Themes

What is the purpose of a city?

Jacobs has written many books about economics, and if you’ve read those, you may believe that she thinks of cities as economic engines, or even more granularly, labor markets. However, in her first book, she more simply and frankly allows the reader to see the city as it is on the street level - a random and weird gathering of people that makes life interesting and exciting. Economic output is often a positive outcome of this fact, but ultimately, cities are built for people. They aren’t built for cars, or for buildings. They are built for people, and her approach to city building is to deconstruct what elements make living in a city wonderful.

What allows that city to achieve its purpose?

Jane Jacobs core thesis is that cities and neighborhoods need diversity of use within them. Mixed use of every type of human activity patched and woven into a neighborhood or city so that it is naturally diverse in an activity, much like a natural ecosystem. This is not because it feels good, but because it is what actually makes a city a safe and exciting place to live.

She begins this thesis, like always, at the micro level. The street level. She notes the unintuitive fact that cities feel safe when they are used. Do you feel safer walking down an empty street or one with people walking by? Of course the latter, because if something happens, people are there to see it. Well how do create foot traffic? Diversity of use. Streets that have offices AND apartments AND restaurants AND bars AND shops AND any number of other services are neighborhoods that are used throughout the day, and as a result, there is always foot traffic.

Take the Financial District of any city, for example. Most FiDis are the first to decline when a city declines because there is no street life throughout the day. The only time people are walking around is to get to their office building to leave their office building. At night these neighborhoods feel quite unsafe because there is simply no one using the street then.

Another insightful observation Jacobs makes to prove this point is one we take for granted right now - Project Housing has not had its intended effect, and feels far less safe than what it replaced. Why would this be? Doesn’t Project Housing have green space between the nondescript high rises? Yes, but regardless of whether there is green space are not, these Project Housing complexes are not integrated into the fabric of use of the city. They are cordoned off buildings, meaning there is minimal foot traffic and the space between buildings, however green it may be, is unwatched. The effect is that these places become extremely unsafe.

So how do we create the diversity that is so necessary to effective city life? Jacobs has 4 elements:

• Diversity of use:
  • A neighborhood must serve more than one primary function. Think of the most vibrant neighborhoods you walk in. They almost always have a diversity of businesses and buildings. The reason this is important is that different types of businesses attract patrons at different times of day. When a given block has a variety of establishments, there is foot traffic at all times of day. This gets at how safe streets are those that are “watched” by the myriad of people that simply use them throughout the day.
  • I believe you can tell how a neighborhood is trending based on its diversity of use. Right now, in NYC, Williamsburg seems to score the highest. You can also tell which areas were once this way but have since homogenized as a result of their own success (as Jacobs also explains later in the book). Examples of this are Greenwich Village and Soho.
• Short blocks:
  • Most blocks must be short so that there are opportunities to turn corners and let serendipity course through the urban experience. One cannot truly benefit from diversity of use unless the built environment allows one to.
  • I loved this section for its simplicity. You have to remember that when Jacobs wrote this, the driving force of city development was building large highways and roads. Short blocks were viewed as backward hallmarks of a bygone medieval Europe. And yet, we continue to visit Paris and Rome for their walkable charm.
  • Jacobs brings this phenomenon into focus by asking the reader where in NYC might they experience intense foot traffic among the large blocks of midtown? Rockefeller Center of course. Why? Because it is the only street that is subdivided into a short block in the entire area.
• Diversity of building age:
  • Jacobs believes that a health neighborhood is one with buildings of different ages, which in turn has the effect of requiring different ROI thresholds for each investor or owner of the building. The outcome of this diversity is ultimately diversity of use, so I tend to feel like this element of urbanism functions more as an addendum to the first.
• Population density:
  • There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, including a dense concentration of people who are there because of residence. Population density is something that is often mischaracterized, and people will often incorrectly believe sprawling cities lack population density. This can be true, but a city like Los Angeles, for example, is one of the most population dense urban environments in US. So when thinking about these 4 elements with Jacobs, it is not that any individual one can carry a city, but rather that they must all be in concert.

