No Need for Acolytes

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Posted 24 Aug 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs

I came across this National League of Cities column through Planetizen.com. It’s great advice for  Jane Jacobs fans and detractors alike.

Emerging Issues: Wrestling With Jane Jacobs

by Bill Barnes

Jane Jacobs wrote one of the most influential urban affairs books of the 20th century.

“Death and Life of Great American Cities” — published in 1961 and still in print today — has become a talisman, cited by many and sundry to advance their views and proposals. Jacobs, who died in 2006, is an icon of the field, and new books explore her ideas and narrate her activities.

Jacobs’ views have become “the common wisdom of our time,” says Paul Goldberger, a prominent architecture critic.

have changed dramatically since 1961. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Death and Life,” it’s surely time now to celebrate her accomplishments and also to think freshly about her ideas, about what we assume is actually going on in cities, and about what we believe is correct and desirable about cities.

Jacobs’ views have become, often unacknowledged, part of the regular vocabulary of planning and urban development. Take, for example, the idea that a street with storefronts and residences and lots of pedestrians is safer than a deserted one because there are people around to watch over it. Or, the idea that mixing uses in dense, complex places is preferable to isolating dwellings from shops and parks from workplaces. Or, the notion that development should evolve from existing uses, rather than by governmentally planned, wholesale clearance and new construction. All of those and more can be found in “Death and Life.”

The very first paragraph of “Death and Life” promises “an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding.” At mid-century, that orthodoxy included urban renewal and highway construction, and it was carried out through such elements as big projects, separation of uses, and “blight” designations followed by clearance. Jacobs’ writing and her activism in New York City’s Greenwich Village contributed immensely to the unraveling — but not the disappearance — of that approach. The book bristles with pointed criticisms and sharp analyses that aim to burst the modernist orthodoxy.

It’s a wonderful book, strongly written, and well-worth reading today.

More people should read the book before they cite Jacobs as an ally for their projects. One recent writer confessed to relying on second- and third-hand sources and to referencing “Death and Life” in support of “whatever I was working on.” Upon actually reading the book, she concluded that the “New Urbanism” movement’s implied claim to Jacobs’ approval is unwarranted. Goldberger complained that Jacobs’ ideas are being used to support purposes “deeply inconsistent with her values.”

Since 1961, cities have changed and the conventional wisdom has changed. How, then, to think anew about ideas that are so widely and implicitly shared?

In “Death and Life,” Jacobs herself provided useful recommendations.

First, she warned her readers against unexamined, preconceived notions, including her own vigorously argued ideas. She encouraged readers to “constantly and skeptically test what I say against [their] own knowledge.”

Second, she urged people who are interested in city life to think inductively and “look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether threads of principle emerge among them.” The page after the table of contents in “Death and Life” announces this approach to the reader. It is labeled “Illustrations.” (The book has no illustrations. It also has no charts or graphs or tables of statistics.) The page declares: “For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”

Third, Jacobs cautioned against over-generalization. She said that we should know which thing we’re talking about. That is, she knew that “Death and Life” is “concentrated on great [that is, very big] cities, and on their inner areas.” Thus, she also knew what she wasn’t talking about: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban. Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities.”

We now need studies that follow Jacobs’ advice: closely observed, fearless studies of the way things do or don’t function on the ground in big cities and also in towns, suburbs and little cities, and regions. We don’t need acolytes of Jane Jacobs; we need people who will think as hard and as well as she did about “the kind of problem a city is.”

Bill Barnes (barnes@nlc.org) is the director for emerging issues at NLC.

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Jane’s Last Letter?

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Posted 09 Aug 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs

Downtown Express photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio, 2004

Jane Jacobs moved from New York to in 1968 (to make sure her two sons were not drafted), but she continued to play close attention to the city that shaped her urban ideas and ideals.

The Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts recently shared the following letter, which may very well be the last one she wrote (at least publicly). The letter focuses on her (ultimately unsuccessful) objection to a rezoning proposal affecting Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Nevertheless, the arguments she puts forth are valid  to a wider audience.

