John Keith asks why he should care about Jane Jacobs. "If you must," he writes, "go to a library and check out The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I gotta tell you, I couldn’t get through it, but maybe that’s just me."
I couldn’t disagree more. Not only did the book strike me as a thoroughly engrossing, engaging read, but an incredibly smart book that still speaks to the challenges of urban planning we face. I sang its praises after I first read it, so I needn’t repeat all I said. Instead, I’d like to consider one of the "rules" of urban design Jacobs proposes: after a certain minimum, the length of city blocks strangles urban vitality exponentially. Whereas the previous mentality believed that crime and decay were a product of small, cramped spaces and tight streets, Jacobs argued that it was in fact the long, uninterrupted blocks of urban planning and municipal buildings that sapped cities of the very activity needed to keep crime in check. Cross streets are needed to ensure pedestrian traffic and maximize the economic and social activity of a given area.
So many times in Boston I see this thesis being played out. I mentioned the other day the stretch of Washington St. in JP from Forest Hills to the Doyle’s interesection is a prime example. The casual observer would say that it’s the nature of business (industrial warehouses and gas stations) that keeps pedestrian activity and vital life away; ultimately, though, it’s the lack of cross streets that allow pedestrians to be traveling through the area en route to somewhere else. Break up the block with smarter zoning-parcel allotments and new side streets and I predict you’d get a transformation.
Or take the stretch of Cambridge Street in Cambridge running between Harvard and Inman Squares. Tony real estate all around, densely populated area, and close quarters to many pedestrians. Yet the area can’t sustain much more than a dying 50s style pharmacy and a florist with a sun-decayed window display. Yet the mystery is not so mysterious after all. Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Hospitals and other insitutional buildings take up sprawling blocks, interrupting the street plan from the surrounding neighborhood.
And of course there’s Government Center; John Daley and Jay Fitzgerald have worried that brick on parcels of the Big Dig Greenway will create another Govt. Center, but the main problem with the Center is not its brick paving but its obstruction of both car and foot traffic traversing the downtown area.
And that’s just one insight Jacobs offers. Her work can continue to inform both big-picture urban design issues and the nuts-and-bolts of municipal civil engineering, permitting and zoning.
Via John Keith, there’s more hagiography at 2Blowhards. Crooked Timber offers its two cents, including the spot-on observation that "people are so taken with Jacobs’s brilliance in “The Death and Life …” that they really really want to believe that she simply must fit into their own worldview somehow. Usually, she doesn’t."
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