The nurturing of complex human ecosystems

One of the most innovative themes of Jacobs’ writing is that she viewed cities as ecosystems that contained humans, not machines built to purpose by humans. This is in stark contrast to nearly all of the urban planners that preceded her and succeeded her for the next 20-30 years. To Jacobs, cities are not machines with every widget put into place as to an exact plan, but rather a living breathing organism that has built up over time naturally. What appears to be chaotic and unstructured from a birds eye view, is actually a highly complex system, where it is near impossible to fully understand how a change in one place will impact another.

City needs to actually be treated like an organism. Once you view cities like an organism, it becomes clear that cities can not be planned. They can be nudged and guided within certain boundaries, but ultimately it is the people who make up the whole, that shape its outcome.

Complex Systems behave unintuitively

Jacobs unlocked for me the idea that we need to approach Complex Systems differently than we do machines. This is also an idea that Nassim Taleb discusses at length in Antifragile and Charles Maron discusses in Strong Towns and continues to be one of my key heuristics when thinking about the Climate Crisis broadly. It is nearly impossible to understand all of the potential negative externalities of a change made to Complex Systems. They can be evaluated with Rules of Thumb, not Rules, and cannot be planned from the top down.

One might be excused for looking at the most active city blocks in NYC and believing that the mixture of buildings and shops and is unstructured, unplanned, purely random chaos. But as we learned above, by the nature of their diversity of use and serendipity afforded by short blocks, there is a complex synergistic connection between every fabric of the city. The coffee shop, the restaurant, the barbershop, the apartment building, the gym, the subway stop, the bookstore - all of these places benefit each other by bringing people to and from their places of business at different times of day. While some, like the residential building or the subway stop, might be more foundational than others, if you destroy one it can very easily lead to the unraveling of the rest, even though these places often seem unrelated. It is not so dissimilar to how industrial farming in one area can lead to the destruction of completely unrelated large species in the ocean, because farm runoff creates algae blooms, which hogs all of the oxygen in the water, making it inhospitable for one small species that provides the basis of food for another, and so on.

Gentrification

Gentrification has become a vilified word, but it is Jacobs who made me realize that we either need to understand that it is a natural part of an evolving city ecosystem, or we need to rebrand “neighborhood change” into something else. Jacobs never uses the word gentrification. I’m not sure that it existed in the early 60s when she wrote the book. But she does say that “Diversity can be crowded out by the duplication of success.”

Jacobs doesn’t really propose a solution to neighborhood change, she merely states that often neighborhoods will become victims of their own success, and that that is okay because it then opens up the possibility that other neighborhoods rise to prominence (as long as other neighborhoods have the key elements to city life). But to lock a neighborhood into a certain mode of operating is a surefire way to enable its demise. The common evolution of a popular area is that it becomes so popular that more expensive businesses flock to the area, and often these businesses may all look the same. Jacobs gives a funny anecdote about how this has happened to Greenwich Village to some extent, but she did not realize how far it had to go! Areas we know today, like Soho, have largely become high end shopping centers rather than diverse vibrant neighborhoods in which to work, live, and play.

City Planning Solutions

Jacobs has a great passage near the end about organizing city government. She talks about how the idea of the “City Planning Commission” has become popular, but there are no instances where it has been affective. The needs of the city aren’t planned in a God like way, overseeing and coordinating all things. Just as city vitality is dependent on the neighborhood or district thriving in the 4 ways she defines, so too must city planning be on the local, district level. Understanding effects on a local level is the only way to properly plan changes in neighborhoods.

In other words, top down city planning always leads to bureaucracy that is divorced from the day to day needs of a neighborhood. Jacobs believes city planning should be left to the districts, and instead of having different departments, that the government should be organized by district. The leader of each district needs to be able to understand the district deeply and must be able address a wide swath of needs.

