Comment by saalweachter
3 days ago
Was she conservative?
I don't know much about her politics, besides that she left the US for Canada over opposition to the Vietnam War.
3 days ago
Was she conservative?
I don't know much about her politics, besides that she left the US for Canada over opposition to the Vietnam War.
She was pro-market, in many ways. She was mostly against top-down development that overrode people that were already in place (at the time it happened to be government ramming highways through cities using eminent domain). So in some ways she's "conservative" in that she likes property rights, less zoning, etc.
Urban left-leaning people tend to like her because she's very human-scale focused. Many use her anti-highway work to rally against other change (often private and market oriented. Though I love her work to death, I've found a lot of what most of us would call NIMBYs and champagne socialists cite her when opposing a lot of stuff (housing they don't like, etc).
This reason interview (libertarian org) outlines a lot of it: https://reason.com/2001/06/01/city-views-2/
She was: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/12/01/conservatives-jane-...
https://mises.org/mises-daily/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsid...
(Big Jacobs fan over here, I've studied her to death)
AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.
If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.
So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.
I'll lend to that. If you use Edmund Burke as the yardstick, calling her conservative is defensible because she believed complex social orders evolve from the bottom up vs grand schemes. My thought is she generally applied this thinking, and that thinking is traditionally conservative. I suppose she is a "radical localist" who stole bits she liked from every side... was a pragmatic, anti‑ideologue, but I do still feel in reading her works, she's is more frequently aligned conservatives than not.
I suppose that is also part of the joy in Jane.
I wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast.
I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?