Source: Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts

If you have trouble reading the scann of the original letter, here is a transcription of the text:

Jane Jacobs
69 Albany Avenue
, ON M5R 3C2
CANADA

April 15, 2005

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and all members of the City Council c/o City Council President Gifford Miller

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities, interested in learning why some cities persist in prospering while others persistently decline; why some provide social environments that fulfill the dreams and hopes of ambitious and hardworking immigrants, but others cruelly disappoint the hopes of immigrant parents that they have found an improved life for their children. I am not a resident of New York although most of what I know about cities I learned in New York during the almost half-century of my life here after I arrived as an immigrant from an impoverished Pennsylvania coal mining city in 1934.

I am pleased and proud to say that dozens of cities, ranging in size from London to Riga in Latvia, have found the vibrant success and vitality of New York to demonstrate useful and helpful lessons for their cities—and have realized that failures in New York are worth study as needed cautions.

Let’s think first about revitalization successes; they are great and good teachers. They don’t result from gigantic plans and show-off projects, in New York or in other cities either. They build up gradually and authentically from diverse human communities; successful city revitalization builds itself on these authentic community foundations, as the community-devised plan 197a does.

What the intelligently worked out plan devised by the community itself does not do is worth noticing. It does not destroy hundreds of manufacturing jobs, desparately needed by New York citizens and by the city’s stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy. The community’s plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide provisions for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor amateur sports, and pleasant facilities for those things. The community’s plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford. The community’s plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind and that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen, initiating spontaneous and self-organizing renewal. Indeed so much renewal so rapidly that the problem converts to how to make an undesirable neighborhood to an attractive one less rapidly.

Of course the community’s plan does not promote any of the vicious and destructive results mentioned. Why would it? Are the citizens of Greenpoint and Williamsburg vandals? Are they so inhumane they want to contrive the possibility of jobs for their neighbors and for the greater community?

Surely not. But the proposal put forth before you by city staff is an ambush containing all those destructive consequences, packaged very sneakily with the visually tiresome, unimaginative and imitative luxury project towers. How weird, and how sad, that New York which has demonstrated city successes enlightening to so much of the world, it seems unable to learn lessons it needs for itself. I will make two predictions with utter confidence: 1) If you follow the community’s plan you will harvest success; 2) If you follow the proposal before you today, you will maybe enrich a few heedless and ignorant developers, but at the cost of an ugly and intractable mistake. Even the presumed beneficiaries of this mis-use of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of the luxury towers may not benefit, misused environments are not good long-term economic bets.

Come on, do the right thing. The community really does know best.

Sincerely,

Jane Jacobs

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Stephen Goldsmith, Editor of What We See, in Gothamist

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Posted 05 Aug 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs, books

On Tuesday,  I posted a review of the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs.  As I mentioned in the review, one of the books editors was Stephen Goldsmith.  At the time of the book’s publication, Stephen wrote a post for Gothamist on the life  and legacy of Jane Jacobs.  Here is what he had to say:

Illustration by Robert Cowan

Here in New York, Jane Jacobs is best remembered for killing the Lower Manhattan Expressway project, and writing “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“. Why is her work still important today? Jacobs’ work is important today because her common sense approach to city building can empower others to be the experts of their places. She was ahead of her time in many ways, and particularly her understanding of the interconnected nature of our social, environmental and economic systems. Jacobs changed the way we think about cities and understood that cities are complex eco-systems that, when functioning well are resilient, cauldrons of innovation.

People who learn about her observations of the ballet of the street for instance never see our sideswalks the same again. The city becomes a stage, a place where our human interactions–both direct and indirect–animate our lives and our places. Another great example of Jacobs’ importance is the way policy makers and law enforcement personnel understand the importance of what she described as “eyes on the street.” After the failed bomb attempt in Times Square earlier this month a number of articles cited Jacobs’ wisdom, and how a couple of street vendors saved the day. Her importance is more important now than ever before because she empowers citizens to trust their instincts.

