Great American Cities Essay Example for Free

Great American Cities Essay Jane Jacobs’ 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities examines the problems with post-World War II urban planning and argue that cities should embrace visual and social diversity, interaction, and mixed uses in neighborhoods. She aims her most pointed criticisms at the disastrous urban renewal projects of the 1950s and ‘60s, which she argues disrupted neighborhood fabrics and worsened urban conditions instead of improving them. QUESTION ONE Jacobs argues that great cities require must look beyond simply neighborhoods and take a more holistic approach, with safe streets, clear delineations between public and private spaces, small blocks, and low-rise buildings from which the sidewalks are easily visible. Great urban environments literally start with the streets and sidewalks, where people interact with both one another throughout the day and the built environment. Vital cities need and should encourage social interactions, have a variety of uses (residential and commercial), should have spaces that allow such interaction (like safe streets and parks), and should embrace a degree of social and visual diversity. She also maintains that cities do not need to be decentralized or redistributed, as planners of the time were doing, and that planners must heed cities’ social and physical realities rather than imposing theories. Urban renewal projects often fail because they are too large in scale, lack diverse amenities (many were mostly commercial projects, for example), and were homogeneous spaces where social interaction did not frequently occur throughout the day. QUESTION TWO Forms of social interaction (other than those created by public spaces) like social organizations and residential classes help because they unite people from different backgrounds and neighborhoods, and ethnic organizations help assimilate and include newcomers, who often find urban life isolating and alienating. They need to transcend neighborhood and ethnic boundaries, as Jacobs says, â€Å"[City] people are mobile . . . [and] are not stuck with the provincialism of a neighborhood, any why should they be? Isn’t wide choice and rich opportunity the point of cities? † (Jacobs 116) Isolation, Jacobs claims, is bad for cities because it contributes more to crime and slum development than low income alone. QUESTION THREE Jacobs believes that post-World War II urban planners had good intentions but used inappropriate methods of dealing with cities, often because they adhered to theories instead of examining cities’ realities, which often contradicted the theories and principles they used. In addition, she claims they had an innate fear and disdain for cities, favoring suburbs (much like the federal government did, with highway construction and the FHA’s suburban bias) and applying methods to cities that overlooked the conditions necessary for social interaction and public safety. Planners often embraced urban renewal projects such as high-rise housing projects and large commercial complexes, which failed because their size discouraged easy monitoring of the sidewalks and streets, did not generate sufficient pedestrian traffic at all times of day, lacked a balance of amenities with residences, and promoted more danger and less use than needed to keep them vital. Jacobs argues that planners need to abandon what she calls their â€Å"superstitions† about cities, especially their dread of high density (which they think promotes slum growth). High density and overcrowding are not synonymous, and planners often struggled to accept visual diversity, considering mixed ages and types of buildings â€Å"disorderly† and thus bad. QUESTION FOUR The phrase â€Å"a most intricate and close-grained diversity of use† means an interconnected urban fabric of social interactions, amenities, and mixed uses (residential, workplaces, retail, etc. ) without rigid separations or compartmentalization. Neighborhoods should not become islands, she claims, because that would promote visual monotony and isolation (which in poorer areas contributes to the creation of slums). She advocates mixed uses that bring safety, public contact, and life to urban areas, and this cannot occur through planners’ adherence to visual homogeneity or large-scale, single-use renewal. Neighborhoods must achieve diversity by serving a variety of functions, thus generating ample uses and encouraging movement of people (particularly pedestrians). Using her own New York street as an example, she writes that her area’s workplaces give local commerce support during the day, and other businesses draw the residents in the evenings; â€Å"Many enterprises, unable to exist on residential trade by itself, would disappear. Or if the industries were to lose us residents, enterprises unable to exist on the working people by themselves would disappear† (Jacobs 153). Such areas also need to mix workplaces with retail and residences so that neighborhoods do not become empty at given times of day (which can allow crime), provide amenities for the people there, and to be close and connected enough to other neighborhoods to become functioning, vital parts of an overall urban fabric. QUESTION FIVE Of city streets, Jacobs writes, â€Å"Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets† (Jacobs 29). She considers the street and sidewalk the basic units of quality urban life because they are an arena of basic social interactions, whether among neighbors or between consumers and merchants. They become safe when constantly used and watched, so residents’ and workers’ proximity to sidewalks is important; well watched, frequently-used spaces monitor people’s behavior and render them safe. In addition, safe streets depend on three factors: clear demarcation of public and private spaces; streets and sidewalks must be visible from the surrounding buildings; and streets need to be used often throughout the day, not becoming abandoned when workers leave (as happens in solely commercial areas, for example). Little-used areas become bleak and conducive to crime, she says. City planners, she claims, do not understand the street’s importance and in the postwar years built large commercial or public spaces that did not attract people throughout the day and night, lacked amenities or nearby residences, and were often too large to safely monitor. Streets become unsafe, she maintains, when people are not close enough to the streets to see what happens there or to interact with passers-by. This was a severe problem in high-rise housing projects, which were hard to police and encouraged