Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice

Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 229 Chapter 16 Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice B.D. Wortham-Galvin Traditionally anthropology (aka ethnology) has been the academic arena most attentive to everyday life; it is the empirical registering of ways of life. This recording of the quotidian is a means to the end of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz would call a thick description. An ethnographically thick description is the way in which Jane Jacobs’s methods of the writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is most often characterized. Although it makes up a small portion of the corpus, Jacobs’s observations about the people and activities on Hudson Street (her home) are what resonate for most readers. Like anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Jacobs was inextricably immersed in the daily lives of the people and place she was studying. In making visible the ‘street ballet’ of Greenwich Village, by recording the mundane and highly specific actions of daily life, she made the familiar strange. She made visible and significant ‘where the what’ happens and, most noteworthy, by whom. But it is also this approach to an anthropology of urbanism that leaves Jacobs under attack and her methodology in question. Often characterized as a housewife without a college degree, Jacobs was in fact an experienced journalist – including a stint at Architectural Forum in the 1950s – well versed in the design and socio-economic issues surrounding cities in mid-twentieth-century America (Laurence, 2011). That she eschewed the research methodologies of the university (she attended Columbia University for two years) was purposeful, as it stifled her ability to collect and observe the lived city on her own terms. Her approach was neither scientifically empirical, nor subjectively anecdotal. Incorporating a (for some, uncomfortable) mix of both, the approach clearly rang true for several generations of readers. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of Jacobs’s methods has been called into question (her lack of footnotes and citations being one of the problems noted). She borrows from ethnology, but does not truly replicate it. Why is her version of research so problematic 230 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs and what does it mean for the design of the built environment – a discipline that is often characterized as creative, mysterious, and anything but scientific? If Jacobs uses ethnographic values rather than strict methodologies, does this render her techniques and observations worthless? Does it mean they are not applicable to design? This chapter will assert that an anthropology of urbanism is a critical design methodology to be embraced in the making of places in the twenty-first century. This is because place should be more than a simulation of identity or the destruction of existing neighbourhoods in order to make way for new ones with a real ‘sense of place’. If place offers a realm of conflicting simultaneity between ideal forms and performative tactics, then an anthropological approach to design offers the ability to understand how people enact places to reveal the politics of context, both to instil and destabilize beliefs and values, and to perpetuate and rebel against tradition (Wortham-Galvin, 2008). Using an anthropology of urbanism as a core design methodology allows places that appear permanent also to embrace the ephemeral nature of dwelling and being. It allows people to become equal partners with form and space in the making of place, instead of being subservient or non-existent to them. With its emphasis on people, Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities marks an early break from the continuing formalism of modernism and the emerging physicality of postmodern contextualism. In establishing an anthropology of urbanism, Jacobs acknowledges architecture’s role beyond that of object and as a place people inhabit. She puts the designer inside of (rather than removed from) the place and inverts the customary primacy of product over process. Her methodology is to make the familiar strange. She allow us to see ourselves, our ways of life, our conflicts and our traditions by rendering them legible, not hidden, or even more often assumed and generalized. Making the familiar strange means immersing oneself in the banalities of the quotidian as a means to the simultaneous stewardship and transformation of place. In asserting an anthropology of urbanism as a way of broadening good design practice into good cultural practice, this chapter will first discuss anthropological definitions of culture and introduce their relevance to Jacobs and how she constructed her research methods. Then the transformational nature of Jacobs’s research and what it means for contemporary design as cultural practice will be examined. This general discussion will lead to one that focuses on a contemporary example of anthropological design practice in Bayview, Virginia. The counter-practice of contemporary New Urbanism – which seeks to remake the familiar while pointing to Jacobs as cultural mentor – will follow, along with a critique of Jacobs. The chapter ends with a critical query into how cultural practice can transform twenty-first century urban design practice into a significant component in the making of place. Building Culture The idea of architecture borrowing from other disciplines in the pursuit of design practice is not new. Certainly a whole generation of postmodernists borrowed from the study of linguistics and semiotics to further their design agendas. While the Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 231 postmodernists were looking at signs and symbols, Jacobs looked at people as a means with which cultural specificity in placemaking could be achieved. In other