Blogging Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": the Need for Diversity in Usage and How to Achieve it

A city or a part of a city works well, according to Jacobs, when there is presence of people - inhabitants, workers, visitors, tourists - during the whole day and evening. She maintains that, in order to obtain such an effect, cities and parts of cities (districts, neighborhoods, etc.) must be diverse - diverse in usages, that is. It is very easy to contemplate that in an area, where people both live and work (not necessarily the same people, of course), people are present, in the streets, the whole time: people going to and from work, parents taking their children out for a stroll, people living there, enjoying their walk after work, people going out to dine or enjoy themselves in some other fashion.

This means that the city and its streets in particular are monitored by the city's dwellers at all hours - and also that people get many more chances to meet each other, to bump into each other, to discover people with similar interests or desires. Jacobs claims that there are four generators of such diversity: mixed primary uses, small blocks, old buildings, and concentration. Let me just write a few words for the first three generators of diversity - I will deal with the need for concentration on my next post on the book.

Mixed primary uses means that a part of a city cannot be solely a business district or an art center or residential. It needs to mix up at least two primary usages, in order for people to be frequenting it all day. This, in turn, means that many secondary uses can be developed, since there are many businesses that can thrive on a clientele present not only for a couple of hours a day (as is the case in business districts, for example), but can count on customers coming in any time of the day. Restaurants and cafes are a typical example of businesses that cannot be sustainable if they work for only two to three hours a day - their overhead, then, is too much for them to handle, they have to raise prices, which means they lose clients and, inevitably, they are forced to close. Conversely, if they can be sustained and be open all through the day, they can support new businesses or new residences, since the workers or the dwellers can count on these businesses for much of the coverage of their needs. They can also attract outsiders, which is of course very good for the local economy, leading to the opportunity for new businesses, and so on.

Small blocks are another generator for diversity, in that they allow many small streets to form and the people living in them get more opportunities to mingle and to follow different paths everyday to their work or to their bus stop. These small streets are also places for small businesses to appear and to assist in mixed primary or secondary uses, leading to the results just mentioned. If, on the other hand, blocks are large, people are reduced to taking one particular route for their everyday walks or strolls or to go to their work. Moreover, it is much more difficult for small businesses to develop, since the distances between a point on the opposite site of the block and the small business is so big, as to discourage potential customers from making the trip (as it often is) from their houses to that business, be it a restaurant, a barber shop, a small gallery, or whatever. Small neighborhood businesses in residential areas bring, of course, the mixed use Jacobs considers important to generate diversity. Jacobs attributes the development of Greenwich Village to the East (to what today is known as the East Village - remember, this book was published in 1961) and not to Chelsea, which was up to some point comparable to Greenwich Village in terms of its population's incomes, to the difference between the large blocks of Chelsea and the small ones in Eastern Village.

Old buildings or, rather, a mix of old and new buildings, seems at first glance an unlikely generator of positive diversity. However, one can understand that cheap buildings, cheap land in general, is required for many an upstart company, which cannot afford to pay expensive rents or buy a studio, an apartment or a store at a high price. Newer and more expensive buildings can be used by established businesses and the osmosis between small and big, upstart and established, proves mutually beneficial in almost all cases.

Blogging Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": The Uses of City Neighborhoods

Jacobs continues where she left off: having discussed the role of the streets and of neighborhood parks, she goes on about the role of the neighborhood itself as a self-governing (albeit not necessarily in a formal sense) body; this, of course, entails defining what constitutes a neighborhood. Surprisingly enough, Jacobs proposes that we think of city neighborhoods in three levels: a small neighborhood, centered around a street, a larger district, distinct within a city, and a whole city by itself.

This seeming contradiction is explained very well if one understands how cities function as a whole, as opposed to just being the sum of self-contained smaller units (neighborhoods or districts): one of the main properties of an urban center is that people can find, within the whole city, a sizable number of other people sharing their own interests or offering the specialized services (or even goods) they might desire. The potential for such specialization requires a significant concentration of people-potential customers, that only a city can offer. Moreover, there are governmental functions (such as policing, for example), that, most of the time, belong to the authority of the city government - which, however, cannot work properly if it is cut off from the actual neighborhoods. An important entity, then, to which all city dwellers look up, is the city itself.

On the other hand, street neighborhoods, i.e. neighborhoods on the smallest scale, cannot be defined solely through geographical borders and isolated (and insulated) from one another; if so, the whole sense of a city is lost for their inhabitants. They come about naturally, usually around a center which might either be a park or a church or a store, which many of the neighborhood's people frequent, and through the neighbors' interaction many parallel webs of relationships evolve, which result in the existence of a neighborhood. But small neighborhoods like that have little or no political clout; in the rare instances they seem to have more of an impact, that is due to some important person or institution (such as a college campus) living or situated in the neighborhood and, in that case, the neighborhood can only be dependent on the particular person's or institution's whims.

