Latest news with #JaneJacobs
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Scranton backs historical board's denial of digital billboards downtown
A rejected proposal for a pair of digital billboards in downtown Scranton ran counter to the example set by late Scranton native and urbanist guru Jane Jacobs, who advocated for maintaining neighborhoods, retail stores and walkability in cities, according to the city's Historical Architecture Review Board. The board in March rejected Kegerreis Outdoor Advertising's proposal to convert the two-faced 'static' billboard signs at 320 Mulberry St. into rotating LED digital signs. That rejection went to Scranton City Council on Tuesday, in the form of a resolution from the administration of Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, for council to uphold or reverse. Council backed HARB in a 5-0 vote — with council President Gerald Smurl, Bill King, Mark McAndrew, Jessica Rothchild and Tom Schuster in favor — to introduce a resolution accepting HARB's denial of a conversion of the static signs on the two-sided structure into digital signs, according to an Electric City Television simulcast and video of the council meeting posted on YouTube. The resolution likely would come back before council for a vote on adoption at its next meeting Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall. The Kegerreis firm, which recently bought the sign structure that was erected in 2012 without zoning approval, sought HARB approval in February for the conversion of the two signs into rotating LED digital signs. At the February meeting, Scott Kegerreis said his company already had removed both static signs and installed one digital sign facing west, before the city issued a stop-work order. Kegerreis thought the prior owner received the appropriate permits from the city for the conversion of static signs to digital, but there was a 'giant miscommunication.' He said officials told him to go before HARB, and if it said yes, then the digital billboards would be permissible. HARB initially tabled the application in February for further review and then rejected it in March. During council's meeting Tuesday, King asked council Solicitor Tom Gilbride, 'So the issue would be, if we were to grant this (digital billboard, by reversing HARB), that would just open the door to … ,' without completing the thought. Gilbride replied, 'It would take away your right to further limit any of these LEDs signs in the historic section.' Council then voted unanimously to accept HARB's recommendation against the digital signs at 320 Mulberry St. Efforts on Wednesday to reach Kegerreis were unsuccessful. HARB's decision, memorialized in a March 14 letter to Kegerreis from HARB Chairman Michael Muller, said, 'The introduction of LED display billboards is inconsistent with the historic aesthetic of the (downtown historic) district and could undermine its visual integrity.' HARB also denied previous applications for digital signs in the historic district, Muller said. Existing digital billboards along Mulberry Street, about one or two blocks east and west of 320 Mulberry St., fall outside of the district or were installed before HARB's expanded jurisdiction over the district, and thus were never reviewed or approved by HARB. The brightness of LED signs and their changing visuals also could distract motorists or pedestrians and pose safety concerns, Muller said. 'Billboards — particularly electronic billboards — are fundamentally designed for vehicles, not pedestrians. Unlike traditional signage that contributes to an inviting and engaging streetscape, large-scale digital advertisements prioritize the attention of drivers, reinforcing car-centric development patterns that diminish a city's walkability,' Muller said. Moreover, the digital signs' conversion proposed for 320 Mulberry St. also 'runs counter to the broader vision for Scranton's urban environment' and walkability initiatives, and would create 'visual noise that detracts from the architectural fabric of a district and the pedestrian experience,' Muller said. Muller cited Jacobs, a leading advocate for preserving dynamic, tightknit neighborhoods, and her landmark 1961 book, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' which redefined views of urban life and led to revolutionary changes in how urban planning is taught and practiced. Jacobs 'championed the idea that cities thrive when streets are designed for people, not just cars,' Muller said. Jacobs 'argued that successful urban environments foster human-scale experiences, with visually engaging storefronts, active ground-level uses and pedestrian friendly streetscapes. Electronic billboards, by contrast, do not contribute to this kind of vitality.' Jane Jacobs (TIMES-TRIBUNE / FILE PHOTO) Jacobs' vision of city and neighborhood communities was shaped in part by her Scranton roots. She was born Jane Butzner in 1916 in Scranton and her family moved from Green Ridge to neighboring Dunmore when she was 5. A graduate of the former Scranton Central High School, Butzner moved at 21 to New York City's Greenwich Village and later married and wrote her groundbreaking book.