crime, as well as being bleak, monotonous, and isolated from the fabric of city life. QUESTION SIX Jacobs considers social and cultural life more important than physical organization alone, though she believes that the two are related and that physical environment has a considerable influence on social life. Dysfunctional places fail to encourage or facilitate social interaction (which she considers the heart of urban living), and a failed neighborhood â€Å"is overwhelmed by its defects and problems and is progressively more helpless before them† (Jacobs 112). On the other hand, functional cities have active social and cultural life partly because they have amenities that draw people at all times of day, mix uses and include residents, workers, and other visitors, and are well integrated with other parts of the city. Visual order, she claims, should not be an end in itself – aesthetics alone do not promote social or cultural activity. She even deems utopian planners efforts to govern cities’ visual character â€Å"authoritarian† and writes, â€Å"All this is a life-killing (and art-killing) misuse of art† (Jacobs 373). Streets with active, sage social lives are seldom visually well ordered and might even look like â€Å"slums† to an uninformed observer. In addition, visual order does not help when it promotes monotony and imposes itself on diverse places; diversity makes a positive difference and buildings should compliment one another, not all look alike. QUESTION SEVEN Jacobs is skeptical of planning because it often relies on its own theories rather than looking at realities; however, she does not argue unconditionally in favor of letting owners or builders operate with little regulation, adding buildings or complexes piecemeal without government guidance. She maintains that neighborhood and city fabrics must be respected and used as guidelines for building; a new privately funded residential building or commercial facility can easily disrupt a neighborhood if it fails to compliment its surroundings, foster pedestrian usage and social interaction all day, and isolates a neighborhood by failing to connect with other parts of the city. Owners and builders can harm diversity by creating bland housing developments, which she deems â€Å"truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life† (Jacobs 4), or else by imposing radical changes too quickly, instead of fostering gradual changes. If they use traditional methods of urban renewal, then builders and private owners will fare no better than the builders of housing projects or large commercial developments will. QUESTION EIGHT Over the past two decades, Americans have rethought their formerly negative attitudes toward cities, especially with concerns over suburban sprawl, and planners have begun heeding Jacobs’ advice. Urban neighborhoods in numerous cities have been gentrified (or â€Å"unslummed,† as Jacobs puts it) with new residential properties (either new condominiums or rehabilitated industrial buildings) and retail and/or workspaces. New York’s formerly squalid Times Square is a good example of a slum â€Å"unslummed† with retail and offices, and Minneapolis’ Uptown and warehouse districts have been transformed from run-down sections to attractive places to live, shop, and be entertained. Urban downtowns have received ample attention from developers and public agencies alike; Baltimore’s downtown has been radically changed in the last twenty years, from a seedy place to an attractive one with ample facilities (like an aquarium and the Camden Yards baseball stadium). In addition, public housing has been transformed from large, impersonal, often crime-ridden high-rise towers (such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, perhaps the worst example of public housing’s failure) to smaller complexes that more closely resemble housing available on the private market. However, urban American has not been completely transformed despite this positive change. Slums still exist throughout American cities, and much of the new development does not help the urban poor, since these new, context-sensitive areas often displace existing residents or businesses and rents in new dwellings are often too high for some. Despite this, American cities have started reviving and planners less antagonistic to urban centers. QUESTION NINE Jacobs was certainly radical when the book appeared in 1961. At that time, urban planners were so focused on urban renewal projects (like public housing, commercial complexes, or sports or cultural facilities) that they paid no attention to the social fabrics that made cities livable. They seemed to operate under the misconception that all urban centers were slums and that large-scale projects would improve them; instead, they uprooted existing neighborhoods and replaced them with facilities that did not encourage pedestrian usage, failed to foster frequent activity throughout the day, were often difficult to police, and did not connect with their own neighborhoods or others within a given city. 1961 also fell during the decades-long exodus of whites from cities to suburbs (which pro-white, pro-suburban federal housing policies assisted), and Americans’ lingering anti-urban attitudes still prevailed. Jacobs offered a different way of envisioning cities, and she seemed to see planners’ errors better than planners of the time would admit; indeed, it took decades before American urban planners and builders approached cities anew. QUESTION TEN This work remains relevant because it presents a set of principles that seem to work well over forty years later. It avoids concentrating on aesthetics, which she dubs â€Å"hair-splitting about fashions in design† (Jacobs 3), and instead discusses social dynamics, for which neighborhoods and cities should facilitate. She shows a clear understanding of cities that avoids the abstract and attests to a more experiential point of view, not a set of theories. However, money plays a much larger role today than it did in 1961; though builders and planners now follow her ideas, this new urbanism is expensive and many less-affluent city dwellers find themselves displaced by new development. Also, while many neighborhoods are reviving with new housing and retail, those areas tend to attract the same stores and building types, so that one revived neighborhood looks like another one nearby, creating a sort of monotony (of which Jacobs is particularly critical). Nonetheless, her ideas are perhaps even more relevant today, now that American cities are reviving along lines she first drew. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage, 1961.