Tag Archives: pedestrians

Jane Jacobs on Perspective

on November 29, 2010 in Jane Jacobs

A pavement (UK), sidewalk (CA, US), or footpat...

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I recently came across this article from Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review.  It is based on the proceedings of a symposium held in December 2000, entitled Jane Jacobs & the New Urban Ecology.   A unique part of the proceedings is a section entitled Random Comments, Jane Jacobs—a collection of some of the comments Ms. Jacobs made both after the panel presentations and in response to audience questions.

Despite being over a decade old, her comments remain relevant today. Here is what she had to say about sidewalks.

Perspective

You ask what cities tell us now that is different from forty years ago. Much of their information is the same, but more dependence on automobiles has brought changes. Except for dense parts of lively cities, sidewalks now are mostly deserted.

During the drive through Newton this morning, from the hotel to the law school, I saw four or five women jogging in their exercise clothes, but otherwise not one soul, man, woman, or child on several miles of sidewalk. This occurred along pleasant streets during the busy morning rush hour. An accompaniment to the disappearance of American is the disappearance of destinations for at fairly short intervals.

Still another change is the larger number of householders seemingly engaged on weekends and after work in either minor or ambitious do-it-yourself repairs and renovations in previously dilapidated parts of some cities. These are symptoms, usually, of gentrification, also indications that rich aren’t pricing everyone else out from such neighborhoods, at least not yet. Accessibility by automobile to big box stores like IKEA and Home Depot obviously encourages this activity, so we might jump to the conclusion that , in these cases, have enabled their owners to exchange one kind of physical exercise for another.

But it isn’t that simple. A big attraction of gentrifying old neighborhoods in my own , Toronto, and also Richmond, Washington, Brooklyn, San Francisco—and from what I read, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle—is the flourishing destinations and sidewalk life they include.

For a full transcript of her remarks, following this link.

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No Need for Acolytes

on August 24, 2010 in Jane Jacobs

Downtown Express photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio

I came across this National League of Cities column through Planetizen.com. It’s great advice for  Jane Jacobs fans and detractors alike.

Emerging Issues: Wrestling With Jane Jacobs

by Bill Barnes

Jane Jacobs wrote one of the most influential urban affairs books of the 20th century.

“Death and Life of Great American Cities” — published in 1961 and still in print today — has become a talisman, cited by many and sundry to advance their views and proposals. Jacobs, who died in 2006, is an icon of the field, and new books explore her ideas and narrate her activities.

Jacobs’ views have become “the common wisdom of our time,” says Paul Goldberger, a prominent architecture critic.

American cities have changed dramatically since 1961. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Death and Life,” it’s surely time now to celebrate her accomplishments and also to think freshly about her ideas, about what we assume is actually going on in cities, and about what we believe is correct and desirable about cities.

Jacobs’ views have become, often unacknowledged, part of the regular vocabulary of and urban development. Take, for example, the idea that a street with storefronts and residences and lots of pedestrians is safer than a deserted one because there are people around to watch over it. Or, the idea that mixing uses in dense, complex places is preferable to isolating dwellings from shops and parks from workplaces. Or, the notion that development should evolve from existing uses, rather than by governmentally planned, wholesale clearance and new construction. All of those and more can be found in “Death and Life.”

The very first paragraph of “Death and Life” promises “an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern orthodox city planning and rebuilding.” At mid-century, that orthodoxy included urban renewal and highway construction, and it was carried out through such elements as big projects, separation of uses, and “blight” designations followed by clearance. Jacobs’ writing and her activism in New York City’s Greenwich Village contributed immensely to the unraveling — but not the disappearance — of that approach. The book bristles with pointed criticisms and sharp analyses that aim to burst the modernist orthodoxy.

It’s a wonderful book, strongly written, and well-worth reading today.

More people should read the book before they cite Jacobs as an ally for their projects. One recent writer confessed to relying on second- and third-hand sources and to referencing “Death and Life” in support of “whatever I was working on.” Upon actually reading the book, she concluded that the “New Urbanism” movement’s implied claim to Jacobs’ approval is unwarranted. Goldberger complained that Jacobs’ ideas are being used to support purposes “deeply inconsistent with her values.”

