Leaders Don’t Predict The Future. They Create It.

Jane Jacobs didn’t just theorize on what makes a neighborhood heathy. She built an army to prove it.

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Little Jimmy Jacobs was worried.

His mother, who later became famous for her urbanist views and activism, was tucking him into bed one night in 1960 when the 11-year-old told her what was bothering him: The family was going to lose the tree they’d planted together on the sidewalk outside their home in Greenwich Village.

The men outside earlier in the day – the same men who’d told Jane they were using paint and chalk to mark the sidewalk for a survey only – had told curious Jimmy of their real work. Manhattan borough officials planned to slash five feet of Hudson Street sidewalks to make another lane for cars. Jane put him to bed and got to work, again. By the next morning, with a petition she’d prepared in hand, she and her three children rushed to the nearest print shop.

But the printer didn’t share their urgency, at first.

He had restaurant menus waiting for his machines and the petitions would have to wait, maybe for weeks.

Jacobs told him the sidewalks would be lost by then – and not just her family’s. The sidewalks would be shorn right outside his shop, too. The paths that brought his patrons in the door would be narrowed. That meant less room for meandering pedestrians and customers and more room for passing cars.

That worked.

Within an hour, they had their copies, ready for Jimmy to take around the neighborhood. Her younger children, Ned and Mary, set up a table with a sign in front of their home. Parochial schools sent copies to parents in kids’ backpacks. Jacobs went back to the influencers she was working with in an ongoing battle to spare Washington Square from traffic. Everyone who could be summoned to participate did so. Soon, Jacobs and others pled their case before the Manhattan borough president, and they won. The sidewalks stayed.

Over the following year, the same “all-hands-on-deck” approach would play out again and again as Jane and her neighbors mobilized to stop arrogant and well-funded city officials from razing and rebuilding fourteen square blocks of Manhattan, including Greenwich Village, in the name of urban renewal. It was a landmark battle that would pit her and her neighbors against the pro-development and pro-expressway titan Robert Moses, who had come to be one of the most powerful unelected city officials of all time. Jane, the mother, the writer, and now the activist, emerged as a leader – a voice – for the community, for the everyday people who would be affected by the plans that distant experts mapped out on paper. The only way they stood a chance was if they banded together in action, only if the community members themselves participated.

As she did with her local printer, Jane Jacobs had a talent for mobilizing people by showing the value of smaller units – a local shop owner, a restaurant, a single sidewalk in Manhattan – by weaving it into the bigger scheme. Jane loved studying systems. She lamented the fact that automobile makers eventually covered vehicles’ moving parts with a metal skirt. She liked to observe how individual pieces fit into a larger whole. She believed in the preciousness and fragility of community ties and networks and the big and small settings that framed and facilitated those ties. It’s a theme she explored throughout her life and from a street-level view in her most influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The printer couldn’t be bothered until he realized that the petition protected him and his business. He had something at stake. So he participated. So did Jane’s family. So did the schools, and so did her neighbors. They came together in fellowship for a shared purpose, something that made their lives bigger and better than they could aspire to singlehandedly.

They would do the same in 1961 when they fought to stop the city’s destructive urban renewal plans for Manhattan’s West Village. In one of their counterattacks, the neighborhood activists – mothers and fathers and small-business owners – produced their own study, going door to door and following federal procedure for slum designation surveys. They meticulously documented every building in 14 city blocks, comparing things like soot and noise to other areas of the city using sound recordings, to prove that it was not a slum. Their work, one administrator with the federal Urban Renewal Administration said, amounted to what would have cost the government $50,000 to accomplish.

Assembled as the Save the West Village organization and working under Jane’s leadership, the neighbors – who Moses had characterized during an earlier fight to stop him from building a road through Washington Square as “nobody more than a bunch of mothers” – worked every day and long into most nights, employing every person possible to spread their objection through every possible medium: press conferences, petitions that children carried around the city blocks, leaflets, newspaper advertisements and letters to the editor, and then fundraising efforts that varied from book sales to Christmas wreath vending. “We all had jobs and some of us who were working mothers had two jobs,” Jacobs would say. “Everybody was in on this. Either their second job or their third job was saving the neighborhood.”