In “Death and Life”, she argued that lively mixed-used neighborhoods are the key to successful cities. If she was still alive today, what do you think she would think of the state of our city? One thing that those of us who had the privilege of time with Jacobs knew was to never second guess what she might think about anything. She was full of surprises, unexpected insight and never dogmatic. One thing I can share is that during her last visit to NYC in 2004 she remarked how vibrant she found the city to be. She came to deliver the first annual Lewis Mumford lecture at City College and filled the hall–standing room only.

Jane Jacobs’ urbanist philosophy seems to have largely been embraced by the current generation of city planners. Where do you think her ideas have had the greatest physical impact here in New York?One way to observe how her ideas are having the greatest impact, and there are many examples to be sure, are in projects such as Majora Carter’s efforts with Sustainable South Bronx , and Alexie Torres-Flemming’s work with Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. One might even make the case that the High Line project is an outgrowth of her sensibilities.

Consider the reclamation of these abandoned, neglected places and the new life they have, the way these places have learned to become something new. Jacobs ideas have catalyzed ways of thinking about preservation, about integrated uses that even manifest themselves in such things as local manufacturers capturing downstream waste for new materials, such as Ice Stone in Brooklyn. The integrated way she viewed cities, economies, ecologies and people encourages creative responses to complex problems.

Here is the link to the original post

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Book Review—What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

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Posted 03 Aug 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs, books

“You can observe a lot just by looking” —Yogi Berra.

Starting with her classic essay ‘Downtown is for People” and continuing in her seminal Death & Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs transformed urban thinking by building theories around her concrete observations, not the abstract theories that had dominated post-war urban thought. Jacobs advocated an integrated form of urbanism.

Jacobs’ approach was simply.  Observe the interdependence of people and structures in the city. Because of her, we think of cities differently. We understand that mixed-uses and pedestrian traffic are important. Few would argue these points. So what more can be said about Jane Jacobs? As it turns out, plenty.

In What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, 30 essayists try to make sense of their own cities or situations in light of what Jacobs’ observed in her books and other writings. The book is the joint work of the Center for the Living City and New Village Press and edited by Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth.

*        *        *

With 30 authors from a variety of backgrounds, contributing essays, the reader will be exposed to at least one or two new scholars, activists and thinkers. Sure, there are some of the expected heavy-hitters the fields of planning/design such as Jan Gehl, Janette Sadik-Kahn, and . But their observations are enhanced by the presence of some unique viewpoints, including a biologist, a youth minister, a playwright, and a PBS correspondent, among others.

While in another setting, this diversity could be confusing, it works here as a perfect tribute to Jane’s integrated approach to viewing the city. Indeed, these diverse voices reflect Jacobs’ observation that “it is fatal to specialize”* The extensive list of contributors mean that not only are multiple perspectives covered, but also many locations. Places such as Missoula, , Germany, and Mumbai are profiled. This captures a breadth of urban environments and dispels the notions that Jacobs’ work was only applicable to midtown Manhattan or downtown .

The essays are thoughtfully grouped into six sections: Vitality of the Neighbourhood; The Virtue of Seeing; Cities, Villages, Streets; The Organized Complexity of Planning; Design for Nature, Design for People; and Economic Instincts. Each section has four to six essays.

As they are too many essays to comment on each one separately here is a cross-section of some of my personal highlights that , reflect that diversity of the book:

  • “The Mirage of the Efficient City,” by economist Sanford Ikeda, touches on a pet peeve of mine: the quest by city halls to create a more ‘efficient city.’ In this essay, Ikeda reminds us that cities are inefficient in a good, necessary way.
  • In “Nine Ways of Looking at Ourselves (Looking “at Cities),” social activist Arlene Goldbard gives us a toolkit to help us emulate how Jacobs approached the observations of her urban environment.
  • “The Village Inside,” by urbanologists Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, re-imagines the Dharavi slum of Mumbai through the eyes of Jane Jacobs. This was a provocative pierce that illustrates how Jacobs’ observations are applicable almost everywhere.
  • Architect and professor James Stockard’s essay “The Obligation to Listen, Learn, Teach—Patiently,” highlights why it is important to connect with the public on planning issues; including the dry technical ones like zoning.
  • Janine Benyus applies the lessons of biomimicry to the ideals of Jacobs in “Recognizing What Works: A Conscious Emulation of Life’s Genius,” While a biologist, Benyus has a long connection with Jacobs; she studied Jacobs’ writing while learning how to write.
  • In “When Places Have Deep Economic Histories” sociologist Saskia Sassen looks at the intersection of the knowledge economy and 21st-century urban industry, and how cities can make their past work for their future.

