Jane Jacobs’ Requirements for Urban Diversity, Part 1

I’m slowly but surely working through my first reading of Jacobs’ seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities {buy it here}. I’ve been reading it bit by bit for the past five months or so.  I have reached the point where she has described the four main tenants needed for a city district to be considered successful.  Over the past few months, Emily and I have/had been looking at moving to a different area of the city.  Just as we were ramping up our search, I came to this point in the book.  I was planning on using Jacob’s principles to help decide which area(s) would be good to move to in Chicago.  Since then, two things have happened: 1. We have decided not to move, and 2. I have started school again, so I haven’t read any further in the book since when I wrote the first draft of this post two months ago.   Nonetheless, in a number of upcoming posts I am going to try to apply Jacobs’ “generators of diversity” to our current neighborhood, Lakeview.

Here are Jacobs’ four conditions to generate diversity:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two.  These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including  a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce.  This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there.  This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

Below is a short video of Jane Jacobs I found on YouTube:

Shoulders of Giants #3

“A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it. The same might be said of streets, in the sense that they serve other purposes beside carrying wheeled traffic in their middles. Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city is dull.

More than that, and here we get to the first problem, if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear. When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.”

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961