Still, she says, it would be destructive to have ALL government in cities organized this way. There has to be a mixture of vertical and horizontal organization. Taxation, water supply, power, air pollution control, labor mediation, management of museums, zoos, and prisons, for example, all need to be verticalized because these functions transcend district organization.

Interestingly, this is also a perennial debate in business, but it manifests in form of whether a company should be managed by product or by function, with a few key ones, like Finance and HR, always organized at the company wide level.

Observer, not Expert

At this point in urbanism discourse, Jacobs is by far and away the most lionized figure. For all her contributions to how we understand cities, the people that populate them, and the elements that make city living wonderful, it is her method of observation and reasoning that has most influened me. Jacobs’ methods go beyond urbanism, and as you read this book (or preferably listen to it while walking around NYC), there will be many moments where you think to yourself, “wow, what she’s saying is so obvious, and yet I never noticed it.” It is quite vogue today to eschew experts, but Jacobs is the first to uncover truth in the complexity of city life, simply by observing, and living within the city.

One of her most enduring points to this effect is that what makes a city a city is the most basic, average occurence we might observe. She says that “it requires large quantities of the average to create the unaverage in cities.” How do people interact with this block on average? What about this building? She notes that traditional planning ignore the “average” because the average is boring. They think about large buildings or landmarks, or districting specific areas for discrete functions, rather than allowing an amalgam of average to permeate the space. In this way, traditional city planners are trained to ignore the very thing that makes the city what it its.

Human Nature

Jacobs has some observations about human nature that I didn’t expect in a book about urbanism, but it is actually this book that made it clear that cities are made for humans, and so human nature must of course at the center of any urbanism heuristics. One of my favorite truisims of hers is that, “being human, it is human beings that interest us most. We love to simply watching humans go about their day. Why do we prefer sitting outside for dinner rather than inside? We experience the street?” It reminds me of a an essay from Eugene Wei about moving to NYC, in which he noted, “New York City is the place to be if you want to feel cocooned by human bodies. People above you, to every side of you, and below you on the sidewalk, or beneath, in the subways. How you traverse a city matters. Our bodies have their own memories. To be outside, moving through New York’s streets, felt as much a return to life before the pandemic as I could have experienced anywhere.”

Future Predictions about NYC

• Noho + East Village + Chelsea never taking off
  • In describing why short blocks matter, Jacobs discusses Greenwich Village and how it has remained so popular and vibrant. I found it amusing to read that many believe that Chelsea will be the next great NYC neighborhood, but that she is certain it will not, and that it will always be stunted in its attempt to be like the Village. The reason is because the blocks are too long, and there is no room for serendipity. More specifically, “a bookstore can never survive in Chelsea for long.”
  • However, she believes that the areas just east of her, namely Noho and East Village, are perfect places to attract immense commercial activity. She ended up being spot on.
• WV and Soho
  • As noted above, the Village and Soho are Jacobs’ prime examples of places that would one day become victims of their own success, as she was already seeing it happen ing the 60s. These areas are still lovely to walk around, but they are no longer dynamic centers of urban life in NYC.

How to “read” Jacobs

• If you like audiobooks, listen to this book, preferably in NYC in summer. Walk around the city and experience the world infront of you just as Jacobs is describing it. You will see that her observations are just as relevant and true today. Pause and think about what she is saying by observing the people on the street, and the establishments around you. Walk to Lincoln Center when she bemoans its monolithic structure, and then walk to Carnegie Hall as tells you how that building is how one should build an arts center, not Lincoln Center. You will understand immediately, because you are there. My favorite passage details White Horse Tavern as a central meeting place for people in the West Village. After almost 80 years, it remains this way for my friends as well. To see and hear this at the same time is a connected experience unlike most other books you will read.