The only essay that fell flat for me was Clare Cooper Marcus’s discussion of planning around children, but emphasizing the cul-de-sac. While it was undoubtably made to challenge preconceived notions of the suburbs, I could not see Jacobs’e agreeing at all with her observations.

One shocking omission is the lack of a political dimension. While there were contributions from past politicians, such as David Crombie and Jaime Lerner that danced around the political—in particular Lerner’s observation that “the idea that action should only be taken after all the answers and the resources have been found is a sure recipe for paralysis”—the essay avoided any overt political commentary.

Whether this is because be because of a narrow urban focus of the editors or a more intentional decision to make the book apolitical, it is a glaring absence. Jacobs never shied away from the most contentious politic issues of her time, whether it be her public battles with Robert Moses, moving to Canada to keep her sons from being drafted to fight in Vietnam or her published book supporting Quebec separatism.

Another shortcoming of the book was the study guide. I was looking forward to using these questions for a jumping of point for a series of blog articles. However, instead of following the conversational and intimate tone of the rest of the book—and of Jane’s own writings—the questions were academic and jargon filled, more appropriate for a final exam than a book club or blog post. Moreover, the questions are lumped together at the end, making it them seem an after-thought. They would have been more effective at the end of each essay, or even each section.

*        *        *

This book is timely. With the approach the 50th anniversary of Death & Life of Great , we need, more than ever, to advance our observations. Just as in 1961, we are struggling with an upheaval of how our urban areas function. The financial crisis spawned by the largely suburban mortgage meltdown has us rethinking how and where we live. The gulf oil spill highlighting the costs of even consuming domestic oil, has people talking about our addiction to the automobile.

I am amazed at how accurately she predicted much of our current situation in her last book Dark Ages Ahead. If anyone had any doubts before the global recession that Jacobs was right about the interdependence of everything, and the need for an integrated approach, they should be answered now.

At the dawn of the ‘century of the city’, we would do well to take another look at Jacobs examination of the urban environment. What We See does just that. And in doing so, it introduces a new generation of urban thinkers, who—while influenced by Jane—are developing a new generation of urban visions and strategies to cope with our new generation of urban problems.

I strongly urge you to read (and reread) this book. But, while doing so, please remember that the purpose of the of the book isn’t too simply to reflection on the observations Jane Jacobs. Rather it is to inspire each of us to advance our own observations of ‘what we see.’

*        *        *

Other reviews worth reading:

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’3 Questions’ with Jane Jacobs (3/3)

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Posted 30 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs

A few days ago, I came across a cool site called Qu3stions.  The site gives readers the opportunity to ‘listen in’ on short but illuminating conversations with interesting people.

While they normally ask questions of living people, they recently decided to take a different tack and profile Jane Jacobs. Instead of asking real-time questions, given that Jane Jacobs passed away in 2006, they instead took  three questions—and Jacobs’ answers—from some of her best interviews over the years. This week,  I am reposting each question and response.

The final question is from a March 2001 interview with James Howard Kunstler for Metropolis.

JHK: You lived through most of the 20th century and it must make for a dizzying view of contemporary history. For instance, you’ve seen pretty much the whole rise of the automobile from its days of stupendous promise before WWII to its utter savaging of the American landscape and townscape. Can you tell us how your own view of the automobile and its consequences evolved and if your view changed over the decades of your life.

JJ: Well, my family had an automobile before I was born even. My father was a doctor and he needed an automobile to get around. A generation earlier, it would have been a horse and buggy. This automobile was a tool of my father’s, just as much as the bag he carried. We never thought of it as an all-purpose conveyance.

