’ Death & Life of Great American Cities was too successful. In praising her neighborhood to defend it against the planners of her generation, Jacobs spawned a new generation of planners who want to rebuild every small town and suburb into high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods like the ones she was defending. This is just as inappropriate as the urban-renewal policies of the 1960s. While dense tenements were considered slums in the 1960s–and rightly so in many cases–somehow, in the minds of so-called “new-urban” planners today, density has become the solution to every urban problem.

Philip Bess of Notre Dame points out that we shouldn’t dismiss all urban planning. Not all urban planners are Robert Moses acolytes:

And it is just historically false to say — and particularly unfortunate for conservatives to say — that Jane Jacobs fought “a century’s worth of received wisdom in urban planning.”  It was about forty years at most; and knowingly or not what Jane Jacobs was fighting was not city planning per se, but rather modernist city planning.

Christopher Leinberger hails Jacobs as a Local Hero/Small Is Beautiful opponent of Leviathan:

Finally, she taught Americans and democratic peoples around the world about the abuse of absolute power. Jane Jacobs’s battle with Robert Moses, the most powerful New York State public official for 40 years, was the classic Daniel vs. Goliath standoff.  Her defeat of the cross-Manhattan expressway that would have destroyed SoHo, which today is some of the most expensive real estate in the world on a price per square foot basis, gave hope to urbanists everywhere. And it showed that millions of small decisions made by thousands of people, in other words the market, is better than a top-down government in any era.

There’s more where all this came from, including contributions from James Howard Kunstler, Mark T. Mitchell, and Lewis McCrary. Read it here, and let us know what you think in the combox thread. Also, this is a good time for me to ask you who want to see a conservative journal exploring ideas like urban planning and Jane Jacobs’ thought to consider subscribing. Your support makes what we do to expand the conversation on the Right possible.