Raw Notes

• Moses wanted to extend 5th avenue thru Washington Square park and create a Broome Street Expressway that linked up the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges, and 90% of it’s cost was eligible for federal funding because it was technically an interstate highway. This would have essentially destroyed all of Greenwich village and Soho and likely West Village.
• City ecosystem is composed of physical, economic, ethical processes active at a given time within a city and it’s close dependencies
• Building for the needs of cars is an easier, simpler problem than the complex one or nurturing a livable city ecosystem. Jacobs says the highway builders do not know how to build for both cars and cities. They believe if only they can solve traffic, they can solve cities. But this oversimplifies the task
• Jane Jacobs core thesis is that cities and neighborhoods need diversity of use within them. Mixed use of every type of human activity patched and woven into a neighborhood or city so that it is naturally diverse in an activity, much like a natural ecosystem
• When people think of the safety of the city, they think of the sidewalk and the city street
• A well used city Street is apt to be a safe one. An abandoned one is not. A street needs activity and eyes on it for it to feel safe. But you can’t make people walk thru streets they have no reason to use. You can make people use streets by putting the things there that they enjoy and use often so that there’s foot traffic there often. Bars, restaurants, and shops being the most obvious examples. And that brings more people. People love watching and being a part of the activity of other people. A street is watched because it has activity on it, and that activity becomes community.
• But what about the high end places on park ave uptown. Those are almost entirely tall apartment buildings, so shouldn’t those be unsafe streets? Well no, because those high end apartment buildings essentially hire the eyes a natural neighborhood would have. They hire their security. Each building has a doorman and others in the building constantly watching, on duty at all ours. And of course, the occasional dog walker.
• But take this example a step further. Areas of project housing are similarly defined by tall high rise buildings with few restaurants, bars, and other areas of community. They have walkways going between them, much like the sidewalks of the high end buildings of Park Ave uptown. But these are poor areas, completely devoid of the “eyes” hired by the wealthy uptown buildings. The result is a sidewalk (the walkways) that is terrorized, vandalized, and in complete disrepair. There are no “neighborhood eyes” watching, naturally curbing the violence that might arise, because there is no activity in the neighborhood, and so the while the private areas of uptown are safe and pristine, the unwatched private areas of the Projects become centers of crime.
• Neighborhoods are an ecosystem, and so the things that make them safe are not artificial, they are natural parts of that ecosystem. They are made safe by the presence of activity, and the presence of that activity thriving
• It’s a misconception that parks are areas of safety. Jacobs references kids she noticed from a school who always wanted to stay. The ones who walked thru the city streets of the slums were always happy to leave, but those who had to walk thru the park of the projects always wanted to stay bc they’d always get mugged. A park without all the components that make a neighborhood diverse will be an even worse component of that neighborhood. Because it is not “watched” by the natural activity of the neighborhood and city street activity around it, it instead becomes even more of a haven for crime.
• Jacobs has a great passage about Philly’s 4 parks that are equidistant from city hall, which is as William penn planned it. But they all have had different outcomes. She explains how Rittenhouse is one of the most successful parks because it is surrounded by a variety of different uses - restaurants, bars, offices, apartments, all mixed together, meaning that at any time of day, it is being used by a different set of people for different reasons. This use and “watching” of the park keeps it safe and lively. It’s also unique in design in that it isn’t monotonous. Have variety, or diversity, within the park is also important to keeping it lively and well used. But a park is nothing without the use cases around its perimeter. Case in point is the differing states of Central Park based on where the perimeter is in the city.
• Core thesis of the book - Jacobs says 4 conditions must be met to create city diversity:
  • the district must serve more than one primary function. Essentially it must have a diversity of establishments in it (think bars restaurants offices homes shops etc) that ensure that the district is used for multiple reasons and this has people moving in and around the streets at all different hours for different reasons. This gets at how safe streets are those that are “watched” by the myriad of people that simply use them throughout the day. It’s also critical that those that use the neighborhood use it for multiple things. For instance, people can’t just use it for work alone, or theater alone. The district must serve multiple purposes to the same people.