For instance, if we wanted to go to downtown, which was two miles from where we lived in Scranton, we went down to the corner and got the streetcar. We were never chauffeured to things. When my father’s office hours started coincided with one of my brothers and me being in high school very close to where he worked, we used to ride down with him. And once in a while our family would take a trip. I remember when I was four years old going to Virginia in the car to visit his relatives. Oh and I saw how the White House lawn was cropped in those days – there were sheep on the lawn in those days.

I didn’t see the automobile as a pernicious thing. I saw what was happening to the roads as a pernicious thing – the widening of roads and the cutting down of trees and then later on of course knocking down buildings, existing buildings. It was the roads I saw as being the destroyers. Perhaps that is a foolish distinction to make. The automobiles weren’t running into the houses and knocking them down, the automobiles weren’t cutting down the trees and so forth. Again, I’m not an abstract thinker, as you can see. The immediate concrete thing was what the roads were doing.

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’3 Questions’ with Jane Jacobs (2/3)

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Posted 28 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs, Other

A few days ago, I came across a cool site called Qu3stions.  The site gives readers the opportunity to ‘listen in’ on short but illuminating conversations with interesting people.

While they normally ask questions of living people, they recently decided to take a different tack and profile Jane Jacobs. Instead of asking real-time questions, given that Jane Jacobs passed away in 2006, they instead took  three questions—and Jacobs’ answers—from some of her best interviews over the years. This week,  I am reposting each question and response.

Today’s question is from a 2003 interview Blake Harris (BH) for Government Technology. It has been widely reprinted.


BH: A prevalent view today is that the old Industrial Age economy is now being replaced by an Information Age economy and that this new economy will somehow work differently. Your book starts from a very different view: That economic life is always ruled by basic processes and principles that we have not understood properly.

JJ: Well, as for there being a new and an old economy, defined in the way you just did, I think that this is the change that people are groping for: A lot of the production work, design work, economic work that is being done now has a much higher proportion of what we call human capital in it and a much lower proportion of natural resources and other materials in it than in the past. And that is an important change that is very promising for sustainable economies because, after all, human capital – the experience, the skills, the inspiration, the imagination that goes into these things – is not a resource that is subject to the laws of diminishing returns. The more human capital is used, the more it grows.

The smaller the amount of material in things that are used, the metals and so on, and/or the cheapness and ubiquity of the materials that are used—I’m thinking of silicon for instance—the better. Better for the planet and better for us. So there is a change that has been occurring. It hasn’t occurred as abruptly as people think. It has been happening for quite some time. It is comparable and is of the same sort of order of change as the change from craftwork to mass production. There was a time when people made one pot at a time or one pottery lamp at a time. And of course that changed even in very ancient times to mass production of pots.

This kind of thing keeps happening in economic life. But that doesn’t mean that the rules that govern the economy are actually changing. What we’ve just been talking about are all instances of development. The actual things that development produces change, and even the methods by which people make the things change. But the process of development, the process that yields these methods—that doesn’t change. That is what we can’t transcend. And that is what we have to pay attention to.

I don’t think I’ve been complete in any way in describing everything to do with development. That is a huge subject. But what I have tried to do is mention the underlying or overriding nature of the process. And the word nature is deliberately used both ways here because it is a natural thing. It is universal. I see economic development as a form of natural development. It follows the same rules. What is develop ment in nature? It is differentiations that are arising out of prior generalities. This is what evolution is, or is a definition for it.

Even before evolution was worked out by Darwin and others, embryologists picked up glimpses of this process, for instance. And they arrived at that notion. It applies to the development of life, the development of species, both animal and plant, the development of an embryo of any kind, including our own. Also to inanimate sorts of development. The features on the face of the earth are differentiations arising out of previous generalities. And this is how economies develop too.

Long ago, when somebody picked up a stone and pounded a shell with it to get it open, the stone was a found generality. But when people began shaping the stone somewhat for various purposes, like prying open the shell or making a spear point, those were differentiations. And to move forward to today, the Internet is a differentiation from quite a number of generalities. So the second point about natural development is that as a new differentiation arises, it becomes a generality in its turn.

