Turf

Definition

Turf is Jane Jacobs's term for the fenced-territory system that fills rebuilt city districts where street safety has been junked: "Wherever the rebuilt city rises the barbaric concept of Turf must follow, because the rebuilt city has junked a basic function of the city street and with it, necessarily, the freedom of the city" (Jacobs 1961, p. 50). She borrows the term from the gang system — "a gang appropriates as its territory certain streets or housing projects or parks… Members of other gangs cannot enter this Turf without permission" (p. 47) — and shows it being adopted, first figuratively (guards), then literally, by developers: the cyclone-fenced project adjoining Johns Hopkins Hospital ("It looks not only ugly, in a deep sense, but surrealistic," p. 48), the padlocked, barbed-wired gate at Amalgamated Houses, the Corlears Hook–Vladeck juncture's "wide parking lot… a spindly hedge and a six-foot-high cyclone fence… a completely fenced-in no man's land some thirty feet wide consisting mainly of dirty blowing papers" (p. 48). "In the rebuilt city it takes a heap of fences to make a balanced neighborhood" (p. 48).

The concept's sociology is the fear that installs it: when Oak Ridge, Tennessee was demilitarized, "everyone in Oak Ridge had come… from unfenced towns or cities, yet stockade life had become normal and they feared for their safety without the fence" (p. 49); her ten-year-old nephew, born in Stuyvesant Town, "comments in wonder that anyone at all can walk on the street outside our door. 'Doesn't anybody keep track whether they pay rent on this street? Who puts them out if they don't belong here?'" (pp. 49–50). Turf is thus the design-locked form of the "togetherness or nothing" failure: without a working street to handle strangers, "people seem to get used very quickly to living in a Turf with either a figurative or a literal fence" (p. 49).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: Turf as the rebuilt city's negative anthropology (1961).

Related Concepts

• privatised-public-space — the concept's later-life descendant: the privately governed, access-controlled interior of the public realm.
• gated-community — the mature institution Turf prefigures: the fence as advertisement ("Your Own World in the Heart of New York," p. 48).
• eyes-on-the-street — the capacity Turf replaces and destroys: guarding without watching.
• separation-of-uses — the sorting doctrine's social extreme: price-tagged populations walled from each other ("price-tagged populace… lives in growing suspicion and tension against the surrounding city," p. 5).
• public-sphere — what Turf forecloses: "the freedom of the city."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's founding passages (Ch. 2, pp. 47–50): the gang system and Youth Board truces (p. 47); Commissioner Kennedy's "right of every person to walk any part of the city" (p. 47); the Baltimore cyclone fence and New York's barbed-wire gate (pp. 48–49); the Corlears Hook–Vladeck buffer anatomy (p. 48); Park West Village's "Your Own World" fence promise (p. 48); the Oak Ridge demilitarization episode (p. 49); nephew David's question (pp. 49–50); the Harvard Design Conference puzzle (p. 50); the freedom-of-the-city thesis (p. 50); the Stuyvesant Town bench incident (p. 49).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Jacobs ingest; awaits the gated-community and privatization literature the wiki holds (Dovey's enclaves, Soja's Carceral Archipelago) as the concept's later history.

Open Questions

• Jacobs presents Turf as reactive — the empirical substitute for failed streets ("They have little choice," p. 50). Later scholarship (Dovey, Soja's Carceral Archipelago) reads enclosure as an intentional power project. Which reading does the wiki's evidence favor — and can both be true of different actors?
• Turf normalizes in a generation (Oak Ridge). What does that habituation imply for privatised-public-space today: is the fenced project an aberration that got used to itself, or the terminal form of "togetherness or nothing" planning?