words, while not self-stated, her disciplinary lens was anthropology and her subject was culture. What needs to be discussed first is the protean nature of the term culture (WorthamGalvin, 2009). The distinction between Culture and culture becomes possible when the definition itself expands from something that is a standard of excellence to something that is a ‘whole way of life’ (Hebdige, 1979). The first definition derives from an appreciation of ‘high’ aesthetic form (opera, ballet, drama, literature, art, and architecture). Thus the initial conception of culture is one reified, bound in formalism, and held static in the site of the material object. The counter anthropological concept of culture sites itself in the social. For anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), ‘… man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be one of those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’. While the former definition of culture remains a product tightly bound to an elitist realm, one of excellence and therefore exclusion; the anthropological definition is more populist and all-embracing, it is both the product and process of dynamic social interaction in all its forms. An understanding of culture as a bottom-up process (as opposed to a top-down imposition) – one which makes the ordinary visible – begins in part in the early twentieth century with the work of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. The corpus of his work and writing focused on his ethnological study of the people living on the Trobriand Islands, an archipelago to the northeast of Papau New Guinea. Malinowski took a radical stance against the ethnological orthodoxy of the time; he believed that anthropologists needed to immerse themselves in the daily life of the people they are studying. As I went on my morning walk through the village, I could see intimate details of family life, of toilet, cooking, taking of meals; I could see the arrangements of the day’s work, people starting on their errands, or groups of men and women busy at some manufacturing tasks. Quarrels, jokes, family scenes, events usually trivial, sometimes dramatic but always significant, formed the atmosphere of my daily life, as well as theirs. (Malinowski, 1922) It is these contingencies of everyday life that Malinowski believed were only revealed when one pitched a tent in the village. And it is these contingencies that he believed would reveal not only the ephemeral and quotidian practices of the people, but also an interpretation more ‘permanent and unconscious’ (Augé, 1999). In other words, Malinowski’s radical methodology was to move from the particular to the general based not on the exceptional ritual or limited contact, but on the banalities of everyday life. The result was an understanding of culture enriched by the dialogue between the qualitative and quotidian experience and the more stable and fixed cultural structures. Geertz (1973) expanded Malinowski’s revolution of ethnographic practices with his assertion that ‘ethnography is thick description’. But what does Geertz mean by thick description? Thick description is set opposite to thin description. Thin description would be satisfied with the ontological status of an action (i.e. winking as an eyelid 232 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs contraction) or with the mimesis of an action without understanding its fullest and subtlest meanings and nuances. If culture is not a power or a causation but a context, then thick description is the means by which one gets at an understanding of that context. Thick description as a methodology is useful only in a discipline that does not search for universals and laws, but for particulars and meaning. It is, thus, useful when one conceives not of a culture but of many cultures. In order for Jacobs to pursue the particular and potentially disjunctive aspects of lived places, she needed to embrace a trans-disciplinary and transformative notion of research. Constructing Research Throughout the twentieth century, in the United States design has been seen as removed from or antithetical to research. In part, this was because research was deemed the primary mission of the academy (something in which Jacobs was not a member). Research was circumscribed within a scientific paradigm which values gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to principles of quantification and objective rationality with the intent of reducing biased interpretation (Wortham, 2007). The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) definition of research, while incorporating some notions of creative work, ultimately demarcates its description within a scientific rubric. This is not surprising since it is a culturally situated document arising out of a rapidly industrializing mid- to late-nineteenth century Great Britain. When historian Raymond Williams (1985) critiques the OED as a socio-cultural invention and reminds us that words are not just defined by their philological and etymologically past but also by their cultural history, he makes transparent the notion that research is a construct. Research practices, likewise, are culturally conditioned. In the university system of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is the cultural memory of the Enlightenment that still holds fast in describing what the work of the scholar should be. Because research is artifice, it can be reconstructed. The argument is not to abandon scientific methods of research, but to make them one of many ways of pursuing knowledge so that intervention in the built environment does not sacrifice connection and interaction at the altar of rationality. This appears to be Jane Jacobs’s agenda. In order to save the city from urban renewal, and the concomitant methodologies of the urban planning profession, Jacobs sought to inquire about the nature of the city, to gain knowledge about how it