The Quarterly

Volume 1, Number 3

Uncommon Sense: A focus on the real and the particular in cities
by Ken Greenberg

Ken Greenberg is an urban designer and architect and partner of Urban Strategies. He has managed numerous projects and studies for the public and private sectors concerned with rejuvenation and intensification of inner city areas and the creation of denser mixed-use communities related to natural settings, which are all concepts at the core of the new urbanism and certainly at the core of major political developments in this city and this province over the last 20 years.
Bob Rae (Excerpted from introduction to Ken Greenberg at Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, October 15, 1997)

I was a student in architecture in that critical and somewhat schizophrenic in-between period when half my teachers considered Jane Jacobs to be a dangerous heretic and the other half were very interested but didn’t really know what to make of her. Despite their reservations, I was profoundly influenced because what I read in The Death and Life of Great American Cities so closely corresponded with what I could experience and see with my own eyes. Nothing in the intervening years has made me change my mind about the essential rightness of the observations of my greatest teacher who still has so very much to teach us.

Jane Jacobs has lived in Toronto for 30 years. During that time the city has gone through an extraordinary transformation. Clearly her ideas have had an impact, one that is more extensive than has been generally acknowledged. We tend to know about the big things she has done in Toronto, like stopping the Spadina Expressway, saving neighbourhoods from destruction, playing an inspirational role in creating the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, and so on, but her influence is actually much broader than that. I contend that we live and work in a different city today than would have been the case had Jane Jacobs not been here with us these last 30 years.

On the Boston waterfront, a new public edge to the harbor, featuring a tidal pool and nine new city blocks of mixed use development is occurring at the Fan Pier.

When Jane Jacobs arrived in Toronto with her family in 1968, the city was at a critical crossroads. In the name of progress, the establishment –politicians, officialdom and the development industry– had bought into the full program of anti-city replacement. Toronto was for poised for, among other things:

• much more urban renewal–more destruction of downtown neighbourhoods through public and private assembly and speculation;
• more major demolitions of heritage public buildings such as the old City Hall, Union Station and St. Lawrence Market;
• the removal of streetcars and their tracks to be replaced with diesel buses;
• more construction of an expressway network–not just the Spadina, but also the Crosstown and the Scarborough–which would have given us the classic American expressway noose, strangling the downtown.

On November 1, 1969, Jane was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying, “As a relatively recent transplant from New York, I am frequently asked whether I find Toronto sufficiently exciting. I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options. Few of us profit from the mistakes of others, and perhaps Toronto will prove to share this disability. If so, I am grateful at least to have enjoyed this great city before its destruction.”

Fortunately that didn’t prove to be the case. Here in Toronto, Jane Jacobs’ ideas began to resonate almost immediately with people who were uneasy about all these impending disasters. There is a particular cultural receptivity here for Jane’s ideas, and this is very ironic, because it was not the case in the US and New York. Some of the American attacks on Jane were really extremely vicious and, while she certainly did have her supporters, I think we have to remember what incredible personal courage it took for her to stand up to the barrage of verbal assaults that came from right across the spectrum of people in both intellectual and economic power.

Here in Toronto there were a number of factors that I think led to the receptivity for Jane’s ideas:

• the historical conditions were right;
• the time lag gave us the ability to observe and reflect on the decline in US cities;
• Toronto had a strong commitment to the city and its neighbourhoods as shown by the small “c” conservative tradition of rate-payers associations;
• there was an interesting situation in terms of the political spectrum in Ontario, with a longstanding fusion of right and left. The phrase Red Toryism captures much of that combined caring for the social structure as well as a certain fiscal conservatism;
• there was a tradition of accessible local democracy which of course we all took for granted: a small ward system with relatively limited numbers of voters who had access to their local politicians. It was on the basis of that ward system that, in three successive municipal elections from 1968 through the early ’70s, the so-called New Council was created in Toronto;
• there was the relative weakness of tools and forces of disruption here in Toronto, and I stress relative; by that I simply mean that, however formidable a character, Sam Cass was not Robert Moses;
• the professionals and decision makers were receptive to change;
• the empirical truths that Jane had written about seemed right. They fit with what people were able to see and know. This is the “real and particular” that I am talking about.

