Jane Jacobs and Edmund Burke

In his introduction to the 2011 50^th anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Jason Epstein (Jacobs’ long-term editor) writes: “To use a much abused term, Jane was a conservative, indeed a radical conservative, mistrustful of abstraction, suspicious of large ideas and concentrations of political power: a ‘genius of common sense’, as far from an ideologue as it is possible to be… I never asked Jane if she admired Edmund Burke but I believe that Burke, were he alive, would admire her. Predictably Jane’s book was praised by the libertarian right and denounced by the social engineers of the left. Jane took little note of either group.” [pp. xii-xiii].

Cities are incubated by, and reach maturity as “great cities” through interaction with, the societies which give birth to them: their fundamental foundational principles, narratives and mythologies; their hierarchies of power and class struggles; their frameworks of economic production and exchange; the geography and terrain in which they live; their orientation to the global market; and in particular, the dialectical relationship between technologies (in particular of transport and urban construction) and the propensity of a society to seize and exploit those technologies to their maximum at a particular historical moment.

I will try to argue that the core organisational principles of American society and political economy (its “operating system” to use a current term) are as different as it is possible to be from the principles espoused by Edmund Burke, and still speak English.

In this sense Epstein may have identified, in an indirect fashion, a key element of Jacobs’ story in the scheme of American urban history: the fact that, in spite of her victory over Robert Moses in the battle to protect Greenwich Village from a multi-lane extension of Fifth Avenue, this represented more of a skirmish in a broader war that was comprehensively won by Moses and the technological, economic, political and social forces he represented and reflected.

There are certainly cityscapes within some of the great American cities that do retain the character, vibrancy and urban qualities that Jacobs sought to understand, protect and promote – in New York, Boston, San Francisco. But these at best pockets of resistance – holdouts mainly by districts populated to a large extent by articulate and connected middle classes. The war to determine the shape of the American urban landscape 1945 to the present (both in the great cities and in the much larger heartland) was won by Moses’ “automobile-freeway-suburban-developer complex” to coin an Eisenhower-ian phrase.

Post-1945 US is essentially a suburban nation, to quote the title of the key work of the New Urbanist movement [Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck, “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream”]. Moreover, suburban design criteria – in particular traffic and parking management – have increasingly dominated US cities: “The new highways of the sixties and seventies, designed to provide suburbanites with better access to downtown, were located on the cheapest land available, land usually confiscated from poor neighbourhoods. The devastation wrought by such inner-city highways was, in

retrospect, so extreme that one cannot rule out a nefarious intention. Less obvious, but almost as damaging, are the many streets in low-income neighbourhoods that were widened and relieved of on-street parking to facilitate through traffic to distant destinations. While the era of the community-killing highway may be over, such roadway widenings continue unchecked … [and] can subject a community to a death by a thousand cuts.” [Duany et al. pp.130-131]. Maybe Jacobs’ later comment, “I just wasn’t cut out to be the citizen of an empire” [p. xvi] is a poignant reflection of this as well as of the international policies that the US was pursuing.

I will try to make this argument through a number of steps, and attempt to identify some of the ways in which technology, urban design, geography, ideology and society have interacted historically to cause the United States to diverge quite early on, and very significantly, from its European and specifically British roots with respect to the urban environment. I will do this by quoting from the writers and commentators that made sense to me when I was thinking about this subject. First I will look briefly at the evolution of English society which informed Edmund Burke’s philosophy, and at the urban forms that reflected it in the case of 17^th-18^th century London.

Second, I will draw on insights from Nathan Lewis’s blog, “New World Economics”, specifically his series of entries on the “Traditional City/Heroic Materialism”. Using photo illustration, Lewis makes a very convincing argument that the basic pattern of urban development, both in towns and cities, began to diverge very early in the history of the US (definitely from the 1820s) from the patterns brought over from England by the early settlers, and he uses the term “hypertrophic” (hypertrophy = abnormal enlargement of a part or organ; abnormal growth) to describe the phenomenon both with respect to the 19^th century and (in a very different technological environment) the 20^th.