worked, so that future interventions would build it up, not deteriorate and destroy it. Jacobs (1961) was very clear that her book ‘is an attack … on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning’. In order to launch that attack, she wanted to write ‘about how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality…’ (Ibid.). This was not research about the current state of the city, but an agenda of transformation of a discipline (or several of them) and of policies towards the city. Jacobs’s values came first and she sought knowledge to back them up. As Peter Laurence (2011) notes, ‘She achieved what she set out to achieve: to present Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 233 a “new system of thought about the great city” – the foundation for an idealized field of city planning, architecture, and urban design that would recognize the complexity and fragile intricacy of the great city’. And she did so with ‘synthetic interdisciplinarity’ (Ibid.). For Jacobs, knowledge should not be confined to a narrow dictionary or scientific definition that delimits the province of knowing to what is known in a particular field. Clifford Geertz (1980) would later affirm her notion of loosening the tight disciplinary circumscriptions by noting: Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think… [P]hilosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanely Cavell on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert) … baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme) … documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castanesda), theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (Levi-Strauss), ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries (Edward Said)… Jacobs’s approach in all of her works implicitly acknowledges the unnecessary nature of this disciplinary knowledge as the reason why boundary crossing should be deemed necessary and not subsidiary. Knowledge production depends on the transdisciplinary, on identifying larger patterns, and on hermeneutics as much as it does on facts, hypothesis and reproducible results. This means moving speculative and inventive inquiry from the margins to the centre of what is deemed significant work. Design Practice as Cultural Practice Jacobs’s trans-disciplinary discourses, perhaps, began with her relationship with social worker Ellen Lurie (Laurence, 2011). Lurie worked in East Harlem, which served as New York’s testing laboratory for ideas regarding urban renewal in the 1950s. As Laurence (Ibid.) notes: By January 1956, when Jacobs first visited East Harlem, 10 housing projects had consumed 57 blocks, more than two-thirds of East Harlem… Laurie had detailed documentation of every neighborhood store and social club that was destroyed, along with the old storefront buildings that were razed for the new monolithic housing projects, and it was these studies that formed the basis of Jacobs’s Harvard conference paper and marked the end of her belief in the ‘city planner approach’. Lurie’s documentation of the destruction of East Harlem can be seen as the implicit influence on Jacobs’s ethnographic approach, which would be interwoven with economics, geography, sociology, biology, and planning. Ethnographers are in the business of looking at culture as ‘texts’, whether those texts are spoken, gestured, performed or written. Jacobs’s work asserts that texts can also be, or result in, built form. For designers, grounding a trans-disciplinary approach in the ethnographic, as Jacobs’s did (whether rigorously or transformatively), allows for places to be designed around the living experiences of real people in real places. 234 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs Ethnography deployed in an architectural schema means that it is not just the product that is of consequence. The process itself, the search, the inquiry, can be as substantial, if not more so, than the rendering of conclusions. What is revelatory about Walter Hood’s work in the mini-parks in Oakland, California is not necessarily a final design scheme, but the methodology employed in his search for the revitalization of these public spaces. Hood’s Urban Diaries (1997) are illuminating as an inquiry into how to acquire knowledge about the relationship between people and space before one (re)makes it into another place. His diaries record textually and visually how both individuals and groups enact space. He particularly focuses on those at the margins of society and, thus, rendered invisible in places, like children, the homeless, the drug addicted, and prostitutes. His transformation of an ethnographic approach advocates that lived space should not be the outcome of design but should, in fact, inform design decisions. If Jacobs’s methods are characterized as the go-and-see method, then Walter Hood’s might be deemed the go-and-live method. A believer in experience, Hood urges designers to leave their expert-driven separation behind and become a member of the community in order to understand its webs of significance. He, thus, puts himself in the community of West Oakland, California to see who the people are and his own connections to them, what they are doing, what their needs are, and ‘what the flow of change discloses’ (Hood, 1997). As Jacobs, he believes the demolition of blighted, mixed-use neighbourhoods in the name of urban renewal should no longer be an acceptable solution, and points out that over the past twenty-five years many sites of previous urban renewal efforts have become public nuisances sponsoring illicit activity and attracting repeated vandalism. Hood believes the illicit behaviour present in these forgotten spaces occurs because people have been marginalized and left out of a system which designs public spaces for only certain members of the community, but not all. He reminds us that those who set foot in community meetings are not a fully representative public. The