CTV News
03-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
Jane's Walk: Granddaughter of iconic urbanist attending Winnipeg festival celebrating her legacy
Jane Jacobs reads a book to granddaughter Caitlin Broms-Jacobs at her Toronto, Ont. Home in 1984. (Caitlin Broms-Jacobs) The granddaughter of an iconic urbanist will walk alongside her grandmother's legacy at a global event celebrating community history and connection. Jane Jacobs was the renowned urban advocate who penned 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' – a work that became a conceptual pillar for city planners, architects, and policymakers alike. To Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, she was grandma. Sort of. 'I called her Jane,' she said in an interview with CTV News Winnipeg. 'Jane wanted her kids and grandkids to call her by her name, so I did.' Jane Jacobs Caitlin Broms-Jacobs sits on her dad's shoulders with her grandmother Jane Jacobs in the background at the Annex Fall Fair in Toronto, Ont. in 1986. (Caitlin Broms-Jacobs) Broms-Jacobs spent most of her childhood alongside her grandmother in Toronto, baking cookies and playing games. She first started to piece together who her grandmother was with the publication of Jane Jacobs' children's book, which she dedicated to her grandchildren. In retrospect, there were other clues Jane was someone special. 'She had really interesting people coming through to visit her and to talk to her,' Broms-Jacobs recalled. 'As much as a small child can absorb from that kind of thing, I think I did pick up certain elements of her relationship with the world and how respected she was.' JACOBS FILE - Author Jane Jacobs responds to a question during an interview in Toronto, May 12, 2004. (CP PHOTO ARCHIVES/ Adrian Wyld) (ADRIAN WYLD) It's been nearly 20 years since Jacobs passed away, but her legacy walks on. Every year, during the first weekend in May, an annual festival called Jane's Walk shuffles into hundreds of cities across the world. The public is invited to put on their walking shoes and join free, citizen-led walking conversations meant to encourage people to share stories about their neighbourhoods and discover unseen aspects of their communities. There are 23 walks planned in Winnipeg this year exploring the local history of neighbourhoods from Old St. Boniface to Transcona. Jane's Walk Winnipeg A 2014 Jane's Walk tour of Winnipeg's Wildwood neighbourhood. 'It's a safe, free and very accessible way for people to come out and to find that strength in community and make connections,' said Ruhi Proshun with Winnipeg Arts Council, the organizer behind the city's Jane's Walk. 'The world can seem like a lonely place sometimes, but hopefully these walks will help people feel like they're a part of a community of people who are happy that they're a part of it.' Proshun said anyone can join this year or even sign up on to host a walk at an upcoming festival. Details can be found on the Winnipeg Arts Council's website. Broms-Jacobs plans to join the Jane's Walk in the North End. She has lived in Winnipeg for the past 15 years, having moved to the Prairies to join the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra as an oboist. Caitlin Broms-Jacobs Caitlin Broms-Jacobs is shown in an undated photo. (Supplied) She picked the North End tour for a reason. 'Jane actually was in Winnipeg once. She was toured around by then Mayor Glenn Murray, and she reported back that she really liked the North End, which I think is really interesting.'
