Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses and Me
Last night I went to see the excellent new documentary Citizen Jane, about urban planning pioneer Jane Jacobs, and it set my mind pinging like an old-school pinball machine. To be a great hero like Jane Jacobs, you need a powerful antagonist, and Robert Moses, the ultimate power broker, was hers.
But the film didn’t make me think about politics, it made me think about order. Robert Moses wanted to impose order in the form of big highway projects and housing developments. His idea of order was a design created on a blank canvas and then superimposed onto a chaotic city.
Jacobs, a mother and resident of the West Village, believed that there actually was order within the seemingly chaotic city, you just had to know how to look for it. The film has wonderful footage that takes you from a chaotic city street to an aerial shot and you can see the patterns emerge from the chaos.
On my website, I acknowledge that life is inherently chaotic and then explain that I want to help clients find the patterns that emerge from their particular chaos. Does this make me the Jane Jacobs of organizing? I wish. I do believe that change that is organic and acknowledges the reality rather than some external vision is more likely to take root and be sustainable.
If Robert Moses was an organizer, he’d probably call in the Dumpster and then take you to the Container Store and West Elm. Your home might look bright and shiny for a month, but I think you might be pretty depressed when you realized your family photos and your favorite chair were gone, and clutter started piling up again on your new furniture.
Life is messy. It just is. From birth to death, it’s full of muck and awkwardness and hormones. I can’t change that; I don’t even want to. I just want you to know at 7 a.m., when you’re arguing with your teenager, that your keys are on the hook, your MetroCard is in your wallet and you don’t need to go to the grocery store after work. Because dealing with a 15-year-old is all the chaos you need on any given Monday.