It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. Julian Barns

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

During our short stay in Paris, Michele and I stayed in a small hotel that had been refurbished, sort of near the Arc de Triomphe. It was in a mixed, gentrifying neighborhood. For me, it was the best part of the trip. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, but just before we got to the hotel, the driver pulled over in what I would call a seedy area and said something in French that meant, I think, “Here is your destination.” It wasn’t, and after some pseudo-conversation which included pointing at various smartphone pages, he said something like “Oh” in French, turned the corner, and drove another three blocks to our hotel.

It was no longer 100°F, but I was still whooped when we first got to Paris. I opted for a day of doing nothing. Michele wandered around the neighborhood in the morning and then returned to the hotel to pick me up for lunch at Restaurant Le Merrill. Restaurant Le Merrill is just a run-of-the-mill French restaurant, which means the lunch was super. Then we spent the afternoon wandering around the area.

As we wandered around this neighborhood, I kept thinking of Jane Jacobs. This neighborhood is exactly what she had promoted. Around the middle of the last century, urban planning became a hot topic, involving the demolition of slums and their replacement with large, planned developments. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and promoted Broadacre City, and in France, Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City. Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York, was one of the most powerful advocates of large-scale projects that destroyed vibrant neighborhoods.

As an aside, among other atrocities committed by Moses in the name of civic improvement, the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced nearly 4,000 families, not counting the families impacted by the increased noise, as it cut a seven-mile gash through the Bronx. End aside.

In the United States, at the time, areas considered slums ripe for improvement due to narrow streets and old, often rundown, buildings included North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All four of those areas are now considered highly desirable places to live, partially due to Jane Jacobs. Greenwich Village and its planned destruction by the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway is where Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses and changed urban planning forever, well, at least for the past 75 years. At the time, Jacobs was dismissively referred to as a “housewife”; now she is considered one of the most influential people in urban planning in the 20th century. She wrote a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said that everything Robert Moses said and did was wrong.

Jane Jacobs said that destroying a rundown neighborhood was wrong, a crime. As I recall, she believed that the tuberculosis rate in a neighborhood was a more accurate indicator of a community’s health than the condition of its buildings. She thought neighborhoods were organic, writing, Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. 

She was for wide sidewalks, narrow streets, and diversity both in its buildings and inhabitants.