Blog 4_Context and Building 2 - Ideology of City Planning (Irfan Fuhair)

Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian journalist,author and activist best known for her influence on urban studies, sociology and even economics. She is also the author of the Death and Life of the Great American Cities . Born on May 4th 1916 and passed away peacefully on April 25th 2006. Jane Jacobs constantly questioning herself, what is a city? What does a city need? What constitutes a city and what makes up a city as a whole? 

With these questions in mind, she also receives opinion from many who say that cities are created by and for traffic and a city without traffic is a ghost town. Jane Jacobs highly disagrees with this statement as she believes that a city is a large human settlement and generally has extensive systems of housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use and communication. When the mosque folded, Robert Moses proposed a road through Greenwich village in 1955. He made a position from one particularly feisty local resident, Jane Jacobs herself.  Jacobs' book was an attack on Orthodox modern city planning and city architectural design looking into how cities actually work rather than how they should work according to urban designers and planners. Jacobs effectively describes the real factors affecting cities and recommends strategies to enhance actual city performance. 

So the Death and Life of the Great American Cities is basically about what goes into making a healthy city, specifically American city where the author Jane Jacobs distinguishes between a big city, a town, a suburb and a rural area because what make these said places to live healthy are different from one another, and there has been a lot of confusion about what is good for a suburb or a small town is not necessarily good for a city and what is good for a city might not be workable in a town, Jacobs makes it a point that medicine at one point took a turn about bloodletting as doctors from the past believed that taking someone’s blood through making them bleed would make them healthier and how medicine worked under this misconception for centuries and eve after the evidence piled up that it was doing no good.

Jacobs makes it a point where there were 3 main point of aspects of urban planning that really affected cities in a negative way and urban planners have been slow to let go of these ideas.The 3 ideas mentioned earlier are called the Garden CIty, proposed by Evan Easer Howard in 1898 at was in London. The idea behind the Garden City was a reaction to overcrowding of industrial London and how the best way to live in a city would be to make them basically suburbs which is to separate out businesses from the industry from the places where people live and and also separated by lots of green spaces and to be an idealistic sort of small towns, 

Jacobs second point of aspect of urban planning is called the Radiant CIty, 1920’s Le Corbusier, where the idea of a vertical city where there would be huge structures set in the middle of a park with really nothing around it and people would just sort of have the nature right outside their door but they will be living in this big giant buildings . 

Jacobs’s third point of aspect of urban planning is called A CIty Beautiful and it was prominent in the United States because it was a reaction to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair where there was this monumental avenues where giant  complexes were all grouped together like the Lincoln Center in New York but taking arts institutions and governmental institutions outside where they were clustered around in a big city at one point and sort of concentrating them into a single use area which is unhealthy according to the author of this book. 

So these are the three aspects Jane Jacobs thought about where the wrong turns were made by the urban planners in the past and Jacob proposes and explains what would make a healthy city in her books titled the Death and Life of the Great American Cities.

In relation to our site at Pura Tanjung Sabtu, it is neither a big town or even a suburb to even begin with.  The modest small town in a rural area is a practice of communal living in harmony. If Pura Tanjung Sabtu were to follow any of these 3 aspects created by urban planners from the past, it would not be as what it is today. Though Pura Tanjung Sabtu is located in a rural area, its extensive systems of housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use and communications are still on point and working especially for the community at that particular area, It does not need huge scale buildings or there is no need to separate businesses from the industry. Pura Tanjung Sabtu works as how it is now, 

Furthermore, these 3 said articles were all relating to an American Culture and lifestyle of living, hence it would not be appropriate to propose such a form of ideation to a community that already has a culture on its own. 

In conclusion, by constantly asking ourselves, what is a city? What does a city need? What constitutes a city and what makes up a city as a whole?  remind us that city planning and city architectural design must be looked into how cities actually work rather than how they should work. In my opinion, Pura Tanjung Sabtu has its patch covered and planned for the future even if it has to go through certain developments.