Book Review Part 3: Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
Part 3: Diversity = vitality
Here it is. The last part of Jane Jacobs’ magnum opus. Get yourself comfortable, grab a cup of coffee (or glass of wine), and let’s get into it.
Conditions for City Diversity
For Jacobs, the most important question about planning cities is: “How can cities generate enough mixture of uses— enough diversity— throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilization?”
Just because a city exists doesn’t mean an exciting city life will develop. There can be districts or even entire cities where there is no urban vitality. She lists four generators of city vitality. All four must exist in combination for it to occur.
1. Mixture of uses
The neighborhood (or district) must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two.
These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. Residents, workers and visitors to the neighborhoods support a variety of commerces and services that make the neighborhood interesting and alive.
Let’s say we have a downtown that is mostly office buildings. That area won’t have a vibrant city life because most activities will occur around the schedule of office workers. The place will be barren by 7 pm and during most of the day except, perhaps, at lunch hour.
Now think of downtowns that are vibrant. They still have a lot of office space, sure, but they also have other uses, like hotels, apartments, cultural institutions (i.e. theaters and museums), parks, and lots of shops. Thanks to that, we have tourists exploring the area, residents going on errands, friends drinking at a bar, families walking their dogs… The district is filled with people at all hours that supports the myriad of businesses and services that eventually sprout.
2. Short blocks
Opportunities to turn corner must be frequent if we want a city to remain interesting. Long streets feel oppressive for pedestrians, especially if they’re large or have a lot of cars. They need visual interruptions, cutting off the indefinite distant view.
Short blocks provide intense street use by giving a hint of enclosure and entity. This is very difficult to find in a very strict grid system (New York being an exception for the sheer density of people and commerce).
Madrid’s city center is a great example of the enclosure and interestingness that short blocks provide. The different paths people can take mean that commerce can be dispersed throughout the neighborhood. And when the streets meet with their irregular patterns, they create lovely, lively plazas.
3. Buildings of varying age, condition and style
Having different styles of buildings adds more charm to a city. Overly ordered, homogeneous neighborhoods feel boring.
There are many ways in which a city becomes more interesting when using their older buildings instead of discarding them. Historic buildings can be repurposed to offer different uses while retaining their authenticity. An old warehouse can become a market with loft apartments (like Atlanta’s Ponce City Market). A bunker can become an art gallery (like Berlin’s Sammlung Boros). The possibilities are endless.
Buildings with varying condition are especially important. An old building that is not in pristine condition offers cheaper rent for its residents and shops. That means that a greater diversity of people can live in the neighborhood.
4. Dense concentration of people
There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people for a city to operate well. I think it is the sine qua non condition for everything else. Without density there is no diversity of people, of commerce and of architecture. Public transport cannot function properly and people need to rely on cars. Shops and restaurants cannot afford to be spread out and need to be grouped together (probably the biggest reason for strip malls in the US). Businesses offering niche services and products cannot exist when there’s not enough people to build their consumer base.
You can see this lack of density in so many cities in the US and Canada. Places like Houston, Dallas, Miami, northern Toronto. These are big cities in terms of population but they are so spread out that pretty much everyone needs a car. And we know what happens. With the car comes the car infrastructure: freeways and highways and huge parking lots and strip malls. Some interestingness might be found in smaller streets inside historic neighborhoods and downtowns but cannot be sustained through large areas.
City as engines of economic activity
The curse of successful districts
We now know all the ingredients successful neighborhoods have: mixed uses, sidewalk life, variety in architecture, good density, and diversity of people and businesses. When a neighborhood has them all it becomes popular. Yet, a common pattern occurs when a neighborhood becomes too in demand in a short period of time.
Firstly, people take note and come in droves. Prices get higher. Sidewalks get cleaned up. Many original residents are no longer able to afford living there and move out. Shops, especially local and niche, change to cater to a wealthier clientele. Developers vacate most old buildings to create luxury condos. And suddenly, the charm and authenticity that drove all the people to the neighborhood gets lost. The diversity of uses gets narrower, and now, the neighborhood looks bland, too homogeneous in its offerings and too expensive to maintain a diverse group of residents and visitors.
Yes, Jacobs, 60 years ago, basically described the phenomenon we now call gentrification. I’ll publish my thoughts on this in a later newsletter, so don’t worry, we’ll be able to discuss and get mad at each other.
Incubators of small businesses
It’s not all bad, though. Big cities are prolific incubators of new ideas and businesses of all kinds. We know this. You can measure them by the economic output cities have. But Jacobs points out an interesting idea: big cities are fundamental at fostering small businesses.
You see, big businesses are different because they are more self-sustaining. They have the capabilities of procuring talent, resources, etc. by themselves. They can move to a smaller city or suburb and import all the infrastructure needed.
But a small business cannot; they need access to a large and varied pool of talent and resources. A pool that only a big city can provide. And this diversity breeds new diversity. The larger the pool, the more businesses are able to be exist.
Big cities also sustain small businesses because there are enough people with diverse enough interests to become consumers. That’s why you can see stores and services catering to every type of interest in big cities. Tattoo parlor/art gallery? Yes. School teaching Bahasa Indonesia? Of course. Store selling Finnish comic books from the 70s? Duh.
Jacobs’ legacy
The surplus of wealth, the productivity, the close-grained juxtaposition of talents that permit society to support advances are themselves products of our organization into cities, and especially into big and dense cities."
Jane Jacobs remains one of the most influential thinkers in urbanism and architecture. Most of her ideas may sound deceptively simple now, but consider she wrote them in the 1960s.
Jacobs took a systemic look at all the elements of a city, looking at them not just individually, but as parts of an interconnected system. She saw cities as living, complex, ever-changing ecosystems.
With her biting critique of modernist planning practices, Jacobs paved the way for other types of urban design ideas. Ones which went beyond the top-down, standardizing, car-centric infrastructure and really engaged with the entire problem of a city.
Most of us who are residents of dense, interesting, lively cities, take for granted how amazing it is to have so much diversity— in architecture, commerce, people, culture, gastronomy— right on our doorstep. To get out of our apartment and walk a few blocks and interact with people of such different backgrounds. To see so many new endeavors. To see human ingenuity in action.
Jane Jacobs reminds us that every city has the potential to become a great city.