Last, I will refer to the work of the cultural historian Morris Berman, who argues that the American Revolution was a far more fundamental break with British and European forms of society and institutions than is commonly assumed, and that basic founding notions of society and economy – “freedom”, “liberty” and “individual rights” – diverged profoundly. I will conclude by arguing that the shapes of urban environments clearly reflect these basic divergences – that in particular with respect to the willingness of societies to adopt particular technologies and building forms “choices” are embedded in, and constrained by, pre-existing social and institutional structures. There is also likely to be a powerful feedback loop, insofar as the diverging shapes of the built environment itself reinforces pre-existing social forms and beliefs.

Edmund Burke was a British (originally Irish) philosopher and Member of Parliament from the 1760s-90s. Now regarded as one of the fathers of conservatism, his philosophy was in reality more ambiguous – he was both an opponent of the British state’s war to keep control of its American colonies in the 1770s and a bitter opponent of the French revolutionaries in

the 1790s. His principles were based on the sanctity of property in maintaining a civilised and ordered society: social and institutional hierarchy (including monarchy) was a natural and necessary component of social fabric; political compromise, respect for tradition, and a culture of duties, obligations and reciprocity between classes and the political institutions that reflected their interests were the values he sought to defend; and therefore a cautious and incremental approach to reform was central. The “rights of man” were not, in his view, universal and intrinsic to the individual in an abstract sense but were rather those that had evolved, been fought over and refined over generations, and therefore reflected the specific history and culture of each nation. Society was therefore in Burke’s view not merely a contract between the different classes, institutions and interests of any particular time but is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born". Paradoxically, true liberty for the individual requires that the individual accept limits to his or her individual liberty. “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”

Burke’s philosophy was very much rooted in the British class and power structures of his day, and could by implication be seen in the development of London as a capital city. Britain, and in particular its big ports, was increasingly dominated by a mercantile elite of traders and empire builders, the nouveaux riches of the day being the owners of sugar plantations in the Caribbean, the imperial “nabobs” who increasingly dominated India, and the shipbuilders and financiers who kept the system of trade going. As a class they tended to look explicitly for models in the European trading cities that had predated London’s rise – the Italian city-states of Venice, Florence and Genoa, and in particular the Dutch ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The large, centralised (and Catholic) monarchies of France and Spain were regarded as eternal and fundamental enemies.

The mercantile elite and the growing urban middle class were not however interested in revolutionary change, rather they were cautious and pragmatic, seeking accommodation with the monarchy and landowning aristocracy and the organisation of political institutions to reflect a balance of authority.

An example of this tendency can be found in the redevelopment of London after the fire of 1666 which had destroyed almost the whole of the then-existing city. This was also the era to which Burke looked back as a defining point in English democratic history, in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 – effectively a bloodless coup d’etat in which an unpopular monarch was not overthrown via revolution but rather replaced by a new monarch “imported” from Holland. Christopher Wren’s initial plans for post-fire London incorporated a series of imposing connected spaces, linked by vistas along avenues. “Wren, a royalist from a prominent royalist family,

was attracted to design ideas employed by autocrats … If Wren’s plan had been adopted, it would have had a far stronger effect on an actual city than the works of Louis XIV … However, the merchants of the city of London owed their allegiance to their own businesses and trade associations. There was little reason for them to be sympathetic to design concepts that would give grandeur to London itself, when the implementation of these designs might prolong the rebuilding process and endanger their economic recovery.” [J. Barnett, “City Design: Modernist, Traditional, Green and Systems Perspectives”, pp.64-5]. The final result, a pragmatic compromise between two visions of the city, and between “planning” and “the market”, was typical of an evolutionary and cautious reform-minded approach to politics of a rising bourgeoisie that sought to cooperate and integrate with, rather than replace, the pre-existing institutions of monarchy and aristocracy.