Jane Jacobs and the Mumford Dispute

Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford are often positioned as opposed figures in twentieth-century urbanism — Jacobs the defender of organic street life, Mumford the critic of cities who advocated regional decentralization. The opposition is real but superficial. Jacobs's 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities attacked what she called 'orthodox modern city planning,' and she specifically targeted Mumford as one of its intellectual sources, a characterization Mumford bitterly disputed in his hostile review 'Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies.' The public dispute obscures the substantial agreement between their underlying frameworks: both insisted that cities must be read through their surfaces, that the values of planning apparatuses were diagnosable from the environments they produced, and that the dominant trajectory of mid-twentieth-century American urbanism was destroying the conditions for organic human flourishing.