Blair Kamin: The competing visions of The City (Jane Jacobs Vs. Mayor Daley)
[Mr. Kamin is the Tribune architecture critic.]
Surely they would have been bitter adversaries: Richard J. Daley, the late authoritarian Chicago mayor, and Jane Jacobs, the combative New York City activist and author. He ripped expressways through Chicago's quilt of ethnic neighborhoods and presided over the erection of its massive public housing projects. She stopped an expressway from slicing apart her Greenwich Village neighborhood and championed the beauty of small things -- the ballet of the sidewalk and the front stoop.
He was the ultimate establishment figure, an imposing man who resembled a corporate executive in his dark suits. She was the ultimate rebel, her owlish glasses concealing a ferocious curiosity and lack of respect for authority.
Although these two giants of mid-20th Century urban America never met (Jacobs died last year, Daley in 1976), they now share one thing: a pair of insightful conferences honoring their memory and assessing the prospects of Chicago and other American cities. Coincidentally held within days of each other, the conferences underscore how much the metropolitan landscape has changed during the last half century and how leaders of cities large and small are struggling to come to grips with those seismic shifts.
It is no longer enough for mayors to fix the streets and make sure water comes out of the tap, Mayor Richard M. Daley said during the third annual Richard J. Daley Urban Forum, titled "Building the Future City," held May 2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, other speakers argued, city leaders need to attend to the "tourist infrastructure," from spectacular attractions such as Millennium Park, to the smaller details such as signs that guide globe-hopping visitors through the urban maze.
Three days later, it was time for a Chicago Architecture Foundation symposium, provocatively titled "If Jane Jacobs Came to Chicago ..." Those words evoked British journalist William Stead's 1894 expose "If Christ Came to Chicago," a searing look at the city's political corruption and underground economy, and seemed to portend an equally scorched-earth examination of Richard M. Daley's Chicago. But the verdict from the assembled experts about a hypothetical Jacobs visit to the realm of King Rich was mixed.
Jacobs, they said, would have found much to like -- the rumbling "L" as the symbol of a mass-transit city, the vibrant interplay between Wrigley Field and its neighborhood and the disappearance of the Robert Taylor Homes, once the world's largest housing project. But she would have turned her thumbs down on such things as the bland new housing of University Village, the sea of parking lots surrounding the United Center and U.S. Cellular Field and the lack of community participation -- so far, at least -- in Chicago's plans to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
More important, perhaps, was the judgment some speakers rendered on Jacobs herself: The lessons about the making of good cities that she so brilliantly codified in her 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," hold far less relevance in an America where the vast majority of people live in suburbs and exurbs. Among those lessons: "eyes on the street" promote safety, mixed uses are preferable to segregated ones, short blocks are better than long ones and small plans are preferable to big ones....
Surely they would have been bitter adversaries: Richard J. Daley, the late authoritarian Chicago mayor, and Jane Jacobs, the combative New York City activist and author. He ripped expressways through Chicago's quilt of ethnic neighborhoods and presided over the erection of its massive public housing projects. She stopped an expressway from slicing apart her Greenwich Village neighborhood and championed the beauty of small things -- the ballet of the sidewalk and the front stoop.
He was the ultimate establishment figure, an imposing man who resembled a corporate executive in his dark suits. She was the ultimate rebel, her owlish glasses concealing a ferocious curiosity and lack of respect for authority.
Although these two giants of mid-20th Century urban America never met (Jacobs died last year, Daley in 1976), they now share one thing: a pair of insightful conferences honoring their memory and assessing the prospects of Chicago and other American cities. Coincidentally held within days of each other, the conferences underscore how much the metropolitan landscape has changed during the last half century and how leaders of cities large and small are struggling to come to grips with those seismic shifts.
It is no longer enough for mayors to fix the streets and make sure water comes out of the tap, Mayor Richard M. Daley said during the third annual Richard J. Daley Urban Forum, titled "Building the Future City," held May 2 at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Today, other speakers argued, city leaders need to attend to the "tourist infrastructure," from spectacular attractions such as Millennium Park, to the smaller details such as signs that guide globe-hopping visitors through the urban maze.
Three days later, it was time for a Chicago Architecture Foundation symposium, provocatively titled "If Jane Jacobs Came to Chicago ..." Those words evoked British journalist William Stead's 1894 expose "If Christ Came to Chicago," a searing look at the city's political corruption and underground economy, and seemed to portend an equally scorched-earth examination of Richard M. Daley's Chicago. But the verdict from the assembled experts about a hypothetical Jacobs visit to the realm of King Rich was mixed.
Jacobs, they said, would have found much to like -- the rumbling "L" as the symbol of a mass-transit city, the vibrant interplay between Wrigley Field and its neighborhood and the disappearance of the Robert Taylor Homes, once the world's largest housing project. But she would have turned her thumbs down on such things as the bland new housing of University Village, the sea of parking lots surrounding the United Center and U.S. Cellular Field and the lack of community participation -- so far, at least -- in Chicago's plans to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
More important, perhaps, was the judgment some speakers rendered on Jacobs herself: The lessons about the making of good cities that she so brilliantly codified in her 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," hold far less relevance in an America where the vast majority of people live in suburbs and exurbs. Among those lessons: "eyes on the street" promote safety, mixed uses are preferable to segregated ones, short blocks are better than long ones and small plans are preferable to big ones....