people who need to be heard most are those who are either not invited or do not feel welcome. He encourages designers and planners to become witnesses to the daily activities and circumstances of all members of the public, to legitimize all constituencies and find a place for all in the making of place. Hood believes the inadequacies of the contemporary policy responses are directly linked to the fact that designers and planners look at the problem from the outside, without a connection to the place, the people, or the problem. His Urban Diaries are daily journal entries about his experience as an insider, a resident, which ‘allow social and cultural patterns to be transformed into physical form’. Clearly his methods for acquiring design knowledge are inextricably tied to human action. And while Hood seeks a thick description of the patterns of culture before placemaking, his work asserts that design should remain focused on the particular and not move to generalized principles. Hood’s work is not an isolated example. The design work produced by the firm RBGC, Architecture, Research and Urbanism under the leadership of Maurice Cox in Bayview, Virginia is another such model of architectural design practice as cultural Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 235 practice (Wortham-Galvin, 2009). What is significant about this example is that it asserts that placemaking can be initiated outside the design professions by the residents themselves. The Ethnography of Bayview On a sun-kissed afternoon, Victoria Cummings fetches her 5-year-old daughter, Kadijah, from the Head Start bus stop up on the asphalt road. Together they walk home, ambling through mud and skirting huge rain-filled holes that scar the half-mile dirt road. They stroll past rickety outhouses, the privy seats and floors encrusted with dried sewage that seeped up through the ground during spring’s heavy rains… Once home, Kadijah exerts her tiny biceps by pumping a dishpan full of off-color rust-flavored water from the outdoor hand pump that her mother will use for her ‘bath’. Cummings plans a trip to the store to buy bottled water for drinking and cooking with her food stamps. Her 12-year-old, Latoya, gets home about 3:30 p.m., and Cummings leaves shortly after that for her night-shift job cutting fat off plucked chickens. Cumming’s dream is simple: ‘Water – running water – inside the house’, she says. (Moreno 1998a) Abject poverty defined the daily lives of the residents of Bayview at the close of the twentieth century. Isolated on a peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay on Virginia’s eastern shore, freed slaves settled this community during the Emancipation of the mid-nineteenth century. Many of its residents trace their family heritage as slaves back to the founding of the Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. Their living conditions in the late twentieth century belied 350 years of progress and change, as more than 100 residents were among Virginia’s most impoverished in one of its poorest counties, Northampton. With no community centre or retail stores, dirt roads ‘paved’ with crushed oyster and clamshells, the chapel in near ruins, the demise of the local economy dependent on fishing and potato farming, and no running water to service the one-room shacks, Bayview’s residents simply wanted to improve their quality of life. Their immediate goals: affordable housing and running water. The feasibility of attaining these aims seemed bleak, particularly when employing conventional wisdom and methods to such a problem. The then governor, James Gilmore echoed the sentiments of many who presumed such problems unsolvable and such communities destined to extinction. Gilmore ‘questioned whether enough local capital [would be] available to install running water and central heating in homes in Bayview and nearby hamlets, where there is little industry and unemployment rates are high’ (Melton, 1998). Instead of waiting for a solution from the top or for the demise of their community and its replacement with an upscale vacation enclave, the residents sought to solve their own problems. Bayview’s community activism got its jump start in 1994 when a group of black and white residents teamed up to defeat the location of large maximum security state prison in their community. The grassroots organization, Bayview Citizens for Social Justice (BCSJ), rallied against the demolition of homes, despite the promise of nearly 236 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs 500 jobs that the prison would create in this economically depressed area. ‘We were brought here to be slaves, and now they were going to demolish these little African American towns’, Alice Coles, head of BCSJ, said. ‘I opposed it’ (Moreno, 1998a). After successfully defeating the state’s prison plans during a three year battle, the newly formed BCSJ partnered with the Nature Conservancy (the Conservancy runs a 45,000acre (18,220 ha) preserve along the peninsula’s shore) and applied for an $20,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to create a plan for eradicating the near-Third-World living conditions in Bayview. The BCSJ saw their collaboration with the influential land conservation organization as a statement of political defiance – that the improving of the quality of life was really an issue of environmental urgency. The grant allowed the BCSJ to bring in an interdisciplinary coalition of experts, led by Maurice Cox and his firm RBGC, Architecture, Research and Urbanism. This team worked with the citizens of Bayview to provide more than just a band-aid on their housing and water dilemmas, but collectively produced a long-term plan to rebuild Bayview both physically and socially. The resurrection of Bayview – under the official nomenclature Bayview Rural Village Plan – would include retail stores, churches, a post office, privately owned homes, rental units, cottage industries, affordable housing, and three deep-water community wells to provide drinking water. Also included were forty new sanitary pits to deal with the immediate severe sewage problems until the new homes were built. The partnership with the Nature Conservancy was not ephemeral, but an ongoing relationship, in which the Conservancy provides the community with technical, fundraising and organizing assistance. The Viability of an Anthropological Approach ‘We want to preserve open space. We want to remember the fields our people worked. Here people are tied to the land. We want to teach our children their history and to protect the environment, the air, and the water.’ Alice Coles. (Flint, 1999) What exactly was the design process at Bayview and how does it differ from the public charrettes heralded by New Urbanists such as the famous Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ)? And, is it really anthropologically driven? As Alice Coles recalled, Our approach was that we had … the architect to come in as a facilitator and they really began to listen to what the community was like … what was the vision and … how did we want to proceed in living? (Hamma, 2003) One of the first things Cox did was to organize a community-wide clean-up campaign and demolish the burned-out shacks. ‘They were not trying to run away from their roots. They actually were trying to embed them deeper. And it was a wonderful moment when they decided that the new Bayview will be erected right across the street from the old’, says Cox. (Leung, 2004) Cox and the ‘experts’ met with Bayview residents in both formal design workshops Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 237 and informal community events such as picnics, concerts, and fish fries. At Bayview an integration of storytelling, oral history, design workshops, community events, and other low-tech approaches helped the residents collaborate on their environmental and housing problems, not only with each other but with the professional team. In other words, the education process was not linear and from the top down, but cyclical: it engaged both sides (residents and professionals) for their expertise. In addition, the process began with the residents themselves, not as a speculative development. While certainly the members of the Nature Conservancy or RBGC did not go and live in Bayview for a year à la Malinowski, their equal partnership with the residents and their consistent and long-term contact began to reveal the particulars of life in Bayview, which illuminated what anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1989) called the ‘patterns of culture’. For instance, in recognizing the need to provide a physical form for the social life of the community, Cox did not merely import the European precedents of the place or piazza. Instead, he observed that public gathering happened organically around personal grooming activities such as haircutting, styling and shaving. A beauty/barber shop became part of the local economic plan. It received specific design consideration in recognition of its crucial contributions to sustain public life. When working on the design of the houses, for the BCSJ ‘living like people’ meant designing houses with front porches. But since this was government-funded public housing, Coles says they had to justify why they were necessary: ‘Because that’s where our family life was spent, on the porch. And so, if you take the porch, just like taking your farm, you take a part of our past. That’s where old stories were told. And songs were taught. And our poems and the scriptures of the Bible were all taught on the front porch… We rehearse everything from the Gettysburg Address to the Creation … on the front porch. We held the books for others, and others held the books until we learned together. So, a part of this village concept was the porch.’ (Ibid.) The porch was not a nostalgic add-on, but a form deeply embedded in their historical and contemporary way of life that the residents sought to maintain. Remaking the Familiar The work of Cox, Hood and many others (Teddy Cruz, Bryan Bell, Sergio Pallerioni, to name a few) has begun to coalesce in the early twenty-first century around a term currently called Public Interest Architecture. While they clearly fall within the exhortations of Jacobs’s call to cultural practice, their work remains at the margins within the design discipline instead of central to its mission. Rather, the urban design field in the United States has been dominated by another design practice that lays claim to being Jacobs’s heirs: the New Urbanism. Founded almost thirty years ago, New Urbanism is arguably the most significant urban design and planning movement to have emerged in the late twentieth century in response to the mid-twentieth century’s perceived loss of place. As the website 238 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs newurbanism.org notes, ‘Currently there are over 4,000 New Urbanist projects planned or under construction in the United States alone, half of which are in historic urban centers’. New Urbanism’s principles address issues as diverse as transportation, health, urban morphology, building typology, and socioeconomics. However, it is not the specifics of any of these that most provoke critics, but the sense that the image of these places and their built forms and spaces replaces reality with neo-traditional idyllic fantasies (Wortham-Galvin, 2010). The New Urbanist vision that dominates the discourse is that proffered by the husband-wife team, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and symbolized in their design for Seaside, Florida. In their New Urbanist schema, a revitalized sense of place is made in villagescapes that promote small-town values (Wortham-Galvin, 2009). The designers achieve this reinvention of small-town America by creating building types that conform to strict codes. In fact, Vincent