Written in 1961 (and still relevant today), “The Death & Life of Great American #Cities” is a classic #book that brilliantly attacked conventional design, planning, construction, policy & finance approaches & suggests an alternate #diversity & vitality-based approach for #citymaking & #inclusive #economicdevelopment. I am officially a Jane Jacobs #fangirl. My long summary:
1. JACOBS ATTACKS THE CITY DESIGN, PLANNING, CONSTRUCTION, POLICY & FINANCE PROFESSIONS WHO THINK ABOUT CITIES TOO SIMPLY, NOT ANCHORED IN HOW THEY ACTUALLY WORK—WHICH CAN KILL THEM. Planners & architects of city design have gone to great pains to learn with the saints & sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work, & what ought to be good for people & businesses in them. They take this with such devotion, that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside. (8)
2. LIVELY, PRODUCTIVE CITIES ARE PROCESSES OF ORGANIZED COMPLEXITY—WHERE CITIZENS ARE EXPERTS TO ENGAGE: To solve a problem, we have to understand what kind of problem it is (432) although the interrelations of cities’ many factors are complex, there is nothing accidental or irrational about the ways in which these factors affect each other. (434) however, conventional city planning mistakes cities as problems of two variable systems, with ratios of one thing, such as open space, depending directly, & simply upon an immediate ratio of something else such as population. (435-6) Objects in cities – whether they are buildings, streets, parks, districts, landmarks, or anything else – can have radically different effects, depending on the circumstances & contexts in which they exist. (440)
City processes in real life are too complex to be routine--always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars, & there is no substitute for knowing the particulars. (441) The awareness of unaverage clues – or awareness of their lack – is again something any citizen can practice. City dwellers, indeed, are commonly great & informal experts, on precisely the subject. (443) City vitality cannot be pursued unless those responsible for diagnosis, for advising tactics, for recommending actions, & for taking out actions, know what they are doing. They must know it is not in some generalized way, but in terms of the precise & unique places in a city with which they are dealing. Much of what they need to know they can learn from no one but the people of the place, because nobody else knows enough about it. (410) the invention [in government] required is not a device for coordination at the generalized top, but rather an invention to make coordination possible where the need is most acute – in specific & unique localities. (418) The larger, the more impersonal, the more incomprehensibly, big city government becomes, & the more blurred in the total localized issues, needs & problems become, the more attenuated & ineffectual, becomes either citizen action or citizen supervision. (423)
3. DIVERSE CITIES ARE GENERATIVE ENGINES FOR THE ECONOMY, IDEAS, & UPWARD MOBILITY: A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people & many greenhorns into confident citizens. (288) Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems & needs outside themselves. (448) Isn’t wide choice & rich opportunity the point of cities? (116) the cities very wholeness in bringing together people with communities of interest is one of its greatest assets, possibly the greatest. (119). To generate exuberant diversity in a city streets & districts, four conditions are indispensable: first, the district must serve more than one primary function, preferably more than two. These must ensure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules. Second most blocks must be short; That is streets & opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. Third, the district must mingle buildings that vary in age & condition. Fourth, there must be sufficiently dense concentration of people for whatever purposes there may be there. The necessity of these conditions is the most important point this book makes. In combination these conditions create effective economic pools of use. All four in combination are necessary to generate city diversity; the absence of any one of them frustrates a district’s potential. (150-1) The main responsibility of city planning & design should be to develop – in so far as public policy & action can do so – cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, & opportunities to flourish, along with the flourishing of the public enterprises. (241)
4. ENABLING MULTI-USE IS ESSENTIAL; ZONING FOR SINGLE USE IS DEATH: Decentrist, bad ideas we are taught about city design are a recipe devised for undermining their economies & killing them (21) The most important question about city planning is how can cities generate enough mixture among uses – enough diversity – throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilization? (144) Failed or failing city areas are in trouble not so much because of what they have (which can always be regarded as a base to build upon), but because of what they lack. massive single uses in cities form borders, & borders in cities usually make destructive neighbors, forming dead ends & barriers for most users of city streets (257-9) Parks with only one significant use, & therefore only used for certain times of day, can become a vacuum most of the day & evening. Into it comes what usually fill city vacuum – a form of blight. (97). For example, the usual form of rescue for a decayed waterfront vacuum is to replace it with a park, which in turn becomes a border element – usually appallingly under used, as might be expected – & this moves the vacuum affect inland. (266-268)
Primary use mixtures must be effective – the people using the streets a different times must actually use the same streets – if they are to generate diversity. (163) insufficient primary mixture is typically the principal fault in our downtown & often the only disastrous basic fault. They have become too predominantly devoted to work, & contain too few people after working hours. Without a strong & inclusive, central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interest isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater socially culturally, & economically than the sum of its separated parts. (164-5) American downtowns are not declining mysteriously. They are being witlessly, murdered in good part by deliberate policies of sorting out leisure uses from work uses under the misapprehension that this is orderly city planning. (171) The purpose of zoning for deliberate diversity should not be to freeze conditions & uses as they stand. That would be death. Rather, the point is to ensure the changes or replacements, as they do occur, cannot be overwhelmingly of one kind. (253)