  • Most blocks must be short, that is streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent
  • The district must mingle buildings of varying age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce.
  • There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, including a dense concentration of people who are there because of residence
• In combination, these conditions create effective economic pools of use, and thus a self sustaining, living and vibrant city district (neighborhood).
• For point 1, Jacobs talks about the financial district and its downfall. Extreme use during lunch, and virtually empty at all other times. It’s because it only serves 1 primary function. People don’t go outdoors on different schedules. They only go outdoors for lunch bc Fidi is only used for offices anymore. There is no diversity in use. And so it’s become more undesirable over time. Even the offices move to more diverse locations because that’s inherently more appealing, and so they moved uptown, further hastening the downfall of Fidi.
• Fidi suffers from “extreme time imbalance.” It’s an incredibly inefficient use of the neighborhood space.
• When places become desirable, often the enterprises that made them diverse get priced out as well. Creating an unfortunate cycle that homogenizes the neighborhood and makes it less desirable
• Offices, residential buildings, and single use buildings like a theater are chessmen on a chess board that can be deployed to launch the diversification of an area
• Lincoln Center is an example of poor city planning, putting all the arts in one area. Carnegie Hall is an example of good city planning, as evidenced by the multitudes of activity and city diversity that developed around it
• Jacobs has a nice passage about how SF’s Civic Center is a great example of failed planning by avoiding diversity.
• Most “downtowns” or “business districts” lack criteria #1, diversity of use. Most residential areas fail because they lack a mixture of the criteria. They often only have a single use, but also often have large blocks and lack of population density
• Short blocks matter. Jacobs uses the example of why long blocks hurt a neighborhood. The man who lives on 86th in between Columbus and Central Park West lives on a huge residential block. He’ll travel to Columbus or Central Park via his street, but due to its size has no reason to ever venture to 87th or 88th. He has no reason to even think that the people who live on those blocks would have any bearing on his life. There’s no neighborhood. And why should there be? All he needs to do is use one block to get to the main attractions of the area, Columbus and Central Park. And this creates and perpetuates Columbus also as a singular place, one of only shops (at least this is how it was at the time I guess).
• To further illustrate this, Jacobs uses a great example of an NYC block that would otherwise dull and unused without an additional street dividing it up - Rockefeller Center. She notes that Rockefeller Center is a lively area of foot traffic and diversity of use in the typically monotonous midtown. The reason is that between 5th and 6th avenues, there’s a small street running north/south from 48th to 51st. Anyone who has been here immediately knows that it is this feature that makes Rockefeller Center. Jacobs then asks the reader to imagine what that area would be without that area being divided into smaller blocks. It would be just like all the other big blocks in midtown, merely a passageway from 5th to 6th avenue. There would be no reason for someone on 48th to venture onto 49th st, and vice versa. This is evidenced by the fact that all of the blocks around Rockefeller Center act in this way. They’re soulless demarcations of buildings that get no foot traffic other than those in the office buildings on those blocks. Blocks need to be small in order to promote use and activity.
• In talking about city blocks needing to be small, she also has a great passage about how her neighborhood of Greenwich has retained popularity, and that people have been talking for years about how Chelsea will become similarly popular because of it’s great location. But she notes that this hasn’t happened, and is unlikely to happen in the way that Greenwich has found popularity, because the blocks are too large to incentivize use of the many streets, which incentivizes use of the diverse restaurants, shops, offices, and apartments in the area. She believes there is a cap to it’s becoming a powerful neighborhood for this reason. She notes that there was an article about how people were mystified that bookstores couldn’t survive in Chelsea. She notes that it’s not that the people who live there don’t like to read. Quite the contrary, the west side is often full of intellectuals. It’s that the area doesn’t have small enough blocks to promote use of a wide variety of people, thus reducing the actual activity experienced by the diversity of use cases in the neighborhood. She then postulates that it is no surprise that neighborhood expansion east of her Greenwich village has become more popular. Those areas have smaller, denser blocks. Of course, we know this today as Noho and the East Village, which have become very popular places.