Scully (1994) asserts that in DPZ’s designs, ‘the important place-maker is the code’. Part of the New Urbanist rhetoric (more appealing and persuasive to the public than the endless charts of codes) is the application of local typological precedents to each project (and certainly the white and pastel frame motifs of Windsor, Florida contrast with the staid Georgian brick of Kentlands, Maryland). Nevertheless, the movement asserts the myth of a nationally and culturally coherent urbanism; an urbanism which combines the ideals of the nineteenth-century Main Street and the twentieth-century Garden City; an urbanism which appeals to middle- and upper-class consumers seeking cultural stability and nostalgia in the face of an increasingly cacophonous and pluralized United States. As John Kaliski (1999) notes, ‘The so-called neotraditional town tugs at emotions and speaks to a mythologized memory of socially homogenous innocence, of golden ages conveniently distant’. Despite all their claims to urbanism, even supporter Scully (1994) suggests ‘the New Suburbanism might be a truer label’. Frequently lambasted for the greenfields application of their principles (where there is no extant community), New Urbanists have recently begun to add abandoned downtowns and brownfields sites to their foci of study. Nevertheless, despite claims to the contrary, their approach yields results that are still dismissive of that which falls outside a nostalgic American vision. In their application of a singular ideal to all existing conditions, their design approach is as problematic as the modernist tabula rasa approach to the city. While their designs are careful studies in the morphology of the public realm, the New Urbanists have chosen the historical typologies that suit their vision and then have their vision guide their designs. While they engage in public charrettes, these charettes are venues used to educate the community on the principles of good design instead of opportunities to record local residents’ understanding of their own history and values (particularly if they are in conflict with the expert view). The New Urbanists employ a tautological approach – that architecture should be based on architecture. In contrast, Jacobs’s seminal tract, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, makes the argument that architecture should start with culture in order to make place in the city. Nevertheless, the New Urbanists lay claim to Jane Jacobs as Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 239 one of their seminal predecessors. Certainly their approaches that focus on pedestrian friendly environments, denser urban morphologies, mixed uses and their use of the charrette would affirm their allegiance to some of Jacobs’s tenets. In addition, Jill Grant (2011) notes that Jacobsian insights are interwoven into both New Urbanists’ founder Andrés Duany’s rhetoric and into New Urbanist theorist Emily Talen’s writings in a purposeful way. But the New Urbanists are not the only ones who cite Jacobs’s as inspiration for their urban design principles. Harrison Fraker (2007) notes that New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism, and Empirical Urban Morphology all cite her work as their ‘theoretical roots’ but retain outwardly opposing positions on what is ‘essential for a “good” city’. New Urbanism diverges from Jacobs’s ideas about the city when it comes to how ‘time, scale, and control affect urban outcomes in significant ways’ (Grant, 2011). As Grant notes, the quickness with which these developments are built, most often in greenfields sites, belies Jacobs’s criticisms of master planning and working at the totalizing scale of the neighbourhood. She adds, ‘Jacobs conceived of scale as creating a matrix for social, political, and economic action, while new urbanism accepts scale as a spatial constraint fixed by development economics and planning conditions’ (Ibid.). It is hard for New Urbanism to foster Jacobs’s beloved notions of diversity and vitality of uses, people, economies and ecologies when implementing the unifying vision of a comprehensive plan, instead of infilling tactically in an extant culture. When culture is, therefore, rendered homogenous and applied from the top down, organic transformation and the potential for democratic action are slighted and made invisible, if not impossible. In an interview with James Howard Kunstler (2000), Jacobs stated: I do not think that we are to be saved by new developments done to New Urbanist principles… I think that when this takes hold and when enough of the old regulations can be gotten out of the way – which is what is holding things up – that there is going to be some great period of infilling. And a lot of that will be make-shift and messy and it won’t measure up to New Urbanist ideas of design – but it will measure up to a lot of their other philosophy. What is messy and makeshift is culture. And Jacobs’s philosophies beg the question: shouldn’t architecture start with culture, instead of generalized typologies, in order to achieve the making of place? Patterns of Culture Achieving a simultaneous and diverse urbanity, rather than one that is singular and homogenous, is not as simple as moving from New Urbanist morphology to Everyday Ethnography. Making conclusions from the observation of everyday life can be problematic at best, as is revealed in Jacobs’s seminal tract. Jacobs begins by making observations of the daily life of the city – mainly her neighbourhood of Greenwich Village – that are detailed to the point of tedium, in the tradition of Malinowski’s ethnographic research. 