Jane Jacobs and Climate Readiness in Boston

I participated in a conference at Boston College (home of the Jane Jacobs Papers) that considered what Jacobs’ ideas can offer the City of Boston as it prepares for climate change. The conference included speakers working in government, education, urban planning, and community initiatives around climate readiness. Here is the text of my remarks.

Because this panel is on urban planning, I want to address the question: What kind of planning is required to have positive, just, and transformative impacts on cities? I’ll describe one way that I see Jane Jacob’s ideas relevant to that overall goal. And also one way that we might challenge her or need to move beyond her perspective. 

One way that Jacobs’ work is highly relevant today is her appreciation for urban complexity. In the chapter “The kind of problem a city is,” from Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs describes cities as not overly simple, nor random and chaotic, but systems of organized complexity. They are diverse and interconnected systems, and to understand how they work you need to observe them closely.

Calling a city a kind of “problem” was important, because that was just how planners approached cities. In the postwar age of urban renewal, cities in the United States were experiencing critical challenges. They were suffering from disinvestment, economic restructuring, and policies that promoted suburbanization. This problem of the city was one that planners often thought they could fix.

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (Wikimedia commons)

She was critical of planners who tried to impose simplistic designs on the city in order to render it more rational, efficient, or optimized. Two models she critiqued are Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, which is an idea for planned communities that intersperse urban cores with green space, and Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s plan to replace a neighborhood of Paris with a vertical city of skyscrapers and open spaces. Jacobs felt that these approaches removed the natural diversity and complexity that was necessary to create a vibrant and functioning city. Vibrant cities should be shaped by the people who lived in them, not by planners from the outside.

Today, we also see cities as problems–environmental problems. Globally, they use a majority of the world’s energy, they produce a majority of greenhouse gas emissions, they generate a great deal of waste, and they produce harmful pollution. Many of the negative impacts of climate change, whether it’s heat waves or flooding or sea level rise or water stress, are often caused by the interaction between what’s happening in the climate and the way that cities have been planned and built, which is ultimately unsustainable and unadaptive. 

So while Jacobs was really trying to preserve cities, the problem of our time is how to make transformative changes in the way cities work. Because even though cities are a problem, they are also really important places for making a difference: for reducing emissions, reducing consumption and waste, and protecting people’s lives and wellbeing from climate impacts.

Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris. (Wikimedia commons)

Her call to appreciate urban complexity is still important, because there are many visions being put forward for what a sustainable or resilient city looks like, and there are plenty of generic, off-the-shelf solutions in which a designer, consultant, or government official is imposing a vision that could be applied to any city. 

And I think that this plays into the backlash that we sometimes see in Boston against solutions that are associated with sustainability and climate resilience, like bike lanes and bus lanes and green infrastructure and flood protection. We need to be mindful of the complexities of already-existing neighborhoods and pay attention to what residents say will help them remain vibrant. We also need to pay attention to residents who worry that new climate-resilient parks or green infrastructure could cause their rents to rise and displace them. One of the central problems facing urban sustainability and resilience today is: how do we make cities environmentally better without making the people who live in them worse off? Or make them have to leave entirely, in which Boston becomes a protected and sustainable elite enclave.

Jacobs’ ideas have also come under critique. She had a somewhat libertarian stance on the role of planning and government that some argue have fed into a general trend toward public disinvestment in cites. What fills the vacuum when government recedes is not community voices but corporate interests, and we have seen how corporate investment has transformed cities in ways that could have used a stronger public hand.

As urban writer Alex Marshall has pointed out, Jacobs focused on the streets, but sometimes ignored infrastructure. She critiqued the poorly thought-out infrastructure, like highway projects, that threatened to destroy streetscapes, without always acknowledging how much those streetscapes were supported and made possible through large networks of infrastructure, much of it publicly funded, often hidden underground.

Boston faces significant challenges from climate change. Adapting to climate change will require significant new urban infrastructure. Parts of the city are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and there are a lot of ideas for how to protect coastal areas.

And there have already been some missteps. Boston has taken a really proactive and science-based approach to thinking about its risks and opportunities. But it created a master plan that really doubled down on developing in high-risk areas of the waterfront, with the promise that these and other areas would be protected. It has also created design ideas for the kind of protective infrastructure that could be built, without a definite strategy for paying for it or getting around the significant regulatory and planning hurdles. We can’t count on corporations or even grassroots efforts by communities to do all of this. And so there have been calls for creating a regional agency akin to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to oversee it.

I think we do need to think about ways to create institutions with the authority to make transformational change. But it doesn’t mean going back to the urban renewal model. There’s a wide recognition that urban climate action is not just about government but governance at many levels to create transformational change. This is a strength we have in Boston and the metro area because we have so many different institutions and groups working together toward common goals and hopeful toward a more complex and collective vision of sustainability and resilience. 

Boston’s first Climate Action Plan

Here is the cover of Boston’s first Climate Action Plan in 2007. It was a simple Word document. And about a third of it was just trying to make the case that climate change was real and that cities should act on it. It only provided a rudimentary inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. It didn’t say anything about adaptation, that would come a few years later. The city has come a really long way. Climate Change is now fully embedded in the municipal government; there are numerous climate-focused offices and staff members, we have emissions goals, and specific adaptation plans. We now have organizations working across the region on these issues. Eighteen years might seem literally a lifetime away to my students, but I have sweaters in my closet that old, so it gives me great hope for the coming years to see how far we’ve come.