We recently discovered, thanks to the del.icio.us of the friends of
Straddle3
, the ‘life and work’ of Jane Jacobs. The cliché is well used, because life and work seem to be two inseparable elements in the figure of Jane Jacobs: urban planner, writer and American activist of Canadian origin known, among other things, for the publication in 1961 of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, a critique of the rationalism of American urban renewal policies of the 50s, as well as a plea for a dense, complex city open to the effective participation of communities and citizens in its government and management.
Earlier this year,
The Municipal Art Society
of New York organized an exhibition entitled
Jane Jacobs and the future of New York
with which they wanted to update her legacy at a historical moment that has important similarities with the one she herself experienced due to the volume and importance of the urban operations that are being carried out in ‘the Big Apple’. But gentrification processes and abusive urban plans are not exclusive to New York and seem to occur in all large cities that compete in the global market; Josep Maria Montaner, published in
El País
this article in which he talks about the exhibition dedicated to Jane Jacobs and established some parallels between the history of New York and Barcelona, from the Porciolist excesses to the current neighborhood struggles in Poble Nou, Ciutat Vella or Barceloneta.
The expo website contains a huge amount of information, among which the videos of the different conferences that were organized stand out; however, one of the sections that has most caught our attention is that of the educational service, which proposes, among other things, that students create subjective maps of their neighborhoods, analyze official maps and the information they provide, comparing it with the information they themselves have generated, or that they go out into the streets to observe, record and analyze what happens in them, or invite members of neighborhood associations and movements and activists to the class.
Almost automatically, we are assailed by the doubt of whether a pedagogical proposal of this type would even be “thinkable” in many of the schools in our cities, at a time when schools seem increasingly closed in on themselves due to legal restrictions and the “demonization” (largely media-driven) of student, parent and mother groups (on the other hand, the “Open Centers” policy that cedes their facilities during weekends for citizen use has little to do with a center project that is truly integrated into the social fabric of a neighborhood and sensitive to its problems and urban life). Even less feasible does it seem to us the possibility of promoting from schools the participation of students in neighborhood demands or, simply, that they get involved in urban issues (however paradoxical it may be that students are also a group directly affected by the decisions of urban planners, politicians and planners). In this regard, we always remember the refusal of the director of the IES Joanot Martorell to even address, from an analytical perspective, the transformations that the Pla Caufec was going to have for the students who participated in
projecte3*
and for the center itself, which is in the middle of this urban operation, one of the most important in the metropolitan area of Barcelona and one of the most controversial. Seeing how educational centers entrench themselves in their function as mere administrators of official knowledge (a task that is mistakenly, although not disinterestedly, intended to be “politically neutral”), rejecting any involvement in aspects that directly affect students in their daily lives, it seems that the committed spirit of Jane Jacobs currently falls very far from our schools…