240 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs But despite her anthropological approach, Jacobs quickly associates specific forms with good urbanism and defines those forms as good… The absolutism of her observations … results in a non-inclusive theory of place-making that cannot encompass, observe, value, incorporate, or utilize a full urban spectrum. (Kaliski, 1999) In other words, her culturally specific observations of a built environment leads to a pattern of culture that is reified into the Pattern of the built environment, as opposed to a pattern of culture embraced by a specific taste, as Herbert Gans would put it, namely that of 1950s Greenwich Village (Wortham-Galvin, 2009). In a discussion of a 1950s New York that also includes a community very different than that of Jacobs’s Hudson Street, namely the community surrounding Andy Warhol, Timothy Mennel (2011) penetrates the problematic of Jacobs’s ethnographic observations of the street ballet: The deeper question here is what participating in a dance actually entails … knowing codes and expectations is a critical part of participating successfully in the ‘ballet’… At some point individual behavior will cross a line beyond which a person can be said to be ‘not dancing’ or not functioning as part of a certain kind of community. That judgment itself is the product of social expectations and codes – and it is here that we can see the most critical divergence between Warhol’s conception of urban life and community and Jacobs’s. Where Warhol is in effect asking why society has created particular forms for physical and social interaction when there are so many other possibilities, Jacobs seems not to have seriously questioned the validity or socially constructed nature of the ballet of the sidewalks that she depicted. Rather, she posits it as an ideal, and perhaps even a norm. So even though her investigation of architecture is broader than that of the New Urbanist typological foundation, Jacobs appears to fall into the same trap. Once the investigation reveals a result, it is taken as the primer to be applied to all situations; and, thus, replaces the heterogeneous diversity of the city with a homogeneous idyll. When Jacobs moves from the particular to the general, there is not an explicit acknowledgement that these universal urban principles are being situated in a specific time and place with an implicit value system leading the way. While she observes the dancers of the street ballet, she does not explicate the ‘for whom and by whom’ of Hudson Street, nor does she acknowledge that their performance may exclude other urban dancers. As Jacobs moved beyond this work, her actions and her voice usually affirmed the pluralism of the particularities of people and place that her initial tract invisibly belied. While her legacy of diversity and vitality is not a false one, it still emanates from a culturally conditioned set of values that informed her observations. This is the legacy of Jane Jacobs to which the New Urbanists have stayed true. Another legacy connection between Jacobs and the New Urbanists is that which elevates ‘the ‘where’ over ‘the what’ and ‘the for whom’ (i.e. the human action). For Jacobs and the New Urbanists, it is still the physical presence of the city that situates the socio-cultural rather than the other way around – the way advocated by Hood and Cox. Jacobs is, perhaps, so popular in architectural curricula precisely for this problematic of the text, precisely Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 241 because while she is both spatially and socially aware of the city, she still places primacy on the first. As Richard Harris (2011) notes: Although here, as in later books, Jacobs insists on the importance of process, she always views it in relation to the forms that, in her view, shape and enable it… Herbert Gans was perhaps the first to challenge her inclination in this direction, flagging it in the very title of his review of Death and Life, ‘Urban Vitality in the Fallacy of Physical Determinism’. But Jacobs’s physical determinism … persisted. Gans’s (1968) critique of Jacobs, which appeared seven years after the initial publication, accused her of the same trap as the modernists to whom she was responding: overestimating the capacity of physical interventions in the city to influence the life of the people. Gans argues that it is not so much the physical form of the city that determines behaviour; rather, it is the cultural codes of each social group. He asserts that the way people use urban spaces depends on the social or ethnic group to which they belong. The reason why people in a certain neighbourhood have an intensive street life (like Jacobs’s Greenwich Village or the North End of Boston) and others do not, could have been caused by how they understood and used their houses (e.g. for family life, for privacy). This shaped the kind of social life that they participated in on the street. Thus, for Gans, what determines the use of space is in itself not physical but sociological. He argues that Jacobs’s view of the primacy of the street and the sidewalk allows her to fall into the same trap of physical determinism that plagued the modernists, albeit leaping from a different value system and albeit achieving a desired morphological result. Making the Familiar Strange Advocating the study of the ordinary in architectural discourse did not wait until the end of the twentieth century for the Everyday Urbanists, but happened on the heels of Jacobs’s publication. Its most prominent articulation was made by another husbandand-wife team, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Their work in the 1960s and 1970s – through studios and exhibitions – created a taxonomy of the everyday built environment. A prime example is the exhibition they designed in 1976 as part of the American Bicentennial, Signs of Life, Symbols in the American City. Exhibited in the Renwick Gallery for seven months, Signs of Life presented the ordinary landscapes of mid-twentieth century America – the traditional city street, the highway, the commercial strip, and the suburb – in 7,000 photographs with little text or analysis (Fausch, 1997). This ‘visual anthropology of American