This is the second of three questions.  The first question can be found here. Tune in Friday, July 30th for question number 3.

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3 ‘Questions’ with Jane Jacobs (1/3)

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Posted 26 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Jane Jacobs

A few days ago, I came across a cool site called Qu3stions.  The site gives readers the opportunity to ‘listen in’ on short but illuminating conversations with interesting people.

While they normally ask questions of living people, they recently decided to take a different tack and profile Jane Jacobs. Instead of asking real-time questions, given that she passed away in 2006, they instead took  three questions—and Jacobs’ answers—from some of her best interviews over the years. Over the next three days, I will be reposting, each question and response.

First up is a question from Bill Steigerwald (BS) in a June 2001 interview for Reason:

BS: What do you think you’ll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?

JJ: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I’ve contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I’ve figured out what it is.

Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes.

Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.

I’ve gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn’t import less. And yet it has everything it had before.

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Jane Jacobs Medal Awarded to High Line Founders

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Posted 21 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Other

Yesterday, the Rockefeller Foundation announced the winners of the 2010 Jane Jacobs Medals. These medals are awarded each year to people whose work “creates new ways of seeing and understanding New York City.”

The 2010 recipients are Joshua David and Robert Hammond, the founders of Friends of the High Line, and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, a founder of the Central Park Conservancy.

David and Hammond received the 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism for their vision and collaboration to transform the once derelict High Line elevated railroad into one of New York City’s most unusual parks.

Rogers received the 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership.  Rogers was a pioneer for her work in park management and landscape beautification.  She is best known for her 16 years with the Central Park Conservancy

Along with the Medal, David and Hammond will receive $60,000 each and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers will receive $80,000.  David and Hammond will each give $20,000 of their winnings to Friends of the High Line. Rogers will continue her lifetime of commitment to landscapes and parks by donating her full $80,000 award to the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Click HERE for the full press release.

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Downtown is for People Download

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Posted 21 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Downtown is for People

For those who have been following my Downtown is for People series, here is the complete essay is a single pdf document:

Downtown is for people

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The citizen

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Posted 18 Jul 2010 — by Yuri Artibise
Category Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs

The final installment of Jane Jacobs‘  Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:

The citizen

The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men. Downtown has had the capability of providing something for everybody only because it has been created by everybody. So it should be in the future; planners and architects have a vital contribution to make, but the citizen has a more vital one. It is his city, after all; his job is not merely to sell plans made by others, it is to get into the thick of the planning job himself.

He does not have to be a planner or an architect, or arrogate their functions, to ask the right questions:

  • How can new buildings or projects capitalize on the city’s unique qualities? Does the city have a waterfront that could be exploited? An unusual topography?
  • How can the city tie in its old buildings with its new ones, so that each complements the other and re-inforces the quality of continuity the city should have?
  • Can the new projects be tied into downtown streets? The best available sites may be outside downtown—but how far outside of downtown
  • Does the choice of site anticipate normal growth, or is the site so fat away that it will gain no support from downtown, and give it none?
  • Does new building exploit the strong qualities of the street-or virtually obliterate the street?
  • Will the new project mix all kinds of activities together, or does it mistakenly segregate them?

In short, will the city he any fun? The citizen can he the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk. He should walk not only the streets of his own city, but those of every city he visits.

When he has the chance, he should insist on an hour’s walk in the loveliest park, the finest public square in town, and where there is a handy bench he should sit and watch the people for a while. He will understand his own city the better—and, perhaps, steal a few ideas.

Let the citizens decide what end results they want, and they can adapt the rebuilding machinery to suit them. If new laws are needed, they can agitate to get them. The citizens of Fort Worth, for example, are doing this now; indeed, citizens in every big city planning hefty redevelopment have had to push for social legislation.

What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely before has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that he likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

END

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading  this essay over the past several days.  If you want to read it in its entirety, click HERE.

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