They looped in legal help, effectively slowing down powerful opposition until, after months of discouraging setbacks, the group won in October 1961. It happened days after Jane set up a press conference at the village’s Lion’s Head coffee shop, triumphantly raising two fistfuls of documents showing, through forensic analysis, that an architect had been hired to plot out West Village’s redevelopment months before officials publicly announced plans to study it for potential renewal. In other words, the public process was a sham. A deal had been struck already – and studies and public meetings were pretense. The neighborhood “detectives,” as Jane called them, had proven it. Soon after, the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board members dropped the proposal all together. The “mothers” won.

They won because Jane, one of them, had given them a voice. She believed in the power of community participation and the validity of each patchwork piece of a larger, vibrant system. At a time when absolute trust in expert opinion was still the default, she had the audacity to think that those affected, those smaller units – mothers and neighbors and friends – deserved a say in the outcome and that they together could fight the most powerful metropolitan politicians in the world.

Decades before she shaped her legacy with a belief in the self-organizing power of communities that activists still evoke today, the iconic activist known for thick, black glasses frames and her democratic approach was just another young woman starting out in the big city.

Leaving behind coal-built and union-friendly Scranton, Pennsylvania, an 18-year-old Jane Isabel Butzner, arrived in New York City in the ‘30s when great shifts were just starting to unfold. Cities like New York City and Chicago were competing to be the most modern – a vision that in that decade included flattening slums to make way for gleaming trophy skyscrapers. Anything that hearkened back to the previous century seemed dirty; “modern” designs aimed take the city away from reminders of the glum days of the Great Depression.

Another big change was roaring in, too, faster than any city officials could accommodate: automobile traffic. An ideal solution, it seemed, was to raze the pesky slums, “miserable low buildings” that consumed entire neighborhoods, and pave new highways to ease congestion. Fixing two problems at once.

Arguments over how best to implement those plans continued for the next two decades. City government hurried to put planners in place. Organizations like the Slum Clearance Committee of New York got to work and people like Robert Moses did, too.

Jacobs, bookish from the start, worked her way through freelance jobs and studied at Columbia University, taking special interest in sciences and especially economic geography, but never completing her degree. In 1944, she married Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., an architect, and the two chose a three-story, “slum building” at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and renovated the former convenience store that would be their family home through the tumultuous fight to save the neighborhood. She landed magazine work – her first breakthrough was a colorful story about the city’s fur district for Vogue – then eventually found a home at Architectural Forum, a publication where she launched a reputation for expertise in urban design, even before it was called urban design.

Before she ever stepped forward to lead a neighborhood, she was building credibility for years among those who follow architecture and the debates over “slum surgery” as well as what urban America should look like. She was far from an unknown ‘50s housewife, putting down her apron to pick up a megaphone and rally her neighbors. She’d already promoted a people- and context-oriented methodology to dealing with “slums” and she’d been writing about building design and architects, land use and planning approaches, and metropolitan government for years. She’d studied and written about similar issues in Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Philadelphia, Fort Worth, San Francisco, and Baltimore. She’d spoken and earned respect in academic circles, presenting in 1956 at the first Urban Design Conference at Harvard University, a historic event for architecture and city planning. There, she was regarded as one of the most knowledgeable and persuasive people to speak. Even though she was described as a “layman” at the conference, her passion for the human scale affected those present, as noted in a conference summary that said she “pointed out that a supermarket may replace thirty little stores but doesn’t replace thirty little storekeepers and their social place in the community

…”

It was her knack for singling out the people behind the plans that first distinguished her in the architectural and urban planning circles. But it was her influence among the community – and her place as someone just like her neighbors – that wielded the most influence when she led their great battles against the lingering effects of Robert Moses. By the time the country reached the 1950s, postwar urban planning was in full swing, with heavy-handed and well-funded efforts to clear whole neighborhoods to make way for something more uniform, something officials thought would be cleaner and more modern.

The term “urban renewal” arose after the U.S. Housing Act of 1954, another powerful federal initiative aimed at clearing out or “improving” slum areas, often by razing and replacing with sterile housing projects. Often, Robert Moses was the hand moving in the background, influencing not just New York City plans but planning processes around the country.

Moses had amassed almost inconceivable power by the end of the war. His appointed – not elected – positions in city government placed him, for a time, behind nearly all the city’s public housing and public works projects as well as highway construction for which he became the champion, helping to craft funding and pro-highway legislation on a federal level for expressways, considered avant-garde at the time.