In the heart of downtown Detroit, a compelling vision for the implementation of the Campus Mauritus, a new signature public space surrounded by 5,000 new employees, is taking shape.

Canada and Toronto have always had a different tradition; we are poised in a different place between our European and other heritages on the one hand, and this emerging North American society on the other, making us again more receptive to Jane’s set of ideas. In particular, Toronto gives the lie to the North American belief system that the middle class has given up on their cities.

The Jacobs’ set of ideas demonstrates the power of a unified theory which becomes more clear with the publication of each of Jane’s books. Taken together, these works offer a powerful dissection of what was wrong in the disastrous mid-century onslaught on the city. Her argument was built from close observation of the concrete, the specific, the actual pieces of the city; she looked at the streets, blocks, parks and buildings in a detailed way that no one prior to that was doing.

Armed with the counter-theory that Jane was able to create, her readers then had the tools to challenge a still very potent set of anti-urban values and pervasive imagery which derived from two great 20th century campaigns against the real city– Broadacre City (Frank Lloyd Wright’s creation) and LeCorbusier’s Radiant Cities. Jane’s work gave the opponents of the derivative versions of these visions the intellectual credibility–not nostalgia but hardheaded credibility–and practical answers to the assertions in these systems. In doing so she was able to help us dislodge the underpinnings of wrongheaded models for the city. She presented a new way of seeing the city as a perpetually unfinished, intensely interactive web of relationships, as opposed to a simple mechanical model of parts.

People readily understood her analogy to an ecosystem model where fertile wetlands are complex, resilient and creative. Breathtakingly she was able to move through the physical world at a remarkable range of scales going all the way from the city region right down to the city sidewalk as a microcosm, a tiny social condenser, where all kinds of important activities took place.

Jane put in a very new perspective of perceived dichotomies of public and private, making it clear that the public sector played a vital role as the framework enabling the private–the entrepreneurial–world to be creative.

Jane Jacobs has never held office in Toronto, nor has she occupied any official position. She is very sparing in her public appearances; she’s been busy writing, not being a personality. Yet astonishingly, in this her adopted city, the Jane Jacobs’ set of ideas progressively becomes conventional wisdom in many circles. It is not universally but significantly accepted, not in a precise textbook sense, but as a loosely integrated and coherent philosophy whose meaning is continually debated by its adherents.

Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. Jane, when she began to work on these things in the 1950s in New York, did not do so in a vacuum. Even today, not everyone is on side. There are significant counter tendencies, a willful unlearning with respect to these ideas, and a resistance to them which also has to be taken into account.

How this progressive infiltration of the Jacobs ideas has occurred to the extent that it does is ex-tremely important. It is one thing to articulate these ideas, it is another altogether to make real change in the modus operandi. The reason that the reactions to what Jane had to say were initially so violent is that she deeply challenged enshrined practices, those which are the most conservative in any society (legal, administrative and financial) as well as decades of indoctrination and habit. While there is significant change in the way we do these things today, it is also clear that some people are merely paying lip service to these ideas while they keep on doing what have always done.

The Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 80-acre, 1.25 mile length of the East River, is being created with broad community input and city and state support.

Transformation happens gradually through a dialectical process of testing. For example, when the Spadina Expressway was stopped there were all kinds of predictions of disaster–the downtown would collapse and the city economy would fall apart. It didn’t happen. When Jane talked about mixed income housing and we attempted it and succeeded–the St. Lawrence neighbourhood appears to work–the establishment was given the confidence to continue to work with that idea again and again.

Little by little these progressive positive feedback loops, this succession of successes, alter thinking and provide inspiration in academic, social activist, professional and political circles–and there are all kinds of interesting cross-overs that occur among these groups. If Jane is the scientist, many of us are the engineers who are learning how to apply the concepts.

The Jane Jacobs set of ideas continues to provide confidence, credibility, inspiration and guidance for a generation (of which I am part) and for the generation which has come after and, dangerously, sometimes takes these ideas for granted. As a result Toronto may be the city where Jane’s ideas are physically most in evidence (even though there are many exceptions and we certainly can’t blame Jane for everything that has happened here). Still, and this is my major thesis, we get a glimpse of what the world might look like when Jane’s ideas are put into practice, even partially.