Since 1961, cities have changed and the conventional wisdom has changed. How, then, to think anew about ideas that are so widely and implicitly shared?

In “Death and Life,” Jacobs herself provided useful recommendations.

First, she warned her readers against unexamined, preconceived notions, including her own vigorously argued ideas. She encouraged readers to “constantly and skeptically test what I say against [their] own knowledge.”

Second, she urged people who are interested in city life to think inductively and “look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether threads of principle emerge among them.” The page after the table of contents in “Death and Life” announces this approach to the reader. It is labeled “Illustrations.” (The book has no illustrations. It also has no charts or graphs or tables of statistics.) The page declares: “For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”

Third, Jacobs cautioned against over-generalization. She said that we should know which thing we’re talking about. That is, she knew that “Death and Life” is “concentrated on great [that is, very big] cities, and on their inner areas.” Thus, she also knew what she wasn’t talking about: “I hope no reader will try to transfer my into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban. Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities.”

We now need studies that follow Jacobs’ advice: closely observed, fearless studies of the way things do or don’t function on the ground in big cities and also in towns, suburbs and little cities, and regions. We don’t need acolytes of Jane Jacobs; we need people who will think as hard and as well as she did about “the kind of problem a city is.”

Bill Barnes (barnes@nlc.org) is the director for emerging issues at NLC.

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The pedestrian’s level

on July 10, 2010 in Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs

Installment number five of my series on Jane Jacobs‘  Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:

The pedestrian’s level

Let’s look for a moment at the physical dimensions of the street. The user of downtown is mostly on foot, and to enjoy himself he needs to see plenty of contrast on the streets. He needs assurance that the street is neither interminable nor boring, so he does not get weary just looking down it. Thus streets that have an end in sight are often pleasing; so are streets that have the punctuation of contrast at frequent intervals.

Georgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch, two faculty members of M.I.T., have made a study of what walkers in downtown notice. While the feature that drew the most comment was the proportion of , the walkers showed a great interest in punctuation of all kinds appearing a little way ahead of them—spaces, or greenery, or windows set forward, or churches, or clocks. Anything really different, whether large or a detail, interested them.

Narrow streets, if they are not too narrow (like many of Boston’s) and are not choked with , can also cheer a walker by giving him a continual choice of this side of the street or that, and twice as much to see. The differences are something anyone can try out for himself by a selection of downtown streets.

This does not mean all downtown streets should be narrow and short. Variety is wanted in this respect too. But it does mean that narrow streets or reasonably wide alleys have unique value that revitalizers of downtown ought to use to the hilt instead of wasting. It also means that if pedestrian and automobile traffic is separated out on different streets, planners would do better to choose the narrower streets for pedestrians, rather than the most wide and impressive.

Where monotonously wide and long streets are turned over to exclusive pedestrian use, they are going to be a problem. They will come much more alive and persuasive if they are broken into varying parts.

The Gruen plan, for example, will interrupt the long, wide gridiron vistas of Fort Worth by narrowing them at some points, widening them into plaza at others. It is also the best possible showmanship to play up the streets’ variety, contrast, and activity by means of display windows, street furniture, imagination, and paint, and it is excellent drama to exploit the contrast between the street’s small elements and its big banks, big stores, big lobbies, or solid walls.

Most redevelopment projects cannot do this. They are de signed as blocks: self-contained, separate elements in the . The streets that border them are conceived of as just that-borders, and relatively unimportant in their own right. Look at the bird’s-eye views published of forthcoming projects: if they bother to indicate the surrounding streets, all too likely an airbrush has softened the streets into an innocuous blur.

Next up: Maps and reality

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How Hard can a Street Work?

on July 7, 2010 in Downtown is for People, Jane Jacobs

Here is installment number two of Jane Jacobs‘  Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:

How hard can a street work?

