Unslumming: Jane Jacobs

Below is an extract from book by Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It talks about how superficial or rather visual understanding of slums that leads to conventional planning to clear them out as a blight blot ignoring the tremendous energy they contribute in regenerating itself and in effect encapsulating more energy and ambition as a driving force. This is no romanticizing of slums, rather a deeper look at forces that causes them to exist and why they can be a source to less expensive, informal, vibrant with entrepreneur spirit caused due to drive and energy.

Our present urban renewal laws are an attempt to break this particular linkage in the vicious circles by forthrightly wiping away slums and their populations, and replacing them with projects intended to produce higher tax yields, or to lure back easier populations with less expensive public requirements. The method fails. At best, it merely shifts slums from here to there, adding its own tincture of extra hardship and disruption. At worst, it destroys neighborhoods where constructive and improving communities exist and where the situation calls for encouragement rather than destruction.

Like Fight Blight and Conservation campaigns in neighborhoods declining into slums, slum shifting fails because it tries to overcome causes of trouble by diddling with symptoms.

Conventional planning approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their self interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in slums themselves and that demonstrably work in real cities. This is far from trying to patronize people into better life, and it is far from what is done today.