The Medium Is the Message: Recent Interpretations of Jane Jacobs and Cities AkkermanAbraham (2020). The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard: Contraction and Meaning in City Form. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 226 + xii pp., bibliography, index, $84.00 (hardcover), $86.00 (ebook).LangGlenna (2021). Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania. New York: New Village Press. 403 pp., acknowledgments, notes, index, $39.95 (hardcover).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jane Jacobs, Ebenezer Howard, mid-sized cities, urban typologies, urban design While the high tide of scholarship about Jane Jacobs has retreated since 2016, the hundredth-year anniversary of her birth, which saw the several publications and a host of symposia, the famed urbanist's life and legacy have continued to offer up new interpretations and revelations.Two recent books present the spectrum.In Glenna Lang's Jane Jacobs's First City, we encounter young Jane-the Girl Scout, teenage flaneuse, and aspiring writer-amidst the daily social and economic realities of Scranton, Pennsylvania in the Roaring Twenties.In Abraham Akkerman's The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard, the mature Jacobs appears as an "urban seeress" following in the footsteps of Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, "within an historical continuum of female oracles specifically focused on cities or other forms of the built environment" (pp.200, 202).Together, the two authors suggest a chronological albeit peculiar biography, insofar as their respective approaches and resulting portraits could not be more different.Lang's Jacobs is seen as if through an old but beautifully restored movie reel, where a vibrant figure reappears from the past in surprisingly high resolution.Akkerman's portrait is an impressionistic painting of a symbolic woman, an archetypical Jungian anima vaguely materializing out of the ancient past, not real but illustrative.Neither book, however, is a biography per se.One of the few things the authors have in common is that in both books, Jane Jacobs is but one character in an expansive urban history.As their titles indicate, Lang also presents a biography of the coal-mining town where Jacobs grew up, while Akkerman's reveals urban planning patterns found in the history of cities since time immemorial.Many important parts of Jane Jacobs's biography are known to us thanks to Glenna Lang.Her first book on Jane Jacobs, Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (2009), was written for young adult readers but remains one of the best biographies of the urbanist, deeply researched and groundbreaking.Success follows success with Jane Jacobs's First City, a masterwork of archival research and scholarly perseverance that at last provides readers with the chapter heretofore missing from Jane Jacobs's 19013J UHXXX10.1177/00961442251319013Journal of Urban History XX(X)Review Essay
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".