He shaped and influenced urban policy-making, the kind that favored contractors’ and experts’ interests over those of citizens who were affected and the kind that sidestepped democratic processes to place almost all decision-making in the hands of a few city officials. And he advised Congressmen as they were working out those federal Housing Act laws and later had access to millions in federal and local funding to make his razing-and-rebuilding and highway-paving visions financially viable and, to some, profitable. And, as a proponent of urban renewal and similar concepts, he was comfortably within the mainstream paradigm among urban planners and designers.

Jacobs saw things differently. She saw the city as built by its individual contributors; she appreciated the ground-level view she experienced at home with her children in Greenwich Village, at work in Midtown Manhattan, and on her bicycle in between. She thought it was the participation of the individuals who made for a thriving whole – and that stamping out trouble areas in their entirety and rebuilding did not. She held no official power, no influence over federal or local policy makers, but, as an urbanist and activist, she didn’t take no for an answer. She was able to gather a force around her by showing each person was a part of the whole system, that citizen participation was vital to the survival of their ways of life and that they could form a sort of communion around a common cause.

Those values – that sense of fellowship – led the activists to victory during decisive battles to stop vehicle traffic into the neighborhood’s Washington Square Park in the mid-‘50s; to unravel an attempt to disfigure and rebuild most of the far West Village in an urban renewal scheme in 1961; and next to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a 10-lane expressway and housing project which would have destroyed what is now SoHo. Jacobs, who was arrested for the first of two times in her life during the expressway battle, led the opposition against all three Moses-spawned proposals.

Among the most quoted passages in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which became a bible for modern urban planning – is her sidewalk ballet.

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”

It is that belief in a working democratic approach to acting together – and her existence as a member, on foot or bicycle, as one of the dancers – that journalist and author Roberta Brandes Gratz says made Jacobs the vehicle for uniting a neighborhood for a common purpose.

“First, there was the Jane Jacobs who became the leader in the village but also the Jane Jacobs who is so loyally followed worldwide,” Gratz says. “I think in both cases, the common thread is that she makes it simple. She doesn’t speak the language of the specialist … She never came across as anyone but one of them, and I think that’s very important. She spoke a common language, so in her interactions with people, she was just another mother and a professional, concerned about her community.”

She included the community – the individuals – in planning and in implementation, and because each could participate, each one enjoyed the hard-won victories.

“We really don’t know what was her idea and what was someone else’s idea,” Gratz, author of The Battle for Gotham, says. “She didn’t want to be the answer, didn’t want to prescribe. The group had the answers. She always said trust the locals. She’d ask you what you thought and had respect for what you would say.”

Jane Jacobs had a purpose, but it wasn’t just hers. It was shared, creating a fellowship of people who worked to achieve what none of them could have done on her own.

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Because of the effort of those mothers, Greenwich Village – what the city wanted to categorize as “slums” – are today among the most valuable properties on the planet. (A different kind of problem for urbanist).

The twist is that, while she spent much of her adult life studying urban issues and economics, her real impact came when she started including and involving other people. That made her work come to life; that’s how she made a lasting difference.

She could have stuck with writing only, stayed inside the room she’d rented in Greenwich Village to write her book. The book itself could have caught some traction, affected some people’s thinking. It might even still be regarded as an important reference for anyone interested in urban planning. But writing, alone, has its limits. She was sharp and articulate – a wise communicator – and that would win some confidence, some trust.

Because she was a neighbor herself, part of the village, people felt like she shared their identity. That created a sense of belonging.

But those first two steps likely would have fallen short of what it required to mobilize the kind of activism she did – enough to take down the plans of a city titan. She achieved the results of lasting, meaningful loyalty because she met both those criteria – trust and belonging – and then went the last step. She offered purpose, not her own goal and her own work – but a shared goal that was bigger than all of them. That’s what made Jane Jacobs a change-maker, a loyalty winner, and a model for how to ignite a loyal following focused on a common purpose.

Fellowship is where leaders and organizations who strive to do good or present a Purpose often fall short. They’ll donate a sum of money to a cause of their choosing and then hold a check-signing and snap some photos – and they expect to get credit from their clients, customers, members or fans. But those people had little to nothing to do with the donation, other than perhaps patronizing a business with a product or service they needed anyway. To create Fellowship, people have to feel like they are an active part of a shared Purpose. Jane Jacobs placed as much emphasis on gathering ideas and distributing the workload as she did on the cause. She made other people owners in the good work she toiled to achieve. She created the future .