Jane Jacobs on Urban Socialization

Building communities of strangers

Image 1. Phyllis Twachtman, “White Horse Tavern,” New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. The West Village tavern was the well-known haunt of Jane Jacobs, who lived nearby in an apartment on Hudson Street.

Introduction

“Do you actually have friends?” AISH of The Messy Middle discounts third places as venues for maintaining friendships:

Your catch-up brunches aren’t doing anything for your friendship.

Sitting across from each other, sipping overpriced lattes, and trading life updates isn’t bonding - it’s just a status check. A way to keep the friendship on life support without actually doing anything to strength it.

You’re not building friendships; you’re curating a highlight reel. A perfectly staged performance - smiling over eggs, nodding at each other’s updates, pretending like this means you’re best friends. But it’s not reality. It’s an illusion of depth, a hollowed-out version of what friendship is supposed to be.

Consider this in conjunction with the meme of a narrowing European street with nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century architecture with the text, “third-space friendships are no better than screaming your life updates on Instagram stories and someone hearing them on the other side.” Abigail Weinburg responded in a note:

I actually disagree w this wholeheartedly. I don’t want to run half marathons with everyone I know, and I’m not going to cut people out of my life just because we only see each other over coffee. I love hanging out with friends, new and old, for a coffee or a drink and exchanging life updates. I’m not hiding anything or presenting a curated version of myself when I do this. I’m just enjoying being in the presence of other people. Like, it feels like this was written by someone who fundamentally doesn’t like their friends.

These comments remind me of the theory of socialization promoted by Jane Jacobs.

Urban Socialization in Death and Life

Jane Jacobs contrasted what I call urban socialization and suburban socialization. She explains urban socialization in Part One of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For Jacobs, the basis for urban socialization is “cheerful and tolerant” people engaging in persistent, often anonymous, low-impact contact. For urbanists who think that living in great cities is the basis for forming close friendships, Jacobs offers no support in Death and Life. A common gateway to urbanism is the higher education experience, where many enthusiasts claim that suburbia is anti-social and makes it hard to find friends. Yet Jacobs has a different critique of suburbia. She does not claim that suburbanites are anti-social losers without friends. On the contrary. She characterizes suburban socialization as “Togetherness,” a social “all or nothing,” in which few people walk the streets or gather in public parks. Instead, these social encounters are convened largely out of the public eye in living rooms and back yards.¹

Therefore, Jacobs does not claim that suburbanites lack social lives; rather, she claims that the social lives of suburbanites have a different character and are played out in highly private spaces, even if she is disapproving of this as the focus of social life. I believe her intuitions are correct about this. Given that I have seen various online urbanists claim that suburban dwellers are anti-social losers, this serves as an important corrective. The best arguments are truthful ones, even when truthful arguments fail to stir the feelings of the faithful. Urbanism is a minority movement. Like all minority movements, urbanism needs more urbanists, which implies that any urbanist minority growing into a majority movement will require that a large number of suburban dwellers and suburbanists to change sides. I am not urging kindness. I am urging truthfulness and fairness. Untruthful claims and arguments that are accepted by urbanists criticizing suburban life will more likely be rejected by suburbanites. Persuading the unfaithful will require critiques that are more truthful and more coherent.

In Death and Life, Jacobs is not writing a treatise about friendship. She is writing a treatise on the functions of great American cities and the street life contained therein. Nor does Jacobs devote much space to the concept of third places, a coinage and preoccupation of Ray Oldenburg published nearly three decades later. More often, Jacobs invokes mixed land use as a practical concern of conveniently-located retail as a means of provision, and not as places to convene with friends. Rather, Death and Life is a treatise on urban street life.

The Social Continuum

Prior to the publication of Death and Life in 1961, Jacobs wrote essays for magazines. she wrote at least two other books. The current essay does not advance a comprehensive interpretation of Jacobs’s work. She does discuss third places in Death and Life, but only in a few places. Of the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, Jacobs writes:²

Strangers become an enormous asset on the street on which I live, and the spurs off it, particularly at night when safety assets are most needed. We are fortunate enough, on the street, to be gifted not only with a locally supported bar and another around the corner, but also with a famous bar that draws continuous troops of strangers from adjoining neighborhoods and even from out of town. It is famous because the poet Dylan Thomas used to go there, and mentioned it in his writing. This bar, indeed, works two distinct shifts. In the morning and early afternoon it is a social gathering place for the old community of Irish longshoremen and other craftsmen in the area, as it always was. But beginning in midafternoon it takes on a different life, more like a college bull session with beer, combined with a literary cocktail party, and this continues until the early hours of the morning.

While friendship is important, many writers greatly exaggerate its importance within the context of urbanist discourse. What these two points of views about social contact can be understood in terms of the continuum of public and private life. Walking on streets and and riding public transportation are the best examples of the public side of the continuum. Living rooms and back yards are the best examples of the private side of the continuum. Retail stores and third places lie somewhere in the middle.

Death and Life hardly mentions friendship, and when it does, it does not invoke it as a means of community building. On the contrary. Jacobs shows much more interest in the way city streets treat strangers and the role that strangers play in reinforcing norms. Streets are public corridors, so it makes sense that Jacobs associates this with community building. Streets lie on the most public side of the public-private continuum, while homes lie on the most private side of public-private continuum. Within a homestead, front yards and porches are the most public parts of the property, while enclosed areas like back yards and living rooms are more private.

Retail stores and third places are mid-points along the public-private continuum. They are privately owned, so access can be controlled more than in streets, but they are less exclusive to other kinds of private spaces, such as homes. In third places, there are a variety of social gatherings possible. Family and friends can meet, acquaintances can run into each other, and strangers can have social contact at various levels of intensity.

Strangers play such an important role in the social lives imagined in Death and Life that strangeship should be invoked as shorthand for persistent, low-impact social contacts of urban neighborhoods that some social scientists characterize as “the strong bonds of weak contacts.” Not every meaningful social contact requires that we know people well or even know people at all. Riding a bus with other people is social activity. Talking with them about the weather is a slightly more intense strangeship activity. Socializing with people you don’t know at a neighborhood coffee shop can be low impact, but it is iterative if you see these people repeatedly. At the same time, strangeship often functions in public spaces, and aligns less well with private ones.

Thus, friendship aligns better with private spaces. So it makes sense that The Messy Middle in its endorsement of intimate friendship proscribes third places, which are liminal spaces that blur the lines between private and public. By contrast, Abigail Weinburg favors third places as appropriate venues for meeting friends. “Hanging out” suggests friendly social gatherings with less intense requirements and less exclusivity. Yet Weinburg does not critique more intimate friendships, nor excludes them as valid social activities, much less ridicule them. While arguably these less intimate friendships are less personally satisfying, they are more public, hence, more conducive to community building.

Jacobs makes the street into the basic urban unit; I make the neighborhood into the basic urban unit. Regardless of method, however, there is a unity of purpose among urbanists to build communities of place. Public and semi-public spaces are better than fully private spaces for the purpose of building urban neighborhoods. Whether third places are good venues for making and maintaining friendships is irrelevant to me. The public side of the public-private continuum is where community building happens, and urban neighborhoods are good models for community building.

1. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1989; New York: Random House, 1961), “Cheerful and Tolerant”: 30; togetherness: 62-8, 73, 79-80, 82, 138.

2. Jacobs, Death and Life, 40.