https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/gentrification-and-its-discontents/308092/
In his essay, Benjamin Schwartz puts into conversation Jacobs and Zukin and is generally critical of both authors, especially from an economic standpoint. He points to some of Jacobs critiques made over the years. Her ideas for what would maintain economic and cultural diversity in cities actually, in turn, have been criticized for leading to gentrification and to the emergence of some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
Jacob’s lived in the West Village and called for the preserving of older structures to maintain affordability, which eventually would become highly desirable for their antiquity. In her time, Jacobs fought against an urban renewal plan to build many below-the-market rate homes for blue-collar residents, arguing that it would ruin the neighborhoods character. A proponent of the renewal project predicted rightly…“’If the Village area is left alone … eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing.’ This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve.”
It seems that Schwartz criticizes Zukin and Jacob’s ideal images for cities by saying that it does not account for the globalization and acceleration of the world economy. He describes their ideal city image as a place “when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual.” But criticizes this ideal as “inherently impermanent nature of this balance, because neither writer comprehends large-scale economic processes.”
“Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment.”
He notes that much has changed since Jacobs’s day, especially, “ the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall.” As a result of economic acceleration.
I think this essay points to the way in which intentions to facilitate the making of a “better” type of city can often go astray or produce just the opposite of what we originally set out to accomplish – especially in the long term. It’s probably important to keep this in mind, especially when considering urban renewal, and globalization. It’s often impossible to know for sure what planning policies will accomplish in the long-term or deem one policy as totally better for the greater good than another.