• She continues on this point by talking about how many have been confused why the elimination of the elevated subway on the west side did little to spur growth in the area while the elimination of the elevated subway on the East side was such a boon to the area. The elimination of the El unlocked a whole area that was ready for to blossom into a neighborhood because it had the right block density, and once paired with diversity of use, it could become a thriving neighborhood. If only she saw how great it has become today she’d feel very validated.
• Jacobs’ chapter about needing mixed building types is very interesting. She phrases it economically - essentially saying that a neighborhood needs a wide range of buildings ranging from very old to very new. This creates a wide variety of ROI thresholds for each building, which in turn means most often that rents are varying, which in turn promotes diversity of use. It does seem that criteria #3 is really in service of criteria #1, although differing building ROIs also promote variety in the population residing in the neighborhood as well. Still, the larger point is that when building of old and new are mixed, different enterprises can be a part of the neighborhood. I think it’s easier to think of when this is not the case. Take, for instance, a neighborhood where every building is new. Since it’s new, the only way for the owner to make the proper ROI on said buildings would be to charge extremely high rent, or or sell for a high price. This limits who can then move into the neighborhood. It basically means it can only be high end luxury apartments or offices and little else. Maybe a very successful national department store, but even those can be monotonous if that is all that can be in the neighborhood. This works similarly with only old buildings that are in need of repair or are inadequate for uses like office buildings or apartments. A good mix means bars and restaurants or small shops and dry cleaners can enter the lower ROI buildings while the higher ones can entice offices, entertainment buildings, or apartments. She notes that this is why in the healthiest of neighborhoods, buildings that were once one thing 20 years ago, become another today. A opera house becomes a brewery, a factory is retrofitted to handle luxury apartments, an old restaurant becomes a clothing shop, and an old apartment can become a restaurant or bar.
• Being human, it is human beings that interest us most. We love the simply watching humans go about there day. Why do we prefer sitting outside for dinner rather than inside? We experience the street
• Greatest flaw in city zoning is that it permits monotony
• By its nature, the metropolis provides what can typically be attained only by traveling - the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance. There is no better proof of this fact than the effort of Totalitarian regimes to keep the strange from their subjects. The big city is sliced into pieces, each of which is observed, purged, and equalized. The mystery of the strange, and the critical rationality of men, are both removed from the city.
• Cities have the capability of providing something for everyone, only because and only when they are created by everybody
• Forces that can influence growth of diversity in cities for good or for ill are: tendency of successful diversity to destroy itself, tendency of massive single elements in cities to cast a deadening influence, tendency for population instability to counter growth of diversity, the tendency of public and private money to glut or to starve development and change
• Jacobs uses 8th street in Greenwich village as a good example of diversity destroying itself. She says a theater was built there showing movies and it was extremely popular. And as a result new restaurants were built up around it. But then the street became so popular that the other diverse uses of the different shops couldn’t afford to be there anymore and moved away until the street became a single use street of only restaurants, and then no longer had the diversity that made people attracted to it and kept it into regular use throughout the day in the first place. Restaurants are considered a “secondary” use by Jacobs (as opposed to offices, which would be primary), and so when a street becomes so dominated by secondary use, it loses its original value and just becomes a street solely for that individual secondary use
• Diversity can be crowded out by the duplication of success
• Funny anecdote - The sorting out of downtown in nyc  was already being memorialized In the 1880s with a song that went: from 8th street down the men are earning it, from 8th street up, the women are spending it. That is the manner of this great town, from 8th street up to 8th street down
• Jacobs says that to some extent the destruction of diversity is inevitable, but there are some things that can be done to try to ensure neighborhood diversity. The first is zoning, which she says, while better than typical zoning which ensures single use, zoning for diversity is still oppressive in a way and can’t completely solve the problem. Examples of this are the gov’t acquiring historical sites and forbidding their alteration. Another one is limiting the height of buildings of certain parts of the neighborhood. An example is limiting the height of buildings on the southern end of a park in the middle of a very popular area. This will allow the park to have southern sun in the winter but also influence a different type of tenant in those buildings, which will balance the high rise apartments or offices that have likely cropped up around the park. She does note though that it is important to appropriately tax the value of these buildings in accordance with the limit placed on them. For instance, just because the park surroundings have become high demand plots of land, does not mean that the height limited plots of land should be taxed the way the land that holds the office buildings is taxed. If the height restricted land is taxed higher because it’s surroundings have grown in value and demand, diversity of use will still be removed from the area, because the original use case will no longer be able to afford being there.
