Women and their role in
the history of sustainability
WORDS FROM THE ORIGINAL PODCAST INTERVIEW BY BRANkO MILETICTone Wheeler talks (and muses via podcast) about Jane Jacobs and
her activism to preserve quality of life in New York; Rachel Carson who
connected the disappearance of birds to the use of DDT; Barbara Ward,
the economist and her Spaceship Earth theory; and Donella Meadows,
an ecologist who co-authored the book The Limits to Growth.
What’s really interesting is that the 1960s was
an era of reaction against post war modernism.
So after the Second World War you had a rise of
modernist town planning, modernist building,
modernist agriculture – it was a whole series of
things that moved into the modern industrial era.
It didn’t take long before people could see that
things were going wrong and by people I mean,
mostly women. That period – the 1950s – as
epitomised in things like say, the Mad Men show
on TV – was a male-dominated world; so it was in
architecture as it was in urban design. But I like
to think that there were four or five women in the
1960s who reacted against that and established
what you might call ‘environmentalism’ – you
know the response to the degradation of the
environment, which inevitably leads on to what
we now regard as sustainability.
The first of those was Jane Jacobs who lived
in New York and could see that the city was
going to be under siege from a whole series of
freeways. The pattern for New York in the 1960s
was the epitome of say, Greenwich Village. It
had been that way in Manhattan for so long
that when it was suddenly challenged and they
were going to put a perimeter of freeways and
cut through it, it was seen to be potentially
destroying the whole of New York but the
reaction to it was mostly led by local activist
groups – sort of resident action committees- and Jane Jacobs formed one of those
committees for her village within Manhattan.
In doing so, she was drawing together a
whole series of threads about the quality of
life, the quality of the air and the quality of the
resultant transportation. Because she had a
journalistic and scientific mind, she was able
to condense these things into understandable
bits of information, which you could see that far
from improving it or being the golden solution,
it was actually going to make life a lot worse.
She measured it by what you might call the
urban quality of life. Not just the normal factors
in terms of health and happiness, welfare and
income and so on, but also how the city sustained
its people by having a life of its own – the streets
were the arteries and there were various parts of
the city where people would gather and they were
parts of the lifeblood of the city. Particularly in
New York where people didn’t need a car – not
then, not now; why would you want to bring
the cars in and then circulate them all the way
around and destroy the street life?
Jane Jacobs wrote a couple of books on this,
which become seminal texts for urban design
and particularly the urban geography of cities
in the economy of cities. The first is called ‘The
Death and Life of Great American Cities’ and
expands beyond her neighbourhood in New
York, beyond Manhattan to the whole of the
pattern of development of the great American
cities – Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San
Francisco, and she looks at how those cities are
all different but they all have a life in them that
is an organic growth out of, particularly the 18th
and 19th centuries or the 20th century; you are
the inheritor of an urban fabric – closely dense
living conditions in the inner city, the idea of
being able to get anything that you need within
walking distance of where you live. There was
a complex relationship between people living
on the street – you were safe because peopleknew you and would recognise you so that if you
weren’t there, they will come looking for you.
There’s another book that runs parallel to
this by Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People
in which he makes a very clear distinction that
Jane Jacobs had done – that streets are for
people, roads are for cars. These two words in
English have a very different meaning.
The book The Death and Life of Great
American Cities really changes the way people
see cities from being almost a singular economic
base to something which has a much more
complex (what we would now call) triple
bottom line that has a social fabric and an
environmental fabric.
The second book she wrote after that was
called The Economy of Cities; she started to
look at the way in which the economic exchanges
within a city can help to find the complexities
of it and the richness that it has – richness in
this particular case meaning rich in economy,
in money, and richness in terms of quality, the
richness which we now think of as diversity –
the qualitative rather than quantitative things,
not just the quantity of money you’ve got but
the quality of what you’ve done with it.
So that’s 1961 when the book comes out and
here it is 60 years later and I think it’s still
one of the best books that you can read about
what’s happening in urban life. One year later
comes a book that looks at the rural life as it
is feeding into the cities. This is a book called
Silent Spring by a scientist, Rachel Carson and
she starts to look at the disappearance of birds
in the agrarian belts of the United States. It’s
what we would now identify as ‘species loss’.ARCHITECTuRE & DESIGN /PROMOTiON/ juL-SEP 201930ADQ3_030_032_Tone Wheeler_V1.indd 30 26/7/19 4:50 pm