NEWSWEEK: You describe North Americans as “drifting, heedless of our culture’s well-being.” How long do you think we have been drifting?
Jane Jacobs: I think we’ve been drifting since the Great Depression. I think America and Canada lost a lot of self-confidence then that they have not gotten back.
The book provides a pretty dismal assessment of many aspects of Western culture: the ‘rot of bad science,’ the deterioration of families, communities, culture and education …
Yes, there’s a lot that’s gone wrong. But this is meant as a wake-up call. We better look at what’s gone wrong and try to correct it. I think we are very adaptable as people and often more clever than we’re given credit for. And I don’t think we’ve reached the point of no return–yet. Now that would be a real pessimistic book.
Do you see any signs of cultural progress?
There’s a lot more creative inquiring on people’s part. I think people in our culture are going into subjects they couldn’t or wouldn’t in the past, which I think is encouraging. I think there a lot of changed expectations of people. You and I understand how important this is as women–expectations have changed a great deal for us. But that’s true of other kinds of people, too. We’re more ready to embrace diversity and I think that’s encouraging.
What factors do you think precipitated this decline?
It’s a great accumulation of things. I name the five pillars of culture that are decaying now, and I am not the only one, by any means, who are recognizing them. The Scientific American has an editorial that says America is failing in science and science is deteriorating. There are a great many scientists who worry about this. I was a little afraid of how higher-education universities would react to my chapter on how they had become credentialing factories rather than educating people. But to my surprise–gratitude and surprise–there are many people in higher education who are just as worried as I am. The first institution to buy the rights and to excerpt the book was the University of Virginia and it chose the excerpt on credentialing versus educating. I believe plenty of students still want an education and plenty of faculty members still want their institutions to concentrate on education. It is not a failing of the material of the human beings but the institutions themselves that have gotten off track.
At what point did these pillars start to decay?
These things go back to the Great Depression. The education versus credentialing certainly does. This anxiety about jobs and about education enriching people in the most literal way–not metaphorical. I think it’s so pervasive. It has become a real cultural force that credentials trump education. The whole culture is implicated in that. It is a passport to being considered for a job. Going back to the Depression, the extreme association of success with making lots of money is a failure of a feeling of security.
How do you strengthen these five pillars again?
You begin by observing what’s happening. For instance, take the great mystery that the more roads you build, the more traffic there is. Roads don’t cure congestion, they increase it. There has not been any real sensible evaluation of why this is. So we need more knowledge and experiments and fewer sacred cows.
When you say sacred cows, are you referring to the automobile industry?
Yes, and the highway planning commission. But, really, the planning is based on ignorance, not knowledge on why roads have the effects they do. And again, we’ve got good people on this. There’s a wonderful planner, [urban-studies professor] Allan B. Jacobs in San Francisco, who has written a book called “The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards,” which is a good start to how do we get at this. There is a lot of information out there. This is not some supernatural trouble. The things I mention we’re perfectly able to deal with if we would put our minds to it.
You write about agrarianism giving way to a technology-based future as a bad thing for communities. What about online communities, where people come together through common ideas or interests?
I think they are very partial communities. They are not communities in the sense of people who know each other so well and can estimate how reliable each other are. That is one of the great problems of the online communities–that, and the business of some being pornographic and wanting to lure children into bad things. This is not a good sort of community. It is based on not knowing much about each other.
You call this a cautionary book. What needs to be done to keep our culture from slipping away?
This book has to do with people being willing to face things and to discuss things they wouldn’t in the past. We have to wake up to what is going wrong. One thing we must get at very quickly–and, fortunately, it’s not all that difficult–is creating more affordable housing and not allowing gentrification to eliminate the diversity, including diversity of income, in neighborhoods. That is quite fatal to neighborhoods … We have to wake up to the fact that gentrification is, like so many things, a double-edged sword. It can work well, but at its extreme, it works badly. Its connection with affordable housing is that this is easily cured if you use affordable housing inserted as infill in empty places. Look to see what is missing and make efforts to supply it. Focus on convenient stores in favor of shopping centers, which are often inconvenient, for example.
What do you hope readers get from your book?
I hope that people will recognize that things are not going well. They may have given very little thought to it. And to remember how capable we are really as a people and how promising it is if we will look honestly at how things are and do our best to correct the deficiences. We are reaching a point where it is urgently necessary to do so. This is a wake-up call.
