Café dialogue at Vendome this Wednesday May 22 and a wabi sabi book about the city

Have you ever heard of wabi-sabi? Knowing about it seems absolutely essential. Here's wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

It’s a Japanese concept which (for me) means that a thing can become more beautiful when it’s flawed or accidental. It runs against the current of planning and controlling everything. Jane Jacobs had a very wabi-sabi mindset when she thought about how cities work.

I’ve summarized her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities below. When she wrote “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” she was referring to the big plan-and-control urban planning approach of “modernism.” Modernists, the expert credentialed urban planners of their time, wanted to sweep away the tenements and other things on the old city streets – all the old things that had brought diversity, liveliness, messiness to those streets - and replace them with grand vistas and huge geometrical buildings and modern freeways that would allow motor vehicles to swoosh through the city quickly. Jane said that would destroy the vitality of the city and none of what the modernists had in mind – including great new centres for music, dance, theatre – could ever replace the vitality that had been lost. She rejected modernism. And lo and behold, the book on wabi-sabi I looked at last night included a detailed, point-by-point contrast of wabi-sabi with modernism!

I think we can apply wabi-sabi to our own life. What’s accidental can make my life more beautiful. Please discuss.

Last Wednesday we were at the former central public library for an evening all about the book that I have summarized below. Jane Jacobs’ nephew Dr. Decker Butzner was there, and he told us about Jane’s visit to Calgary. Who knows, maybe he’ll join us at Vendome one Wednesday evening. Just by accident. Very wabi-sabi.

Arthur

Book: (Jane Jacobs) The Death and Life of Great American Cities (first published 1961)

In a list of the “Top 20 urban planning books of all time,” this website has Jane Jacobs’ book at the top of the list: https://www.planetizen.com/books/20

She opens her book with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that includes the essential observation, “Life is an end it itself.” That’s not to deny that it can help to find a purpose in your own life. Yet it also helps to keep that other way of thinking in mind too and use them as you would use your legs to keep walking.

Early in Part Two of the book, the author cuts to the chase with this: “To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones, so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentrations in the case of people who are there because of residence.

“The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”

The book begins with the statement (Jane Jacobs’ Introduction) “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” In Part One (the Peculiar Nature of Cities) she turns her attention to the uses of sidewalks (especially); and of neighbourhood parks, and of city neighbourhoods. Sidewalks are for safety (also for contact and for assimilating children), and if you don’t have safety in any part of the city, people will avoid that part and then it becomes even less safe. There must be “eyes on the street” to make sure the streets are safe.

The peculiar nature of cities includes their abundance of strangers, so that each of us will encounter far more strangers in a city than we would if we lived in a village. That can enrich us if the streets are safe.

Among the many potential obstacles to building social capital in a city, and ensuring “eyes on the street,” is blacklisting of a neighbourhood by lending institutions as a locality for mortgage loans. Yet in her chapter 16 “Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money” (in Part Three, Forces of Decline and Regeneration), Jane describes how a neighbourhood in Chicago got past that obstacle when individuals as well as businesses located there met with the lending institutions and told them everyone was ready to withdraw their deposits from the lending institutions if they continued to blacklist the district for mortgage loans! In another blacklisting case, the North End of Boston, the approach was different, drawing upon the many tradesmen who lived in the area, and developing a gradual system of barter and exchange to carry out renovations on the existing houses.

Are cities for people or for automobiles? In Chapter 18 “Erosion of cities or Attrition of Automobiles” (in Part Four of the book, Different Tactics) she writes “Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations, and drive-ins, are powerful …instruments of city destruction.” They are also necessary for the big city to stay connected. So the challenge is how to mitigate the destructive effects while preserving the automobile’s value to a great city. Fort Worth is cited as an example of a city that has met the challenge with some success, by limiting but not eliminating auto access to the inner city, in part with the use of giant parking garages strategically placed. “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice,” and the automobile helps with that.

In a concluding chapter, Jacobs compares the study of cities to the fields of biology and medicine: organized complexity. This understanding of our own city as a complex organism will be a useful perspective to keep in mind.