• The other tactic Jacobs recommends is for governments to actively promote diversity when they are planning to build their civic or public works. They shouldn’t try to centralize where their public works or civic buildings are, but rather, each new one should be placed in an different area of the city, one that they believe needs greater diversity. The placement of the civic building or public work can become a catalyst for the evolution of diversity of use in an area.
• The thing Jacobs most recommends is creating competition of diversity and thus attractiveness among neighborhoods. No district can be frozen in time, and it is natural that some will be more popular than others at any given time. But in order to keep diversity of use in a city, there need to be multiple attractive neighborhoods that entice diversity of use. So that even though there may be one area that is at peak popularity, the use cases that might not be able to afford that peak popularity area will be able to find an attractive alternative, which will in turn make that alternative more attractive with diversity of use, and eventually that area will become the most popular. It’s an ecosystem that really needs more areas of diversity of use to continue to incentivize other areas to have diversity of use. In a weird way, it reminds of Moses’ scheme for Triborough Authority. The only way to have enough money to build the things he wanted, was to continuously build things before he could pay off the bonds of previous works, so he could continue to issue more bonds and raise money. It’s a self reinforcing thing.
• Jacobs notes that clear demarcated borders very often create stagnant and desolate areas. She says it’s no wonder that most university campuses in cities are associated with blighted areas. A university campus in an area is often really a massive plot of land of single use, just as harmful as the monotonous planning of having one area be all huge office buildings or public housing. The border is clear, the use case is not diverse, and as a result the borders don’t attract diverse uses, and then the areas around those borders subsequently don’t attract diverse uses, thus creating a blighted area.
• Small parks, rather than large ones, knit together neighborhoods and bring people together
• That’s not to say that these large institutions that cleve a city with borders is bad. A city needs hospitals, universities, large parks with public institutions, and highways/expressways for trucking. We just need to know how to fold them into diverse city life.
• And example Jacobs uses for this is Central Park, which on the east side has intense city use but on the west side does not. And certain attractions in the center are closed down a early and seldom used. She suggests major park attractions should be brought to the perimeter to promote use around the entirety of the perimeter of the park, which will further incentivize use further in. It’s also important to have commercial uses on the street side opposite the perimeter of the park. The activity on waterfronts docks should be exposed to people as well instead of hidden. People are often fascinated by the work going on there.
• Unslumming a slum is actually most often halted by the destruction of that slum in replacement for the things like project housing
• Slum clearance fails because it tries to address problems by trying to fix the symptoms
• Immense suburban sprawls around American Cities has not come about by accident, and still less by the myth of free choice between cities and suburbs. Suburban sprawl was made practical, and for some families mandatory, through the creation of something the US lacked until the 1930s - a national mortgage market, specifically calculated to encourage suburban home building. Because of the certitude offered by government mortgage guarantees, a bank in say, New Haven, could would and does buy of mortgages on housing in a place far away like Southern California. Obviously this is broadly a good thing because it provides liquidity into the market and allows for a better matching of supply and demand, but when funneled into so singular a use as suburban home building, it can be destructive
• Jacobs suggests governments subsidize rents  for buildings by guaranteeing a certain level of monthly rent paid rather than subsidize the entire capital cost of the building like they do for project housing. This incentivizes the owner to invest in the building and the area
• The limiting the ills of the car and traffic can’t be achieved by merely making pedestrian only areas. You’d still need all the parking and the gas stations and any other service for cars. Instead, the quantity of cars in use in cities must be limited