There are now enough elements in play to really see the results. Toronto has had 30 years of layering with a whole generation of work and actions built on some common foundations.

Jane has always said that she takes great pleasure in seeing how things work out. Toronto’s density and diversity, the making of streets, buildings and parks, and the sense of being part of a city region all have been affected by Jane’s ideas. Each has the power to transform and, in retrospect, each has evolved a certain coherency.

Let me start with density. Toronto is becoming denser. This has been a battle on two fronts: the first battle was to protect what we had. Jane played a very key role in helping us to see the value in historic urban form–its scale, its mixed-use, its street orientation–and develop a rationale for protecting it. We have done so more fully than almost any other North American city. The second battle was to go beyond the legacy of the 19th-early 20th century city and intensify further, adding even more people and thereby tackling the powerful indoctrination that less is more. Jane admonished us not to be afraid of density, which is an abstraction, but to look at its form, to see the potential to add while still respecting the grain and structure of the city.

There’s a wonderful quote from Jonathan Barnett, an urban designer in New York, who captures this very simply by saying, “It’s not how dense you make it, it’s how you make it dense.” The first part of his message has obviously been much easier to absorb than the second. Although I think we still have trouble with this idea of the form, it’s very instructive to track what’s happened in Toronto neighbourhoods:

1. In the 1960s, we talked about blockbusting as a way to introduce the next layers of density. We desperately needed alternatives to the then accepted notion of towers and slabs in a kind of debased Rad-iant City format. People didn’t want anymore of it.
2. In the 1970s, we used the terms white-painting and sandblasting to refer to the middle class embrace of existing neighbourhoods.
3. In the ’70s and ’80s, we discovered infill revealing all kinds of opportunities to go back into the fabric of the city and introduce medium density mid-rise building developments on smaller found parcels within existing block structures. Toronto has really pioneered this kind of development and, although individually small, the accumulation of these all over the city has had enormous impact.
4. We strove mightily to put Jane’s notion of zoning for mixed uses into the 1974 Central Area Plan on the flanks of the downtown. We required it in the plan and gave developers a greater benefit than if they built for only one use. Lo and behold, the very developers who initially fought mightily at the Ontario Municipal Board against the idea began to do it and prosper. They exported that idea of mixed use development all over the world.
5. The whole notion of providing affordable housing for low-income people, not just in isolated public housing projects but mixed with other people, was an idea experimented with in Toronto. That eventually became provincial policy and is still, despite recent political changes, reflected in Official Plans throughout the province.
6. Revisiting public housing projects themselves to change and improve them is still largely an ambition but a very potent idea in places like Toronto’s Regent Park.
7. Since Jane and I were fellow members of the city’s Jury in 1990 promoting main streets, we have seen the absolutely exceptional development of hundreds of kilometres of successful main streets supported by transit and a pedestrian population. We are learning how to actually mix things, to watch what happens where they touch and to think about how to turn the corner from the mainstreet into the neighbourhood. These used to be awkward, crude places, most often parking lots or what was called boulevard parking. We’re now gradually developing something socially and physically which I’ll simply refer to as the neighbourhood café–that piece which actually fits between the neighbourhood and the mainstreet.
8. Industrial lofts and converted office buildings, in the downtown itself and its flanks, are taking the whole notion of a mix of living and working to remarkably new heights, making this a highly inhabited neighbourhood.
9. We had extraordinary success with making new neighbourhoods by building on obsolescent industrial and railway lands in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Unfortunately this was never repeated with quite the same vigour and clarity. We have a problem with making the leap of imagination from applying these principles in existing areas to applying them forcefully and in a clear way in new areas.

Meanwhile, American cities are preparing bold new visions of themselves backed by significant resources such as this birds’ eye view of Saint Paul on the Mississippi.

The accumulated results–a mix of large, small and medium size successes, partial successes and failures–have made Toronto one of the few city centres on the North Ameri-can continent whose population is growing (6.8% increase in dwelling units, mostly in downtown Toronto, from 1991 to 1996, for example), and that’s against a backdrop of higher density. Just for comparison, there are 6730 people per square kilometre in the city of Toronto versus 3790 if you take all of Metropolitan Toronto as it currently stands. This is a very impressive achievement and I think we owe a great debt to the ideas that Jane put forward about density which enabled our culture to make these moves.