settlement forms’ achieved a thin description of American places because it was not inclusive of all people and how they enacted these settlements. In advocating the methodology of the thick description, Geertz (1973) believes, ‘The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is… The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is … that, in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said’. Venturi and Scott Brown are 242 The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs more concerned that we notice and value the burlesqued wink, but do not want to get at what the wink means. Also focused on where the what happens, their observations of the ‘ugly and the ordinary’ remain a collection of visual culture, not of human actions and their significances. In reference to their work on the Las Vegas strip, they declare, ‘Las Vegas is analyzed here only as a phenomenon of architectural communication; its values are not questioned’ (Venturi [1968] 1996). Even though Venturi and Scott Brown advocate designing based on an understanding of the existing built environment and are not offering up a mythic ideal of what that environment should be, in making those familiar landscapes strange they ultimately offer up only a thin description. And it is a description based more on the visual than the social side of semiotics. Conclusion Action is with the scholar … essential… Without it, thought can never ripen into truth… The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action… But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837) Certainly Jacobs’s body of work follows Emerson’s exhortation. The experience of the city is at the core of both her values and her research that stemmed from a moral proposition: that the city should benefit from good design – design Jacobs defined by the morphology of a street that fosters diverse and vital environments. A valueladen approach to design work still exists today. For example, Bryan Bell’s direction of Design Corps could be considered a practice that begins with a moral proposition: that the underserved should benefit from good design. From that proposition, Design Corps’ then engages a myriad of social, aesthetic and scientific disciplines (often simultaneously) as the group’s members make cultural inquiries and surveys, conferences, texts, designs, and as they construct buildings. While both Jacobs’s and Bell’s agendas are laudable, they still put the moral agenda first (as did the modernists). The difference, however, is in how that agenda is implemented. Bell, like Hood and Cox, is interested in how specific cultural practices can inform and define design practice. Physical form does not determine cultural practice; rather design practice follows cultural practice. In some ways the difference between a New Urbanist approach and the beginnings of an anthropological design approach could be what anthropologist and historian Michel de Certeau terms strategies and tactics (Highmore, 2002). In design terms, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1997) deems it the difference between planning and the vernacular. Strategy results from the practices of the powerful who compose and manage place, whereas the tactical comes from below and relies on seized opportunities and adaptation to the particular. In the application of an anthropological model to urban and architectural design, is it possible to design forms valid for social groups other than the designer’s own? In other words, can one educated in a certain culture (often Culture) design for another? Making the Familiar Strange: Understanding Design Practice as Cultural Practice 243 In the case of Bayview, Virginia, how viable is it to replicate the unique partnership where all partners – the Nature Conservancy, a politically active citizenry, and the designers – were on equal footing, while providing different contributions? In the case of the parks in Oakland, how feasible is it to get policy-makers and neighbourhood stakeholders to give a voice to prostitutes, drug addicts, and the homeless? How thick was the description achieved at Bayview or in Oakland? Is everyone really being included? Is culture being stewarded in a manner that includes change or that tries to keep a neighbourhood fixed like a museum object under glass? If Bayview is deemed successful, how much of it was the result of the grassroots activism of the citizens? Can the same results be achieved without the process beginning from residents who live in such a dire situation? And what process should design follow when the marginalized constituencies actively dismiss the relevancy of participating in the process? The object of Geertz’s study is human beings. Therefore, his definition of culture and his employment of thick description in method and analysis fit his object of study. Jacobs’s loci of observation are usually categorized as the city and economics; and, yet, at their foundation, her studies too focused on people in order to localize meaning. In architecture, the objects of study are things (most often buildings and/or the physical aspects of places), not people. While these things can be ‘read’ as signifiers – what do these buildings and/or places signify? To whom do they convey what meaning? How does the meaning change with time, place, people, prevailing ideologies, and/or with the ones inscribing the meaning? Are these objects as dynamic as our social rituals? Geertz (1973) says, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages … they study in villages’. His turn of phrase is both clever as well as true to his theory. By contrast, Jacobs (1961) declares that ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody’. Geertz’s disciplinary formulations still puts the power in the hands of the expert scholar, whereas Jacobs’s transfers the agency to impact place into the hands of the people. 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