• Increase in service for automobiles (bigger roads, highways, making avenues one way instead of two way) almost always coincide with a decline in public transport service. When congestion increases, the remedy is often to increase automobile accessibility like parking, which creates a vicious cycle of incentivizing more cars to be on the road, which incentivizes further measures to increase car accessibility
• Jacobs has a good anecdote about curbing car use in the example of Washington Sq Park. The neighborhood was able to both prevent the widening of the road going thru it and the creation of highways around. In fact, they were also able to close off the road thru the park, which is at it is today. Moses predicted a swell of traffic and congestion and so wanted to create larger roads around it, but they prevented that too. As it turned out, there was no uptick in cars at all, and there was even a slight decrease in the area, because people found other routes to be better.
• People become deeply attached to landmarks within areas of great city activity and diversity
• Having the lobbies of apartment or office buildings is a great way to create mixed use and diversity in an area
• Part of unslumming slums is also about creating the vitality in the area that keeps those living in the slums to elect to stay there and invest in the neighborhood instead of fleeing. When a population rises in wealth but flees, it perpetuates the nature of the slum neighborhood they came from. But those that stay put end up unslumming their neighborhood. The rise of Greenwich village is an example of this from the 30s to the 60s. And it turns out, most people want to stay put. It’s about creating the environment that incentivizes them to do so.
• Jacobs has a great passage near the end about organizing city government. She talks about how the idea of the “City Planning Commission” has become popular, but there are no instances where it has been affective. The needs of the city aren’t planned in a God like way, overseeing and coordinating all things. Just as city vitality is dependent on the neighborhood or distract thriving in the 4 ways she defines, so to must city planning be on the local, district level. Understanding affect on a local level is the only way to properly plan changes in neighborhoods.
• She says that the organizations of different departments in government naturally leads to sub departments due to the size and complexity of the city, and leads to immense bureaucracy in government. She notes that people criticize people of NYC for not caring about their city government, but she sees it as amazing actually that there is anybody that continues to care at all, because it is so obtuse.
• Instead of departments, Jacobs believes city planning should be left to the districts, and instead of having different departments, that the government should be organized by district instead. The leader of each district needs to be able to understand the district deeply and must be able to go across a wide swath of needs. This is government organized horizontally (by district) rather than vertically (by department or specialty). So the head of a district must understand every issue that might come in contact with that district.
• Still, she says, it would be destructive to have ALL government in cities organized this way. There has to be a mixture of vertical and horizontal organization. Just as taxation and funding must be centralized, there are other bodies that need to be vertically organized too - water supply, power, air pollution control, labor mediation, management of museums, zoos, and prisons, for example - because these functions transcend district organization completely bc district knowledge is irrelevant to them. And some need to be horizontal in some cases and vertical in another. For example, the distributor of licenses to taxis should be vertical (it’s not relevant on a district basis), but vendors and places of entertainment do make sense to be granted licenses on a district level  - personal thought: maybe this is the way a company should be organized
• So a city planning commission could exist, but it’s body needs to be made up of city district leaders. This is necessary because the larger a city becomes, the more blurred and impersonal the needs of the localized areas of the city become
• It is futile to expect that citizens will act with responsibility, verve, and experience, on big, citywide issues, when self government has been rendered all but impossible on localized issues, which are often of the most direct importance to people.
• City needs to actually be treated like an organism. Approached like we approach the life sciences. It’s not scientifically solved in the same manner that typical scientific method is, or even statistical analysis is. It’s an organism, deriving complexity from the interaction of a plethora of different factors that all react and depend on each other
• It requires large quantities of the average to create the unaverage in cities. Planners have been trained to ignore the “average” because the average is statistically uninteresting. They’ve been trained to ignore the very thing that gives the city vitality
• City’s need the country, the country need the cities. The success of each enables the success of the other. It’s the spread of suburbs and the paternalistic cozying up to nature that actually destroys it