The left suddenly rediscovered Jane Jacobs as their “diversity” hero and rewrote her plays to fit their narrative to help rebuild the Democratic Party after its epic failure and defeat by President Donald Trump. So who is Jane Jacobs? What works did she produce? What philosophy did she put forward? What insight can we gain from her wisdom, if any?

In Jane Jacobs’ work: “Dark Age Ahead”, 2004, a couple of years before she died, she talks about how in the United States and countries with rural areas, 70-80% of the people are poor, in contrast to vibrant cities where there are fewer poor people, when those cities are designed right.

Unfortunately, and I realize I don’t mean picking on an old lady, just because she’s old or just because she’s a socialist, but in these statements and conclusions in your work you are mixing and conflating results with perceived causation. She will see, the cities absorb from the rural areas, they absorb money, water, energy, wealth and tax money. Cities are infinite in their needs; urban transport, social interest housing and manipulate the markets to keep it running. Just like our universities living in a false la la land economy.

I would argue all points with Jane here if she were still alive today, and I have been to every city in the US, and I despise Agenda 21 and socialists who want to crowd people into cities, thinking it is more efficient. . Without the rural areas, the city would collapse as they require goods from everywhere to make it work. I’m sorry, but your claims are just plain nonsense, and if we’re really looking for a way to philosophize about how to approach human civilization, it would be much wiser to consider Ayn Rand’s philosophy, not Jane Jacobs’. Also, if we look at urban planning in Portland OR, where she had a hand, it’s not as viable now in retrospect. Although to her credit he did predict her downfall.

What’s the point of building big planned cities if you can’t afford them? How about China, which invested in big cities where no one lives, with all the comforts, now crumbling, in debt, and with weeds growing on unmaintained sidewalks? . Urbanists beware, technocrats, and remember the Urban Plight and Urban Flight of the past, these ideas are not as new as they claim, nor are they the answer. After reading his final paper, it seems he inherently understood these challenges, but kept his original concepts of walkable cities, with open spaces, parks, and open areas with short blocks to create vibrancy. That’s not enough.

She acknowledges the complexity of urban planning, but constantly returns to committee-based planning that involves everyone, yet all we get when that is done is human politics, higher costs, and therefore unaffordable developments that cause the need for price controls, more spending, and more people inadvertently. crowded together like rats, and we all know what happens when we pack too many rats together.

I find it interesting that today’s leftist political base uses his works to promote their growing agenda to put people in small living spaces like college dorms in big cities, and to claim that it is best for everyone and that it will somehow get a better quality of life. Not so, in fact, socialists and leftist political elites are totally fed up with the plot and misconstrue the misinterpretation of the Jane Jacobs story: your typical pretentious leftist intellectual elite talking out of her ass.

This work is now used as hate speech against Donald Trump, that is the only reason why his books are now popular again. It’s a bad reading of his work, plus he also had a bad reading of the story. Besides Donald Trump knowing a thing or two about building cities, cleaning up slums (check out Atlantic City near the casino he built), or problems with low-income housing, he should know that he built several of those large buildings. under government contract.

Those who stood up and elected Trump realize this and the anti-Trump protesters are paid propaganda for a political purpose organized and financed by leftist groups that have more hate inside than we have ever seen. To hell with those who use Jacobs’ work as a springboard for their socialist and PC vs. Fabric of America views. We celebrate diversity here, but ramming the PC down people’s throats is not noble.

Jane Jacobs is not the pillar of intellect she pretends to be when leftists in the US try to rewrite what she said from their own rewriting of history and mold it to their world views. Ayn Rand was more correct than Jacobs. And cities suck wealth and taxes from all the surrounding areas to exist, water, energy, food, everything. The UN Agenda 21 is nonsense, and is causing a complete and unnecessary false promise. This is another bunch of leftist BS, of course the left also enjoys channeling Karl Marx.

Maybe, we should allow the left to make these arguments and then show them how their solutions have caused our problems, and are not the solutions, AKA: “the road to hell is always paved with the best intentions”, why even Hugo Chávez believed that he was doing what was best for Venezuela, we know how that turned out. Perhaps the left needs to reread the works of Jane Jacobs more carefully before using this dead woman’s name to further her failed agendas. Think about this.

Recommended additional study:

(1) YouTube Video: “Robert Kanigel, ‘Eyes on the Street’: Jane Jacobs Expelled From Harvard,” on CSPAN BookTV Channel. Posted on February 1, 2017.
(2) Urban Gateway Website – Article; “Dark Ages Ahead: Understanding Jane Jacobs in the Trump Age”
(3) World News website (dot) com – Article; “Did Jane Jacobs Predict the Rise of Trump? Ever Prescient, Her Latest Book Depicted a Coming Dark Age and How to Get Over It”, by Richard Florida.
(4) YouTube video: ”
(5) Book: “The Life and Death of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, 1961.