Winnipeg Free Press
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A 21-gun salute for urban theorist Jane Jacobs
After her time meeting with the City of Winnipeg in the '90s, the world's most famous urban theorist Jane Jacobs was reportedly gifted a $10 watch with the city logo. 'It's so funny because it came in this fancy little box,' laughs Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, Jane's granddaughter, an oboist living and working in Winnipeg. If this gift seems like a token of underappreciation, Winnipeg offers Jane something of a 21-gun salute this May. Supplied Caitlin with grandma Jane That's the number of Jane's Walks hosted in Winnipeg this year between Friday and Sunday during the annual festival of free, community led-walking tours inspired by Jacobs. Started by friends and colleagues of hers shortly after her death in 2006, the concept quickly spread to cities around the world — more than 500 of them to date, according to the fest's Toronto-based steering committee. 'It's all very decentralized and self-organizing,' says Jim Jacobs, Jane's son. He lives in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, where Caitlin grew up and Jane lived after emigrating to Canada from the United States in the late '60s. 'Its focus and value are not in promoting her thoughts or ideas… but to provide a soapbox,' he goes on. 'People will say whatever they want to say and if the audience likes it, they'll stay. And if they don't, they'll beat their feet!' This grassroots freedom is already in a certain Jacobian spirit. Jane Jacobs' complex ideas evolved considerably after her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities; the first book of many by a self-educated mother of three, which ultimately turned the urban-planning establishment on its head. (Although her son observes that that establishment absorbed her ideas in ways that today sometimes amount to little more than window dressing — big shows of 'community consultation,' for instance, that do little to shape planners' schemes.) Supplied Jane Jacobs (left) with her son Jim and granddaughter Caitlin at Toronto's Annex Fair But certain throughlines tie this tapestry together. Jacobs championed vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods built on diversity, density and mixed-use development. She famously opposed top-down planning and urban renewal projects that she believed devastated communities. Instead, she emphasized local knowledge and organic interactions between everyday people — 'eyes on the street' — in shaping successful urban life. If some of these ideas seem taken for granted today, it speaks to Jacobs' towering influence — an influence resisted at first by an establishment more smitten with modernist visions that served 'order and progress' at the expense of human-scale urbanism. Jane Jacobs became famous not just for her theories, but for her David-and-Goliath battles, waged with wit and grit, against powerful planners in New York and Toronto. It's this plucky spirit from which local community organizer Michael Champagne and Jane's Walk leader draws inspiration. Supplied 'I know that too many people just drive down Selkirk Avenue or Main Street to get from one part of the city to the other,' says Champagne, who also organizes North End History, committed to social activist and heritage enterprises in the neighbourhood. He leads 100 Years of Main Street: Commerce and Community from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday and Selkirk Avenue: Yesterday & Tomorrow from 1 to 2 p.m. Sunday. 'These walks invite Winnipeggers to get out of their vehicles to see the vibrant local organizations, businesses and people that are here because, like Jane Jacobs, we believe our community problems can be answered when we're together.' Other Jane's Walks this year explore Old Saint Boniface, the Exchange District and the histories of its garment and grain industries, St Norbert's forests and more. 'These walks are a nice, hyper-localized opportunity for us to listen to and learn about the solutions that are working,' says Champagne. Supplied According to Broms-Jacobs, Jane left her tour of Winnipeg especially interested in the North End's history and future — a locale that, for all the challenges it may face, has a strong neighbourhood identity encompassing a mosaic of social groups and uses. What would she make of present-day Winnipeg? 'Jane observed from a political point of view that having a city's government controlled by its suburbs is devastating to a city,' says Jim Jacobs. Notwithstanding, he has an optimistic vision of the city. 'There are certain long-standing characteristics of Winnipeg that count in its favour, even if they're under-exploited, like a lot of mixed-use neighborhoods,' says Jim Jacobs. 'And there are these older buildings, some of which provide lower rent and more flexibility, more flexibility for entrepreneurs, community groups and artists.' Supplied Caitlin with grandma Jane MIKE SUDOMA / Free Press files Michael Redhead Champagne will lead two Jane's Walks in the North End. Wednesdays A weekly look towards a post-pandemic future. One of those artists is Broms-Jacobs, who performs with such organizations as the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Fierbois duo, often in the city's older, more centrally located churches that now serve partially as music venues. 'It's an open-minded, artistic, sensitive town … new ideas can flourish because it's not so crushingly expensive,' she says. 'And in the (15 years) that I've been here, I've just noticed such an amazing increase in diversity in the way that Torontonians think of diversity — in the international sense.' To see the full list of Winnipeg's 2025 Jane's Walk and to register visit The events are all free. Supplied Winnipeg-based oboist Caitlin Broms-Jacobs is Jane Jacobs' granddaughter. Conrad SweatmanReporter Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Boston Globe
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
