Jane Jacobs on her book "Dark Age Ahead"

Jane Jacobs, visionary, activist, and guru of urban planning, talks about her new book called, "Dark Age Ahead."
(Original broadcast May 2004)

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[TigerRocket]

Another way of putting is this: if a simplistic generality is repeated often enough, no one ever bothers to check if it's true, they just swallow.

[TigerRocket]

In other words, the dynamics were unwittingly engineered by the very folks who claimed the opposite would be the result. Urban planning, as Jacobs has pointed out, is not just about building things and filling them, but about accounting for the details in how they work. This includes social factors which were clearly n o t part of thinking things out. When you put the cart before the horse you get what you pay for.

[TigerRocket]

By the time overcrowding happened, it was too late for adjustments necessary to catch up and alleviate the very problems that were created. Physically building a neighborhood or region is a much slower process than that of unpredictable numbers people moving to another location. The poverty and thus “race” issues were inevitable given these facts, though the simplistic argument that “those people” drove things into the ground was touted as inescapable “truth.”

[TigerRocket]

Incorrect. “white flight” was the result of suburban environments having been built first (1950s), to meet car culture in regional planning (Robert Moses' concept of the future), followed by the ‘exodus’ to fill them. Inner-city overpopulation resulted because the building of these outer zones sapped investment for the urban infrastructure that slowed building growth in cities to meet the demands of new growth. Immigration was concomitant to this but n o t the cause.

[asspastor]

A woman who spent her entire life preaching something that took the rest of us another 40 years to even begin to understand. Im so disappointing that we did not more broadly implement her philosophies more quickly.

[knightschwartz]

suburban sprawl was created by mass post-1965 immigration which gave us overpopulation and busing policies which caused white flight.

[socialconscience100]

I wonder what Ms Jacobs would have made of SCAMH, and the great big open-air condo salesroom-cum-clip-joint gallery that's Queen West today.

[malika585]

Brilliant! She is the reason I am an urban planner