Jane Jacobs: Seeing the Trees and the Forest

I was recently involved in an online discussion among poets about the relevance of landscape poetry. Some poets involved just didn’t get much from reading poetry about landscape. I would have to lump myself in with those poets. But there is often the shared assumption among many artistic types these days that nature is more important than human beings and their creations and that humankind is merely imposing its will on the natural world. A friend of mine argues that, to the contrary, man is part of nature and everything man makes is a part of nature. It’s when we forget that when we get into trouble.

I think Jane Jacobs, who died today, understood that. From The Death and Life of Great American Cities up to Dark Age Ahead, her books show that she persisted in believing that it is our ideologies about what human nature should fit into that causes many of our problems. Her approach to city planning was to not have an overall grand design but to let the city grow according to what the people who actually lived there wanted. A city developed by its use. It’s the kind of thinking that can alienate those on the left who think no good can come out of cities and those on the right who feel that people must be more strictly controlled or else chaos will break loose. Her plan was to let natural chaos happen and see if it was such a bad thing.

There are so many things about her attitude that I like. Primary among them is that she didn’t immediately write off cities as the embodiment of humanity’s worst impulses. My own work is about cities and about the places where cities meet ‘nature,’ so I liked knowing that Jacobs was around to step into the fight for better cities. And she was pragmatic and Taoist in her approach. Yes, cities should be better, but there was no ‘should’ as to how that could be accomplished.

In fact, her approach allowed for cities to grow naturally, as if humans were a part of nature and the cities were simply taking shape the way a beehive or a seashell takes shape. We have cities because we can’t help but have them. It’s part of what we are and nature itself made us that way.

Yesterday, I was cycling through one of the many green areas in Edmonton and I heard a loud rending snap and crash. I kept going and only on my return trip did I see what had happened. A tree had fallen. And I had heard it. (I almost felt like it had waited for someone to pass before it fell so that it wouldn’t become the tree in that stale philosopher’s paradox about sound and the unheard falling.) This is one of the things I value about this city – the feeling that non-human nature is a part of everything here. I can look from my balcony (I have an apartment precisely because I don’t want my own piece of land that I have to groom and maintain according to arbitrary standards of grass height) and it’s only from a height like this that you can appreciate just how many trees there are in this city. During the summer, all the houses for miles around are blocked or partially blocked by green. I don’t see the war against nature from this vantage point.

Today when I cycled past the fallen tree again, I couldn’t help but think of Jacobs, giant that she was in her own neck of the urban woods. And I hope not unheard.