Toronto is an extremely diverse community with an incredible mix of people; this has become the city’s distinguishing characteristic and perhaps our greatest human resource. Jane’s message in this area has been vitally important to us. The glue that binds Toronto together, the sine qua non for the successful integration of peoples from all over the world, has been a shared public realm and a continued commitment to the social infrastructure including health care services and a good public school system. These are the things that make it possible for people to become Torontonians–to know and have relationships with each other, and have their kids grow up together.

Another aspect of diversity is an economic one. The city has become a hatchery of new work. We have come to understand and value the incredible importance of our immigrant community. By decriminalizing initiatives we used to look down on and using our neighbourhood fabric in a more interesting way, we have changed public attitudes. For example, Kensington Market used to be seen as a nuisance, an embarrassment, something dirty and out of control and a source of disease. Now it is a place that most people in the city are extremely proud of, and it continues to incubate new life and activity with each new group that comes along.

We’ve also had another change. The city itself has become the resort for most of its population. Most of us don’t go off to summer cottages all summer or every summer weekend; that’s reserved for a privileged few. So the city has had to double up its role in that respect, not as a theme park but as a true gracious resort for its own population.

In partial conclusion, I think Toronto has moved from defense to offence in three decades with an enormous amount of help from Jane Jacobs. Although sometimes clumsy, with pockets of resistance and backtracking, there has been a great forward motion.

We have started to realize the enormous, exhilarating potential of these ideas as an entire system of thought revealing deeper truths that do not become dated; in fact, Jane’s ideas have demonstrated enormous staying power with the ability to help us to tackle new issues as they become apparent. We are still in-volved in an ongoing struggle. There is a dynamic tension here, the battle is not won. Even though a large portion of the population may have internalized some of Jane’s concepts–notions like eyes on the street–perhaps without knowing their origins, there are new challenges to be faced. We have to move on from saving and preserving to what seems to be most difficult for us: making new places within our city in places such as the large obsolescent sites (like the railway lands), the first-ring suburbs which are now part of the new city of Toronto and the emerging fringes of the GTA.

These new areas provide new tests for the appeal and applicability of the Jane Jacobs set of ideas. We have to face the ultimate dilemma of supply and demand. Is the marketplace supplying people with what they want in those suburb areas? Can Jane’s ideas compete successfully in a fair market contest? This is an endless dialectic as new political, social, economic and technological challenges, threats and opportunities emerge. But all this is normal. Jane never promised us a perfect end state.

Post Scriptum

I have been writing exclusively about Toronto where Jane has come to live and work and write, but Toronto, by taking this path, has become an extremely useful example, a kind of research lab on urbanism, which other cities have been looking at.

Our relative success with certain issues – coping with, fending off and appropriating forces unfriendly to the city – has had a certain impact on observers from elsewhere.

We have become for a time the exception that proves the rule – a mid size city within North America that bucks or alters many of the major trends. Becoming denser and more diverse in a joyful and successful way seems to work and make sense socially and economically.

As evidence of this playback I have had some interesting experiences working for a number of US cities with Toronto as a calling card. Even in the most difficult circumstances, the same set of ideas that seem to have worked in Toronto are beginning to have the power to galvanize other cities.

Working with the Jane Jacobs set of ideas has enabled our teams to help others see value and possibility where before they saw only chaos and disorder. To begin to shape and guide the economic forces of renewal and foster life on the street in the all-but-abandoned part of Detroit, a priority was given to uses that would animate the sidewalks. To reinforce St. Paul’s emerging urban villages – places where people live and work and use the sidewalks (not the skywalks) even in a very cold climate – links are beginning to appear, connecting the State Capitol to the immigrant neighbourhoods across the Mississippi in a way which has never existed before. And, to encourage Trinity College and Hartford Hospital as they work to open the gated enclaves and (to use Jane’s term from 1961) “unslum” the struggling but improving Puerto Rican community in South Hartford.

In all these cities, the decision-makers who have the confidence to make these changes are strengthened in their resolve by the body of thinking and work Jane has contributed to us all. They can see that to work in this way is neither nostalgic nor altruistic; it is just uncommon good sense.