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The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Difference between revisions
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (view source)
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It resonates with a series of other great books in adjacent fields over the last sixty years all of whom caution against executive, top-down direction networks of autonomous individuals who are better placed, motivated and incentivised to make executive decisions for themselves. Jacobs was there first, and she if she didn’t articulate [[complexity theory]], [[systems theory]] then she anticipated it with spooky, eerie accuracy. So read ''American Cities'' with {{br|Seeing Like a State}}, {{author|Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} and {{author|Donella H. Meadows}}’ {{br|Thinking in Systems}} and you will have the bones of a grand unifying theory of everything. | It resonates with a series of other great books in adjacent fields over the last sixty years all of whom caution against executive, top-down direction networks of autonomous individuals who are better placed, motivated and incentivised to make executive decisions for themselves. Jacobs was there first, and she if she didn’t articulate [[complexity theory]], [[systems theory]] then she anticipated it with spooky, eerie accuracy. So read ''American Cities'' with {{br|Seeing Like a State}}, {{author|Charles Perrow}}’s {{br|Normal Accidents}} and {{author|Donella H. Meadows}}’ {{br|Thinking in Systems}} and you will have the bones of a grand unifying theory of everything. | ||
Half a century before it became the fashionable pose it is today, [[diversity]], and the richness and variety of everyday life, are the heartbeat of Jacobs’s observations. ''Real'' and not just cosmetic diversity, of income, occupation, outlook, stage in life. Jacobs observes that diversity and efficiency are, at some level, ''mutually exclusive''. That is a wallopingly profound idea. And so obvious, that it beggars belief no-one is harping on about it today. You can’t homogenise, economise, compartmentalise, rationalise, standardise ''and'' embrace caprice, idiosyncrasy and divergence. This is the great, huge irony of our modernist diversity agenda: it’s so ''homogenous'' — so ''legible''. We all wear the same badges, signal the same virtues, declare ourselves each others allies as if we are Stepford wives. That is not what Jacobs is talking about at all. She is talking about a variety, a serendiptious, redundant, overlapping, scattershot fripperousness that generates all kinds of unexpected opportunities and challenges. ''This'' is the richness of city. | |||
So, of the thundering, plainly right, observations Jacobs makes are these: | So, of the thundering, plainly right, observations Jacobs makes are these: | ||
*The streets, and not the buildings, are the vital part of the city, | *The streets, and not the buildings, are the vital part of the city, which is largely comprised of people when you can see them. When they’re in their houses, from the city dynamic they’re largely out of circulation; | ||
* | *You need old buildings as much as you need ones: not just fancy old ones, but also humdrum, run down, or even dilapidated old ones. If the whole place has gentrified, there will people who can’t afford to live there. | ||