5. WELL-USED STREETS & SIDEWALKS ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF TOLERANCE, CITY SAFETY, PUBLIC LIFE, & CHILD REARING: A well used city street is apt to be a safe street. it is futile to try to evade the issue of unsafe city streets by attempting to make some other features of a locality, say interior courtyards, or sheltered place spaces, safe instead. (35) Street crime becomes easier with added emptiness. (45) the trust of a city street is formed over time from many little public sidewalk contacts. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. (56) it is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from oneself, & even, as time passes, unfamiliar public terms with them. (62) public contact on sidewalks & public safety, taken together, bear directly on our country’s most serious social problem – segregation & racial discrimination. (71) tolerance & the room for great differences are possible & normal only when streets of great cities allow strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized, but essentially dignified & reserved terms. (72) Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partially because city sidewalks are conveniently considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel, & access to buildings, & go unrecognized & unrespected as the uniquely, vital & irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life & child rearing that they are. (87)
6. OLD & NEW BUILDINGS ARE NEEDED FOR DIVERSITY OF ENTERPRISES & POPULATION: Cities need old buildings so badly. It is probably impossible for vigorous streets & districts to grow without them. If a city has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist they are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. (187) Chain stores, chain, restaurants & banks, go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants & pawnshops go into older buildings. (188) Standardization of buildings is fatal, because great diversity & age & types of buildings has a direct explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises & diversity of scenes. (212) Density should be raised in new buildings gradually rather than in some sudden cataclysmic upheaval to be followed by nothing more for decades. (216)
7. TO GROW THE MIDDLE CLASS CITIES MUST VALUE RESIDENTS BEFORE THEY ARE MIDDLE CLASS, INVESTING IN LOW INCOME AREAS: People who cannot be housed by private enterprise have been turned into a statistical group with peculiar shelter requirements, like prisoners, on the basis of one statistic: their income. The statistical group has become a special collection of guinea pigs for Utopians to mess around with. (324) One of the unsuitable ideas behind “projects” is the very notion that they are “projects”, abstracted out of the ordinary city & set apart. The aim should be to get that fabric, that patch upon the city, re-woven back into the fabric – & in the process of doing so, strengthen the surrounding fabric too. (392) Cities need not “bring back” a middle-class, & carefully protect it, like an artificial growth. Cities grow the middle-class. But to keep it as it grows, to keep it as a stabilizing force in the form of a self diversified population, means considering the cities people valuable & worth retaining, right where they are, before they become the middle class. (282) When they develop choice (400) people must be permitted to stay by choice, which means the maximum income limits must be ab&oned. (401)
8. CONVERT CATACLYSMIC USES OF MONEY INTO CONSTRUCTIVE FORCES: There are three kinds of money in cities. First, the credit extended by conventional, non-governmental lending institutions. The second is money provided by the government. The third is money that comes from a shadow world of investment, an underworld of cash, & credit so to speak. The third type is most notable for financing exploitative conversions of humdrum buildings to slum buildings at exorbitant profits. This money shapes cataclysmic change in cities. Relatively little of it shapes gradual change. (293) Given enough federal funds & enough power, planners can easily destroy city primary mixtures faster than these can grow in unplanned districts, so there is a net loss of basic primary mixture. (177) It is so easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic or immigrants, or the whimsies of the middle-class. The decay of cities goes deeper & is more complicated. It goes right down to what we think we want & into our ignorance about how cities work. The forms in which money is used for city building – or withheld from use – are powerful instruments of city decline today. The forms in which money is used must be converted to instruments of regeneration – from instruments buying violent cataclysms to instruments buying continual, gradual, complex, & gentler change. (317)
In addition to what’s highlighted above this book prompted a variety of different applied thoughts for me:
· Why return to work alone after the pandemic won’t help DC’s downtown and why keeping the Caps and the Wizards in downtown DC is important (and not sending them to the suburbs thinking a new football stadium in a different part of the city is the answer).
· Some of the same simplistic views of how to “fix” low income parts of DC are still widespread today that are inhibiting inclusive growth: “Unslumming is at the very least directly – as well as indirectly – inhibited by discrimination. Generation after generation, non-slummed dwellers stick to the same foolish ideas about slums & slummed dwellers. The pessimist always seems to feel there is something inferior about the current crops of slummed dwellers themselves, & can point out supposedly dire differences that distinguish them from previous immigrants. The optimist always seem to feel that there is nothing wrong with slums that could not be fixed by housing & l& use reform & enough social workers. It is hard to say which oversimplification is sillier.” (285-86)
· I also find it ironic that L’Enfant Plaza in DC is named after L’Enfant. L’Enfant would have hated that single use area of DC. “Washington’s government capital is turning away from the city; the government buildings are being concentrated together, & separated from the buildings of the city. This was not l’enfant’s idea. (173)”
· With the CHIPS Act there is a historic amount of investment going into regions around the country to revitalize areas and turbocharge regional economic development. As Jacobs notes, “There is a widespread belief today that city problems can be solved better if only the territories involved & problems entailed are made larger still, & can therefore be attacked more broadly. A region, someone has said, is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problem we found no solution. (408-410) this is a simple statement of a basic fact about disorganized complexity; it is much like saying that a large insurance company is better equipped average out risks than a small insurance company. (438)”. This makes me reflect on how I hope those programs are designed to provide gradual money that builds on existing ingredients for diversity and vitality.
· Why the vibrancy of cities can be threatening to some: “By its nature the metropolis provides what others could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions & undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance. There is no better proof of this fact than the attempts of all totalitarian authorities, to keep the strange from their subjects. (238)”