It’s tempting to agree with the skeptics. Jacobs, it may seem, has become a historical figure. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, in an age of suburbanization, she was the thinker around which so many urban stories revolved, her vision of restoring vitality to cities crucial to turning back the devastation unleashed by several generations of modernizing dreams seemingly come to ruin. Now, however, she has become something else. Not quite the villain of a newer, emergent generation of city stories, her familiar lessons about the virtue of neighborhoods, “eyes on the street,” and mixed uses nevertheless seem quite beside the point to those fixated on the quandaries of precarity, inequality, racialized dispossession, the financialization of housing, and climate catastrophe.

One of the reasons for this impasse is, of course, gentrification. Whatever Jacobs may have had to say about the problem — and she had a number of ideas about it and what to do about it — it has become something of a working assumption amongst Jacobs skeptics that her ideas are the original source of the “aesthetics of gentrification” that bedevil cities today. For many, the basic ideas Jacobs recommended in The Death of Life of Great American Cities have themselves become the building blocks of upscale urbanism. Since the 1980s and 1990s the ideals that became codified in her name — an urbanism of the streets, stoops, and small-scale neighborhood—have lost their power to lead the way out of urban crisis. Adopted as the ideal vision of a middle class “back to the city” movement in the 1970s, they are now simply mobilized as lifestyle amenities for real estate boosterism, instruments of accumulation in the quivers of urban developers.1

This is in part because of a larger problem: Jacobs would not let herself see cities as primal scenes of exclusion. She recognized the fact of inequalities — of class, and particularly of race — but was less concerned to confront the way they had a constitutive role in making, not just ruining city life. She tended to see them as forces that could undo the natural virtues of urban density and diversity — not fundamental properties of the ways that American cities had been built and arranged for more than a century before her mid-20th century moment.2

Jacobs’ innate belief in the generative power of cities, her sheer faith in their innate capacity to produce new ideas and collaborative innovation from their diversity of uses and peoples, may seem outmoded to many today. It might even seem naïve — but that faith gave her the conviction that cities were places where problems gathered not to fester but to be solved. More than a tribune of the ideal neighborhood, Jacobs was perhaps our greatest champion of the city as a decentralized, dynamic, always unpredictable human system. The city, she believed, could never be a modern machine for living erected by the wise and all-knowing. It existed because people themselves created lives from its chaotic, improvisational economies.

Can we recover some of her faith in the problem-solving powers of city life?

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• 1. Brian Tochterman, “Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs,” Radical History Review 112 (Winter 2012): 65-87.
• 2. For Jacobs, cities were about freedom and creativity. They were dynamic organisms, self-organizing systems of interdependencies — seedbeds for “organized complexity” that were predisposed to create vibrant social worlds if the planners and bulldozers could be turned back and people’s innate interest in creating “new work” could be unleashed. The contemporary crisis of cities that goes by the name of gentrification, the process Jacobs first called the “self-destruction of diversity,” was for her an unfortunate part of the larger churning — the death andlife — that city economies unleashed. Vibrant city economies, she argued, drive overall prosperity. They might still be harnessed to transform the stagnant “plantation age” economies of modernity into new, human-centered, democratic worlds.