That is why Jacobs argues for another neighborhood level, the district, which can be understood as a number of street neighborhoods, in geographical proximity, which share more or less common problems - and usually has some political representation, in the form of electing a representative to the City Council. The chapter on the uses of city neighborhoods is filled with examples of organizations and mobilizations, mostly at the district level, which were effective in challenging decisions made at a central level. Moreover, organizations at the district level can be very helpful in informing central municipal authorities on the issues of the respective districts, serving as an intermediary between the Mayor or the Police Commissioner and the street neighborhood.

Again, in all three levels of neighborhoods, Jacobs stresses the various relationships that emerge from the daily interaction of the neighbors or of people of common interests or goals within a district or a city. She notes that it does take time for these relationships to be built and to become strong. She also observes that in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods such ties might be developed faster, but at the expense (crucially) of interaction with the bordering neighborhoods, which would form a strong network within a district. Apart from that, ethnical homogeneity would also mean the exclusion of newcomers not belonging to the dominant ethnic group and its breach would result in massive changes, having an indirect effect of making the neighborhood undesirable to those who had settled in because of its ethnic composition. Such changes, then, have an adverse effect on the process of building overlapping relationships and networks (which require time to begin anew) and, consequently, on the effectiveness of the neighborhood as such.

This chapter ends the first part of the book, titled "The Peculiar Nature of Cities". In sum, Jacobs argues that cities have their own properties which are markedly different than those of suburbs and should be treated as whole, diverse entities, rather than the accumulation of small, autonomous communities, particularly since the diversity and specialization in services or jobs afforded to city dwellers is their main motive for living in a city in the first place.

Blogging Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Neighborhood Parks

General introduction - disclaimer: I am involved with an independent run for the municipal elections in Athens, due next November. The group I support is called "Orange" and is led by Mr. Tasos Avrantinis, a very dear and able friend. Jane Jacobs' seminal book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", published as far back as 1961, contains observations which would be relevant even in today's Athens, since many of the problems facing the American cities of that period have causes and explanations common to most large metropolitan areas. Although Jacobs was not an architect or a city planner by trade (she was a journalist and actively opposed many of "master planner" Robert Moses' plans in New York City), her observations are very astute and her arguments are very convincing. I am beginning a series of posts, in which I intend to write down the basic points of her book's chapters, as I am reading them.

Neighborhood parks - introduction: Although the first specialized chapters in the book deal with the functions of sidewalks, my first post will be on the chapter addressing neighborhood parks. There is a very specific reason for this: a whole airport in Hellenicon, to the South of Athens, has closed. Its whole area (belonging to the Greek government) is double to that of Central Park in New York City. There are many voices calling for the establishment, in this area, of the largest municipal park in Europe. This concept reeks megalomania, of course, and is in no way sustainable (all the more so, given Greece's precarious current financial situation). 

Jacobs spends a very large part of her book contradicting the accepted wisdom of most city planners on many issues, the role of neighborhood parks among them. She uses a lot of empirical evidence to back her claims (much of which we can relate to with our own experiences half a century later), which are also supported by compelling arguments of reason. Her central thesis is that parks do not operate independently of their surroundings and do not add value to them by themselves. In fact, it is rather the other way round. And a prominent observation she makes is that with parks, most of the time, it's either very good or very bad, no middle ground. Parks can either be an extension of the neighborhood, in which case the flourish, or they can be cut off from it, in which case they become decrepit.

She gives many examples of parks which are filled with people all the time and contrasts them to many dilapidated parks, including many which had been planned and were expected to bring great value to their neighborhood. On general, it seems that parks, which are situated next to mixed-usage areas fare much better than parks situated in exclusively residential areas; parks situated near business areas fare even worse. The main reason for this is that, in mixed-usage areas, there are people at all times of day walk or wonder on the park. People going to work, people coming to work, mothers and children in the morning, mothers and children in the afternoon, people taking a lunch break from work, etc. 

Another very important aspect of parks, often overlooked in Greece (where we go to great pains to show how much green and trees we can plant in as little space as possible) is that the inside of the parks should be visible from the surrounding streets. That way there will be no dark parts, with the informal supervision afforded by the passers-by and the neighbors (which is the focus of one of the chapters on the role of sidewalks) available at all times. That is one of the reasons that most successful parks are rather small ones. Moreover, Jacobs proposes that general-themed parks should have variety in their settings and a center, which would be the area carrying the most activity in the parks. Their relationship to the sun is also important: the sun must, ideally, not be cut off from the park by very tall surrounding buildings.

Experience has proved that parks, which are not suitable for general, everyday use, can function as specialized parks with very good effect (swimming pools and skating rinks were hits in New York City, theaters and concert venues also). Jacobs also mentions parks, whose only function is to provide a visual relief for passers-by. Her examples are taken from the very small parks in San Francisco which have been set on corners created by the convergence of the streets.

I must also not fail to mention that Jacobs dispels the myth, that parks reduce pollution. She notes that it takes almost a small park to offset the carbon-dioxide emissions of four persons. If parks are designed to be too big, resulting in the metropolitan area widening up and the use of the automobile being required (as is the situation in Los Angeles), the effect on the environment is rather adverse.