The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs (2 of 2)
This followup post on the Jacobs book was intended to do my usual thing, where I just bullet-list all the important lessons I could remember from the book. I let it sit so long that I'm not really in the mood to do that anymore. (The original post, where I apply some of the principles to Paris.)
Buy The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
A short-list of that nature:
Borders are places where the natural flow of the city is cut of forcefully, as by huge institutional edges (like Columbia's campus edge), railroad tracks, rivers, or sharp discontinuities in neighborhoods (like where Soho ends and the Courts District begins).
Borders are bad, because people cross borders less than they cross inside borders. Why set up a restaurant at a border? Your customers zone will be all to one side. So border areas go dead, spiral downward, and become hard to revive.
Sidewalks should be wide, since they are the site of temporary, diverse activity throughout the day by the citizens. Don't give it all to cars -- they usually don't stop and play, sing a song, eat an ice cream cone, chat, etc. People do. And that adds to the vitality of a street.
Vitality begets safety. If there is interest, there are people and casual observers keeping a place safe.
Life attracts life.
Commerce is a kind of life, and it should be encouraged like any other. Joe the Butcher handing Alice the meat...
Everything can happen in one place. You don't need super-wide roads or distant playgrounds. Build little roads and wide sidewalks and everything will get along together. It will self-regulate the traffic and safety issues better than an urban planner could.
Urban planning of the 1950s/60s variety tended toward monopolizing or dominating "uses" for land and space. But monopolized uses like a giant housing project with a giant park neighboring it, with a giant office park...are not flexible. And they are not diverse. Both of which are necessary to keeping a place vital.
Flexibility is important because things change. When a neighborhood's basic convenience as a "garment district" starts to wane, you need to be able to convert it quickly to the next best idea. Otherwise, you are left with a rotting post-industrial ghetto.
Government has a role in this - things are not to be laissez-faire. Government needs to seed small organizations and give little loans to owners in depressd districts, provide meeting areas for community organizations, combine together the common interests into large projects where needed, but operate on defeasible programs that can be modified by various groups.
Times of day are as distinct as parts of a city. If an area bustles at noon, that is fine -- but it needs to bustle in the evening too. If not, the character of the zone will be impacted by that imbalance. The daytime restaurants will be less interesting, as they focus obsessively on making money by the end of lunch hour. And in the night, the area will be dangerous.
The best way to ensure continuous usage is to integrate diverse uses, since all uses have time-of-day preferences. Office workers lunch at 12pm, moms promenade with babies at 1pm, children come home from school and play at 3pm, rush hour at 5pm, dinner dates at 7pm, after-theater crowds at 9pm, the occasional bar-goer at 11pm, the club kids at 1am, until the fishmonger opens up at 4am, etc.
Now for a reflection. Is Jacobs a liberal or a conservative? Search the web and you will find a number of libertarian-leaning conservatives claiming her as their champion. And the style of building she opposes was a product of the FDR economic policies. Robert Moses wasn't quite a part of either party, but NY was a heavily Democratic town as he reigned. And the broad political concepts that underlie his policies--of technocrats and central planners--do reek of communist-style collective construction.
But they were Eisenhower's highway projects too, and the suburbs of today are not a great liberal cause. Far more likely, if you read the Weekly Standard's David Brooks, you will see their praises sung by conservatives. Jacobs is a critic of bad city rehab, but also of the very premise of suburbs and their design. She wasn't anti-automobile, but her book is anti-highway. And you will find it hard to argue that Greenwich Village is a utopian model of modern libertarian conservativism.
It's much more like the Paris Commune of 1871.
Libertarian tendencies in fact are more often associated with Montana ranches and private islands. In principle why shouldn't a libertarian think the great stinking frolic of New York is free living in action?
Because of all the rules, I'd imagine. All the "Don't even think of parking here" signs, cops at intersections, public-funded sewage and water, state-mediated personal relations, mass transportation, etc. Cities are ways of collective living. A premise of Jacobs' book is that cities are anonymous places, unlike towns. And in the space created by that anonymity is the role of the state.
But still the book advocates individualism, freedom, competition and market forces over state planning, centralization, idealized fascistic governments etc.
The underlying doctrine embraces competitive capitalism, and shows that there is a liberal doctrine of capitalist social order out there. This is an encouraging reminder. The extreme left is still stuck opposing capitalism, when I'm sure nobody sane really wants to say such things. Competition and freedom are good ideas, especially when put to the problems of large-scale social living. Concentrations of power, monopolies, paternalism -- those are the dangers.
Posted by amol at May 22, 2003 06:11 AM
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