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The Week's Work

American Studies 334
Urban America
Roger Williams University
T, F     3:30 - 4:50
CAS 228
Spring Semester, 2008 
Michael R. H. Swanson, Ph. D
Office: CAS 110
Hours:  T,  9:30 - 11:00
  W 2:00 - 3:00
M, F 1:00 - 2:00
Phone:   (401) 254-3230

This rather dingy picture doesn't do justice to the vibrancy of the Back of the Yards district in Chicago, featured in Jacobs' chapter 6.  Clicking on it will bring you to the brochure of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council one of the grass roots organizations which Jane Jacobs lauds as vital to arresting decay in the city.  Forty years after her book was published the Council remains active and vital, even as the ethnic mix continues to change.
For other vibrant images of the Back of the Yards District, and many other neighborhoods in Chicago as well, visit Picturing Chicago.  The site is under expansion and reorganization, so you'll have to prowl around a bit.
Read, in Jacobs,
Chapter 6. The Uses of City Neighborhoods

This chapter may be the most difficult of all in this assignment. This is not Jacobs’ fault, particularly, but the fault of our own preconceptions about neighborhoods and what it means to be someone’s neighbor. We’re going to have to move to different sorts of definitions here. Jacobs wants us to understand three levels of “neighborhood,” all of which have to function simultaneously if a city is to function well. If this is the case, simple geography can’t be the entire definer of neighborhood or neighborliness.  I wonder, given that she wrote this before the invention of the Internet, whether she would now want to consider four levels of “neighborhood”.  What do you think?

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The Internet is so dynamic that it is hard to keep up with the latest innovations.  One of the students in class pointed out to me that Google Maps now incorporates something called Street View.  Five of the eight cities have it.  I've suggested to the other three groups that if they wish to change their cities so they can use this tool, they are free to do so.  The view above is from Chicago, representing the area the key picture represents:  The Old Chicago Water Tower.
James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, two books that brought the specter of suburbia to light for millions of Americans and struck a nerve among those longing for a better place to live.  His relentless dogging of suburbia is well founded: "I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." Visit the website of Traditional Neighborhood Design to read a transcript of  Kunstler "in mid-rant," by clicking on his picture at the left.  To reach his personal website, including a blog with a not very polite title,
Read, in Death and Life of Great American Cities:

Part II.  The Conditions for City Diversity.

  7.  The Generators of Diversity 143 - 151 (ML: 187 -  197)
  8.  The Need for Mixed Primary Uses 152 - 177 (ML: 198 - 232)
  9. The Need for Small Blocks 178 - 186   (ML: 233 - 243)
Notes on the Readings:
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Much of the power of Jane Jacobs' book comes from the rigorous structure of the argument.  Part One establishes Diversity as a measure of healthy urban life.  Part Two looks at what makes for diversity: the factors which make diversity within city districts possible.  She identifies four which are crucial enough to be considered needs.  The six chapters in part two are organized almost as if they could stand by themselves: Chapter 7 serves as an introduction, and Chapter 12 as a discussion for chapters 8 through 11
Chapter 8: Need for Mixed Primary Uses. 

Chapter 9.  Need for Small Blocks.

For Tuesday, February 19
For Friday,  February 22

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