Inhaltsangabe
A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected writings and talks by the legendary author and activist
No one did more to change how we look at cities than Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and economic thinker whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities started a global conversation that remains profoundly relevant more than half a century later.
Vital Little Plans is an essential companion to Death and Life and Jacobs’s other books on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics. It offers readers a unique survey of her entire career in forty short pieces that have never been collected in a single volume, from charming and incisive urban vignettes from the 1930s to the raw materials of her two unfinished books of the 2000s, together with introductions and annotations by editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring. Readers will find classics here, including Jacobs’s breakout article “Downtown Is for People,” as well as lesser-known gems like her speech at the inaugural Earth Day and a host of other rare or previously unavailable essays, articles, speeches, interviews, and lectures. Some pieces shed light on the development of her most famous insights, while others explore topics rarely dissected in her major works, from globalization to feminism to universal health care.
With this book, published in Jacobs’s centenary year, contemporary readers—whether well versed in her ideas or new to her writing—are finally able to appreciate the full scope of her remarkable voice and vision. At a time when urban life is booming and people all over the world are moving to cities, the words of Jane Jacobs have never been more significant. Vital Little Plans weaves a lifetime of ideas from the most prominent urbanist of the twentieth century into a book that’s indispensable to life in the twenty-first.
Praise for Vital Little Plans
“Jacobs’s work . . . was a singularly accurate prediction of the future we live in.”—The New Republic
“In Vital Little Plans, a new collection of the short writings and speeches of Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential thinkers on the built environment, editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring have done readers a great service.”—The Huffington Post
“A wonderful new anthology that captures [Jacobs’s] confident prose and her empathetic, patient eye for the way humans live and work together.”—The Globe and Mail
“[A timely reminder] of the clarity and originality of [Jane Jacobs’s] thought.”—Toronto Star
“[Vital Little Plans] comes to the foreground for [Jane Jacobs’s] centennial, and in a time when more of Jacobs’s prescient wisdom is needed.”—Metropolis
“[Jacobs] changed the debate on urban planning. . . . As [Vital Little Plans] shows, she never stopped refining her observations about how cities thrived.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[Jane Jacobs] was one of three people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people who had an aura of sainthood about them. . . . The ability to radiate certainty without condescension, to be both very sure and very simple, is a potent one, and witnessing it in life explains a lot in history that might otherwise be inexplicable.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“A rich, provocative, and insightful collection.”—Reason
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) was a writer who for more than forty years championed innovative, community-based approaches to urban planning. Her 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities became perhaps the most influential text about the inner workings and failings of cities, inspiring generations of planners and activists.
Samuel Zipp is a writer and historian. He is the author of the award-winning Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, which tells the larger history of the battles over urban renewal that propelled Jane Jacobs to national fame. He has written articles and reviews on urbanism and culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. He is currently associate professor of American studies and urban studies at Brown University.
Nathan Storring is a writer, curator, and designer who specializes in making contemporary urban design, planning, and policy accessible to the general public. He has served as acting curator of Urbanspace Gallery in Toronto (founded by colleagues of Jane Jacobs) and worked on permanent exhibits at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Boston Society of Architects. He has written for various outlets, including Canadian Architect, Next City, and the Metropolitan Revolution blog, and is a regular contributor to the Project for Public Spaces blog.
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chapter 1
While Arranging Verses for a Book
New York Herald Tribune,
January 22, 1935
I should approach these sheets with reverent eye,
Thinking, with mental halo, how I sought
The perfect word to clothe the perfect thought,
The phrase to bring a tear, a smile, a sigh.
Or, failing that, I think at least I ought
To sweat again on seeing fragile verse
I brought into the world with groan and curse,
Whose every rippling foot was ripped and fought,
Or think of how it should have been, and moan,
And wish for the effects I seem to miss,
But all the things I’d think I’d think are flat,
The words and sheets have memories of their own:
I ate brown sugar while I thought of this,
And my nose tickled when I worked on that.
Diamonds in the Tough
Vogue, October 15, 1936
“Everything comes to the Bowery, if you wait long enough,” say the dealers in the diamond center between Hester and Canal Streets, one of the largest and strangest jewel exchanges in the world. There, seventy percent of the unredeemed jewelry pawned in the country is bought and sold. Through this single block of shops, a glittering island in the most squalid section of New York City, has passed every sort of quaint and lavish jewelry, the most extraordinary pieces in the world—crown jewels of royalty, seal-rings of lords, love-tokens of courtiers, and unsophisticated lockets of children.
No one seems to know why this location was chosen or why the district continues here. Twenty-five years ago, the first of the merchants settled in this incongruous setting for no reason now remembered. It is adjacent to no allied centers; it exists by itself, across the street from the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, surrounded by the almost legendary Bowery life.