The 60-year-old book that can help cities reduce gun violence
What are the conventional wisdoms that have gotten us into this mess? The conventional wisdom of the left views gun violence as being largely about guns. The best available data suggests there is truth to this view: If there were some way to disappear the 400 million guns in America (a country of 330 million people), murders would decline substantially. But we can all see what the politics of gun control look like, especially at the national level. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up The left also tends to see gun violence as due to bad economic conditions, driven by desperate people doing whatever it takes to feed their families. But ending the big 'root causes' of these conditions — such as poverty, segregation, social isolation — is complicated, leading to a sense that gun violence is 'too big to fix.' Advertisement The conventional wisdom on the right says gun violence is due to intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. That's led to policies that try to disincentivize gun violence with the threat of ever-longer prison sentences. The result of following this approach has been the highest incarceration rate of any nation and a murder rate unheard of in any other rich country. Advertisement We have the worst of all worlds. So what should we do? We should look back to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' Jacobs noticed that within her home city of New York, similarly poor areas wound up having dramatically different levels of violence. That means gun violence isn't determined purely by root causes like poverty. It also means gun violence can't be due just to people's moral character (surely that doesn't vary by neighborhood) or to the criminal justice system or gun laws (since those are the same everywhere within the same city). What does make a difference? Jacobs argued that similarly poor neighborhoods had such different levels of violence in large part because they differed in the degree to which they had residents out and about, and willing to step in to interrupt trouble before it escalated. She called this 'eyes on the street.' Jane Jacobs in the 2016 documentary film "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City." Courtesy of IFC Films Notice that conventional wisdom suggests eyes on the street should be largely irrelevant to violence. The left and the right implicitly share the core assumption that before anyone ever pulls a trigger, they engage in some deliberate weighing of the pros and cons. Conventional wisdom suggests violence interrupted is merely violence delayed. But conventional wisdom misunderstands what most shootings are. Most shootings start with words — arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun. Advertisement Whatever people are doing in the middle of a heated argument, it's most definitely not a careful, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. In those moments, most of us are instead acting emotionally, almost automatically. This connects to an important lesson from behavioral economics, as summarized in the wonderful book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. All of us engage in two types of cognition, but we're only aware of one. The 'voice in our head' that we usually think of as 'thinking' can indeed be rational, deliberate, and calculating. Kahneman calls it 'system 2.' But that type of thinking is slow. So our minds also carry out a different type of thinking — 'system 1' — that happens below the level of consciousness. It's a set of automatic responses designed to work well for routine, low-stakes things we encounter daily, but it can get us into big trouble in high-stakes situations — as when a gun is present. This is why eyes on the street are so important: System 1 motivation for gun violence is fleeting. In other words, violence interrupted is usually violence prevented. Many rigorous studies support this view. Anything that gets more eyes on the street reduces violence. That's why police walking the streets prevent violent crime. They don't just make arrests but also interrupt violence. The same is true of private security guards in a neighborhood. But critically, having eyes on the street is also about things we don't normally associate with gun violence prevention at all. It means we need to ensure that poor neighborhoods have stores that draw people out of their homes. We need to clean up abandoned lots to make inviting places for people to spend time. We need to ensure public areas are well lit. Advertisement These may seem like small things — distractions from what conventional wisdom has been arguing for. But the data suggests each of these urban planning policies can have impacts on violence that are remarkably large — reductions of 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent. When taken together, these measures accumulate into massive, almost transformative differences. For example, on the South Side of Chicago, where I live, there are two adjoining neighborhoods — Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore — with nearly identical levels of poverty and similar demographics. They are governed by the same gun laws and criminal justice system. What's different is that South Shore has fewer vacant lots, less disorder (like graffiti) that discourages people from coming outside, and 50 percent more land devoted to stores and other commercial uses. And on a per capita basis, shootings are just half as common in South Shore as in Greater Grand Crossing. Solving the problem of gun violence in America will require us to see more clearly what it is and what causes it. That points to surprising solutions — including the vital importance of urban planning. Urban planning is all about shaping the figurative health of our communities. But it also turns out to be vitally important for ensuring the literal health of our communities. Jane Jacobs can show us how.
