Jane Jacobs's urban ethics: Fid-Bau Portal

Jane Jacobs's urban ethics

Laurence, Peter L.

Abstract The 2016 centennial of Jane Jacobs's birth was an opportunity for scholars and pundits to reflect on the legacy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and the author's other works and activism. Such reflections naturally reflected on her enduring appeal and readership, but also sought to find shortcomings. Among the critics, and even some otherwise admiring biographers, was a theme that while Jacobs was keen to observe the importance of “eyes on the street” and other street-scaled phenomena, she was weak on such overarching structural concerns as racism, power, and capital. From such charges arose claims that Jacobs was race-blind and a neoliberal, accusations made more dramatic in the context of the polarizing rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential election, Brexit, and other ideological divisions. By examining Jacobs's ideas about the freedom of the city; segregation and discrimination; public space and social capital; neighborhood organization and self-government; and her rejection of the “Plantation mentality,” this paper challenges those claims and shows Jacobs as an important theorist of ethics in the city, which she described as an “ecosystem” of “physical-economic-ethical processes” ideally characterized by “mutual support.”

Highlights • Some biographers have mistakenly described Jacobs as race-blind and a neoliberal. • Jacobs wrote at length against racism, housing discrimination, and redlining. • Jacobs was a pioneering theorist of gentrification and an activist against it. • Rejecting libertarianism, Jacobs advocated community organizing and mutual support. • Jacobs's writing and activism was a precedent for today's progressive social thinkers.