None of the dealers rents a whole shop. Each has a counter in a store with a dozen or so other dealers. The more affluent ones also rent little partitioned spaces in the show-windows and put up such signs as all articles here may be purchased only at third counter to left.
No effort is made for artistic or dramatic displays, but some bizarre effects are unwittingly obtained by festooning quantities of jewelry haphazardly over little statuettes that seem to bear no relation to the other merchandise. A plaster goat, probably of bock-beer ancestry, has several rings suspended from one horn, a necklace rakishly wrapped around the other, a watch over his tail, and assorted trinkets along his back. King Arthur, already burdened with his armor, supports several necklaces about his shoulders, a wristwatch around his waist and a lavaliere from his visor.
In the showcases, there is no black velvet, no particular gem placed to catch the eye, but row on row of gleaming diamonds and shining gold, or sometimes just a jumble of rings and watches and bracelets. Frequently bold, definite-looking prices are marked on the jewels, but these represent chiefly a starting-point for dickering.
The specialty of the district is diamonds, of course, but every other sort of jewelry and precious metal work is also traded in. Probably the most magnificent article now in the district is a samovar, said to have been made about three hundred years ago for the Czar of Russia. Seventy-six pounds of solid silver, finer than sterling, with an intricate gold inlay pattern! It was bought from a pawn shop where it had been left by gypsies. No one knows where the gypsies got it.
Some of the jewelry sold in the Bowery is new, but most of it comes through the three large auction houses on the block between Hester and Canal Streets. It is sent there by pawnbrokers after the twelve months stipulated by law—and one month of grace—have elapsed from the time it was pawned.
Except in the summer, sales are held nearly every day. The jewelry to be sold is put on display for the dealers to examine and to make notations of its value. These notations are all in codes of a primitive sort, letters representing numbers, and each dealer keeps his a secret. The notes are to remind the dealer in the excitement of the sale what, in a cooler moment, he considered paying.
The auction proceedings are baffling to an outsider. They are completely silent. All the dealers able to touch the auctioneer crowd around him, and the rest sit on two benches facing him. The auctioneer indicates a figure to begin the bidding, and the dealers raise it silently. Those near the auctioneer squeeze his arm, nudge his ribs, or press his foot, and those on the benches wink, hold up their fingers, rub their elbows, or make any other noticeable gesture. With half their minds, they seem to be making bids, and, with the other half, they are figuring out their neighbors’ bids. It is all done quickly; in a moment the jewel is awarded to the highest bidder, and everyone seems satisfied. It looks extremely haphazard, a cross between hocus-pocus and mind reading.
Some of the gems that reach the Bowery are reset there, particularly those with settings that are more valuable for bullion than for their workmanship. One dealer has used forty-eight rubies, once belonging to the Romanoffs, to make a bracelet, a small diamond between each ruby. In the center is a diamond-studded plaque that snaps open to reveal a tiny watch.
One of the oldest articles is not really a jewel at all, but a fifteenth-century etching-plate made in Vienna, a portrait of the Pope. In addition to its antiquity, it has a peculiarity. The eyeballs seem to move, not merely to follow the observer as they do in many pictures, but actually to shift from side to side.
An example of early American metal work is a stiff little silver statuette of an Indian holding an eagle. In position and general appearance, he is a miniature cigar-store Indian.
From time to time, a “poison ring,” with a secret cavity and sometimes a sharp little prong to give a lethal prick, reaches the Bowery. These are usually melted down because, although people like to look at them, they don’t buy them.
Initial rings, however, are not often melted. Eventually someone with similar initials finds the ring irresistible.
All sorts of wedding rings reach the dealers. One early French engagement ring has no gems, but is a cluster of gold lovers’ knots that shake with a sweet jingle.
One of the few pieces whose complete history is known is a watch, made in England and bought one hundred and forty-four years ago by a Vermont college professor. The face is so clear and so beautiful and the engraving on the edges so artful that at first there seems to be no crystal covering it. The professor used it only a few years and then put it in a vault to be kept for his son. Somehow, it was forgotten until long after the son had died, and it has never been used since.
A graceful little French clock, one hundred years old, rests on two Ionic pillars, and on a rail at the base of the pillars sits a laughing ivory cupid. A bracelet made about the same time in France has six sections, each with a peasant figure in exquisite mosaic of brilliant colors.
On a large cameo necklace is the profile of a lady with an identical cameo on her necklace, and on that cameo, microscopic but clear, another necklace with a cameo. Is it a likeness of the lady who wore it so that she could complete the sequence of ladies with their portraits on their necklace?
With how much fantasy and imagination were these jewels made, with how much love were they given, and with how much sentiment were they treasured? Maybe there was bitterness, too. At any rate, loved or hated, here they all are on the Bowery, waiting to be sold, to begin...
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Vital Little Plans : The Short Works of Jane Jacobs
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Random House, Incorporated, 2016
ISBN 10: 0399589600
ISBN 13: 9780399589607
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