20161031

Concerning Neighborhood Parks,

Jacobs doesn't think very much of them. She has several reasons why she thinks they're not exactly wonderful places. She gives many examples, and distinguishes between famous downtown parks, such as the commons in Boston, and lesser known parks in the "neighborhoods". She makes a distinction between "real" and "mythical" uses of parks. Make sure that you understand what she means by those differences. Below are two examples of the parks which she criticized when this book was published, Franklin Square in Philadelphia on the right and The Plaza in Los Angeles, on the left. Cities are dynamic places. Both of these have changed. Would you say for the better, for the worse, or a bit of both? Remember you can look at both of these directly on Google Maps. I may demonstrate in class. Find a "neighborhood park" in your city and add a link to it in your resource folder.

Concerning Uses of Neighborhoods,

Jacobs wrote, "A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not overwhelmed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its problems and is progressively more helpless before them. Our cities contain all degrees of success and failure. But on the whole Americans are poor at handling city neighborhoods..." She also writes. "In most big cities, we Americans do reasonably well at creating useful neighborhoods. Note how they do this. She calls the way we use the term "a valentine"--something sentimental and unreal. How does she define neighborhood? What about neighborhood boundaries? Do you agree or disagree? What would Jacobs think of Mr. Rogers, below?

Concerning Generators of diversity,

Jacobs wrote, "A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiently complex to sustain city safety, public contact and cross-use needs an enormous diversity of ingredients," and also "It is all very well to castigate the Great Blight of Dullness, and to understand why it is destructive to city life, but in itself this does not get us very far." It is going to be important to understand what she means by diversity, and why she thinks it is important. It is not the same thing as would be described by sociologists, though it might lead to the outcome desired by sociologists. As usual, she gives examples, and how they are useful to create lively, interesting urban places. Her examples are useful because they show both areas of success and failure.

Remember that she wrote this before the age of electronic media and the Interstate Highway System, Both of which contributed to the problems she notices. She notes, however, that sales in "downtowns" are declining year by year, as suburban shopping malls take over what had been one of the causes of urban centers (remember our two previous books about this). As world trade grows, some of the problems she mentions have grown only worse. Consider Detroit, for example.

After you read this short chapter, see if you can find a neighborhood in your city which has the kind of generators of diversity about which she writes. Find them, use Irfan View to turn a screen shot into a image, and put it in your resource folder.

Concerning The Need for Mixed Primary uses,

In a sense, this continues the thoughts Jacobs shared in the previous chapter. She mentions, among other things, organizations which are seeking to improve the conditions of the area which she described. One of those is the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, which was founded just a few years before the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It has a website. Take a look at it by the link I've provided. In Bigger cities, the mixed primary uses may be housed in separate structures. In smaller urban areas, two or even more uses may be housed in one building. See if you can find examples of both kinds of mixed primary use in your cities, and you can, provide evidence of some kind in your drop box. The map below is of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan District. you can see the home of the association on the map. The map clicks to open Google Maps. Prowl around until you find your own example of primary use, and save the URL to your resource file. Then see if you can find a similar area in your chosen city.

Two views of Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. Both of these connect to Google Maps, the one on the right to the Google Earth Feature. I've visited Telegraph Hill, and perhaps some of you have, too. If not, this is a good way to visit it with your imagination. Find some of the the things which create diversity here, using, of course, the Adams model.

Google Street View allows one to "enter" certain structures. I've entered two from the Downtown-Lower Manhattan District. Can you see how places like this make the area "livable" Find one more and post the URL in your resource folder. Do the same thing for someplace in your City, if there is one available.