The best place to look at first is the street. One had better look quickly too; not only are the projects making away with the noisy automobile traffic of the street, they are making away with the street itself. In its stead will be open spaces with long vistas and lots and lots of elbowroom.

But the street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and for themselves, through mid-block lobbies of building block-through stores and banks, even parking lots and alley, communication. Users of downtown know very well that downtown needs not fewer streets, but more, especially for . They are constantly making new, extra paths for themselves, through mid-block lobbies of buildings, block-through stores and banks, even parking lots and alleys. Some of the builders of downtown know this too, and rent space along their hidden streets.

Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens

Rockefeller Center, frequently cited to prove that projects are good for downtown, differs in a very fundamental way from the projects being designed today. It respects the street. Rockefeller Center knits tightly into every street that intersects it. One of its most brilliant features is the full-fledged extra street with which it cuts across blocks that elsewhere are too long. Its open spaces are eddies of the streets, small and sharp and lively, not large, empty, and boring. Most important, it is so dense and concentrated that the uniformity it does possess is a relatively small episode in the area.

As one result of its extreme density, Rockefeller Center had to put the overflow of its street activity underground, and as is so often the case with successful projects, planners have drawn the wrong moral: to keep the ground level more open, they are sending the people into underground streets although the theoretical purpose of the is to endow people with more air and sky, not less. It would be hard to think of a more expeditious way to dampen downtown than to shove its liveliest activities and brightest lights underground, yet this is what Philadelphia’s Penn Center and Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center do. Any department-store management that followed such a policy with its vital groundfloor space, instead of using it as a village of streets, would go out of business.

Next up: The animated alley

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The Trouble with Cars

on March 16, 2010 in Quick Take

From an interview with Jane Jacobs by Hank Bromley in July 2000:

The trouble with on a main street is not  per se. In fact you have to have some for servicing and all that. The trouble is cars to which everything else is sacrificed. And how is everything else sacrificed?

Well, the roads are made too wide, too hard to cross. The cars are allowed to go too fast. Too much parking is provided. Those things are not necessary for allowing cars on a main street. Disneyland out in California gives you some lessons about this. It has streetcars and other conveyances running through those little . They go slowly; the are easy to cross; the parking is all somewhere else, not cutting up the interesting places want to be. Those are good principles for any main street that you want to be good for business.

You can have cars there, but they can’t be racing through. You can have the street, but it can’t be unfriendly to pedestrians.

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Quick Take: Cars ≠ Freedom

on March 2, 2010 in Other, Quick Take

I came across this passage on BostonBiker.org.  The post addresses two main issues that author has with cars.  While coming from a cyclist’s perspective, the post raised points relevant to anybody seeking a more rational approach to our cities.

I though the second passage of the post, on the mistaken idea that cars=freedom, was worth posting in full.  If you enjoy it, and/or have comments, please leave them on the Boston Biker site.   I’m just a messenger.


…

Human beings have evolved over the eons to favor things that make their lives easy, and shy away from those that make them hard. We are literally wired to enjoy things like sugar, fat, and salty foods, mostly because in the stone age we could never get enough of these foods so evolution wired our brains to search out these “easy” sources of calories. We use our big ol’ frontal lobes to come up with all sorts of ideas to make our lives easy. Farming, domestication of animals, automation, computers, cars…the list goes on and on. Evolution rewards (to a point) those humans that were able to “live the good life” by getting enough food and shelter, because those people had the most kids.

Cars (and more importantly car companies) tap right into that part of us that is seeking out the easier way. Why walk for weeks when you can get in your car and drive there in a day? Why ride your bike for days when you can drive your car there in a couple hours? Why walk for an hour to the store, when you can drive in a couple minutes? And you wonder why there is an obesity crisis?

People are not lazy per-say, they are simply falling victim to the wiring in their head. People don’t get fat because they eat too much, they get fat because we live in a modern world of plenty, but their brains are identical to the stone age hunters that had a very hard time getting food. Their brains tell them to eat lots of salty, sugary, fatty foods, and their bodies are designed to store that up for the hard times, they simply had the bad luck to live in a world FULL of these kinds of food. They suffer from a common problem in modern world, our brains and bodies are not set up for the modern world we have created.

The car culture feeds into that trap. It allows us if we so choose to spend our whole lives without a significant distance promoting obesity, and weakness. It allows (and encourages) the development of , and exurbs, and whatever comes after that, that destroy communities and encourage loneliness. It encases us in a little metal shell that promotes road rage (you don’t feel so bad about honking at the anonymous person in the other car, but would never act that way in an elevator). These are the kinds of things they don’t talk about in car commercials.

Even if you throw out all the physical and psychological negative effects on the human body you are still forced to contend with the fact that cars take up a lot of space. Much of the area in a modern city is dedicated to roads and car parking. Much of that land was taken from things like , sidewalks, green space, etc. Putting one person in one car, and then doing that a couple thousand times and your nice wide four lane roads suddenly don’t seem large enough anymore. Lets tear down some buildings and build more roads! Then people see the “ease” at which you can get around, so a couple hundred more people buy cars, and low and behold your 8 lane highway isn’t big enough anymore. Lets try a 16 lane highway! Damn that filled up too, better go with 32! Before long you end up with something like this:

Cars are sold as a luxury, as a path to freedom, to something that will make your life better! But in reality you can’t democratize a luxury. What I mean, is that not everyone can have a luxury item, or else it stops being a luxury and starts being a necessity. Cars are no longer a luxury in many places of this country, in a lot of places if you don’t have a car, you can’t get to the store, or to your job, or to school. Our cities have been designed in a such a horrible way that some people are forced to spend a large part of their work week earning enough money to power the car that gets them to work. Yet car commercials still show a lone traveler speeding through the empty city without a hint of traffic in sight.

In short, it’s a lie. The car companies sell freedom and mobility, but in fact offer only gridlock, poor land use, health problems, and global warming.

So what?

So what are we to do? If the “one car one person”, model has failed so fully what do we do to reverse it? The answer is simple, but is going to require a lot of effort. We need to stop designing our lives around cars. That means everything from removing on-street parking, building larger sidewalks, making people pay more for parking, building dense cities, providing good public , and getting more people to ride bikes!

…

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What is Jane’s Walk?

on February 15, 2010 in

No one can find what will work for our cities by
looking at suburban garden cities, manipulating
scale models, or inventing dream cities.
You’ve got to get out and walk.
- Jane Jacobs, & urban visionary

Jane’s Walk is a series of free walking tours that helps put in touch with their environment and with each other, by bridging social and geographic gaps and creating a space for cities to discover themselves.  Since its start in 2007, Jane’s Walk has happened in cities across North America, and is growing internationally.

Jane’s Walk honors the legacy and ideas of urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs who championed the interests of local and pedestrians over a car-centered approach to . Jane’s Walk helps knit people together into a strong and resourceful community, instilling belonging and encouraging civic leadership.

All Jane’s Walk tours are given and taken for free. They are led by anyone who has an interest in the neighborhoods where they live, work or hang out. They are not always about architecture and heritage, and offer a more personal take on the local culture, the social history and the planning issues faced by the residents. Jane Jacobs believed strongly that local residents understood best how their neighborhood works, and what is needed to strengthen and improve them. Jane’s Walks are fun, engaging and participatory – everyone’s got a story and they’re usually keen to share it.

Thousands of people have taken part in a Jane’s Walk. Past walks have explored a range of urban landscapes, from social housing slated for redevelopment to areas with a rich architectural and cultural heritage, to teen hangouts and secret gardens.  Walks are led by individuals and small groups. Some focus on historical themes more than geographical areas, for instance, some strolls are built around ideas like the history of the bicycle, gay and lesbian history, places of relevance to the homeless, the history of ‘skid row’, and urgent planning matters facing certain neighborhoods.

Click on the following links for helpful information and resources about hosting a Jane’s Walk:

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To become involved, get more information, or schedule an interview, please contact Yuri Artibise, co-ordinator of Jane’s Walk Phoenix. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter

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Quick Take: Living in Mrs. Jacobs' Neighborhood

on February 10, 2010 in Jane Jacobs, Quick Take

I came across this post on Planetizen.com.  one of my favorite resources for all things urban.

Living in Mrs. Jacobs’

Wed, 02/10/2010 – 11:54

A decade or so ago, after reading some of Jane Jacobs’ work, I became aware of the distinction between mixed-use and single-use neighborhoods.  In those days, I imagined that in a well-functioning urban neighborhood, every non-polluting use would be mixed together, and the lion of housing would lay down with the lamb of commerce.

Jane's House

But for the past few months, I have lived just six blocks from Jacobs’ Toronto house, in the Annex neighborhood.  And in the Annex, I have learned that the distinction between sprawl and walkable urbanism is a little more subtle than the bumper-sticker phrase “mixed-use” suggests.In the Annex, as in conventional sprawl development (CSD), most businesses  are on a few major streets, especially Bloor Street West between Spadina and Bathurst. Although Bloor has a few residences above shops, Bloor is primarily a commercial street.

So how is Bloor different from San Jose Boulevard (the sprawling commercial street of my former neighborhood in Jacksonville)?  Bloor’s distinction rests less on diversity of uses than on street design.

San Jose has a wide variety of commercial activities near some residential blocks, but is as wide as eight lanes in some spots- too wide to be comfortable for pedestrians.  Bloor is only four lanes wide, and is thus relatively easy for pedestrians to cross.  And on Bloor, nearly every commercial building immediately adjoins the sidewalk, rather than being set back from the sidewalk by yards of parking.

As a result, pedestrians can easily access shops, rather than dodging cars on the way to their destination.   And because the nearby residential blocks are part of a grid system, neighborhood residents don’t have to hop from cul-de-sac to cul-de-sac to reach Bloor’s businesses.  In sum, Bloor is pedestrian-friendly less because of than because of pedestrian-friendly street design and compact development.

The Annex’s residential streets, like those in my old neighborhood in Jacksonville, are at least somewhat single-use: streets with large apartment complexes (St. George and Spadina near Bloor) have very few single-family structures, and other residential streets are dominated by houses and duplexes.  So in a sense, the Annex’s streets are as single-use as a typical suburban subdivision- both types of streets are dominated by one type of structure.

But there are two significant differences between an Annex street and a CSD street.  First, some of the Annex houses have been cut up into small apartments; thus, on an Annex street, single-family houses and duplexes often coexist with very small apartment houses (though not with high-rises).  More importantly, the Annex’s residential streets are more compact than their equivalents in sprawl subdivisions: houses are closer together, and are often duplexes.  Thus, more live on an Annex street than live on a typical residential street in Jacksonville, which means that the Annex has the density to support good public transit.

In sum, what makes the Annex walkable is not so much that every street mixes uses; rather, it is that the commercial streets are easily accessible from the residential ones, thus creating a mixed-use neighborhood.

NOTE: To see some examples of what I am talking about, go to Google Street View at maps..com.  To see Bloor, go to anyplace between 350 and 600 Bloor Street West in Toronto.  To see a typical residential street, go to Albany Avenue, just north of Bloor (Jane Jacobs lived on this stretch of Albany).    To see an apartment-oriented street, go to St. George St. or Spadina Road just north of Bloor.  To see my old sprawl street in Jacksonville, go to 10000 San Jose Boulevard in Jacksonville.

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Quick Take: Streets Are For People, Not (Just) Cars

on April 20, 2009 in Quick Take

http://www.planetizen.com/node/38401

Key Quote: 

The domination of the street by in the last century is at least partially a result of an innocent tendency of to traffic the sidewalk for various reasons, rather than a categorical forfeit of the majority of the public realm to one user-type.  In the current, thrilling campaign by planners to return urbanity to something more human scale, a photo memorializing the multiplicitous modal functionality of Scollay Square before its razing is as good a symbol as any for wisdom that must be embraced once again.

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