Jane Jacobs And Atlantic Yards

Fantastic revisiting of Jane Jacobs by Karrie Jacobs, basically arguing that the patron saint of sidewalk culture wouldn't necessarily have been appalled by the Atlantic Yards project. I agree with almost everything here -- part of the charm and dynamism of the Greenwich Village that Jacobs celebrated came out of the fact that it was framed by much larger-scale developments, in Midtown and Wall Street. There's no reason that couldn't work in Brooklyn as well, if it's done right. Brooklyn already has an existing commercial downtown between these various brownstone neighborhoods -- it's just a downtown that doesn't really work. Now, you can make the argument that the Ratner/Gehry plan won't work either, but to object purely to the scale of the project strikes me as being a kind of sentimentalism. Right now, Brooklyn has pretty much everything that makes a great city: a diverse population, artists and writers and other creative types, a thriving sidewalk culture, restaurants and boutiques, movie stars and first-generation immigrants living within a dozen blocks of each other, one of the great urban parks in the world. But it doesn't have a downtown core that anyone wants to visit.

This gets me to the one part of Karrie Jacobs' article that I have a small quibble with:

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”

Jacobs may well be right, but part of the point is that the border vaccuum already exists. I seriously doubt that even the existing plan will make it worse, and with some thoughtful modification, it could make it much better.

The one major concern I have -- and obviously this is an core objection that's been raised by the critics of the project -- is the traffic impact. Both Ratner and the city seem to be dodging that issue in all the discussion thus far, and it really will need to be solved if this thing is going to work.

Comments

[Litfaßsäule]

great site with good look and information...i like it

[Michael Kovnat]

Check out the Unity Plan:
http://www.developdontdestroy.org/public/UNITY.pdf
An alternate idea that seems to address the border vaccum problem, creating a better flow between Park Slope/Prospect Heights and Fort Greene. To my mind, one of the downsides of living in Brooklyn is the lack of that neighborhood-to-neighborhood connectivity that Manhattan tends to have. Smart development of Atlantic Yards could and should address this. The current Ratner plan doesn't.

[James Governor]

I applied some Jane Jacob's theory, by way of Emergence, to enterprise software generally, and SAP specifically, in this blog post...
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001972.html

I realise you're super busy but i thought you might be interested in seeing your thoughts extended in a different area.

Why is there a limit to what SAP can offer customers? Its a top down city plan, with no sidewalks. Enterprises need mixed use zoning as much as cities.

Thanks again for Emergence by the way. God I love that book.

[Monte Davis]

"Brooklyn has pretty much everything... But it doesn't have a downtown core that anyone wants to visit."

I'd expect you of all people to consider the mental-maps angle. Part of our definition of "a [one] city" is its [one] downtown core. When greater NYC was formed in 1898, something had to give: the Manhattan core drained the status, the pizzazz, the mana from Brooklyn's. Call it "rich get richer" or "winner take all."

Also, just fifteen years earlier, the Bridge approach had shifted Brooklyn's commercial center of gravity up the hill from Fulton Ferry to the Borough Hall area -- so Brooklyn's core itself may been a bit unsettled and "fragile" in mental-map terms.

[NoLandGrab]

Objection sustained...

You state, "to object purely to the scale of the project strikes me as being a kind of sentimentalism."

SCALR in the case of Atlantic Yards means several differnt things.

HEIGHT:
Since the project was announced there have been many residents of Central Brooklyn who have objected to losing their view of the Clock Tower. OK, that could be characterized as "sentimental," but can you blame them for wanting to keep something they cherish?

DENSITY:
If Atlantic Yards is built, the project would become the most dense residential community in the nation by a long shot. [See, The Real Estate Obsever, http://therealestate.observer.com/2006/07/prisoner-of-atlantic-avenue.html]

BULK:
Atlantic Yards Report recently noted that the tallest building in Atlantic Yards ("Miss Brooklyn") is only 20% taller than the Clock Tower, but will be three-times the bulk, and that 10 of the 16 towers proposed in the project would be bulkier than the Clock Tower building. [See, http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2006/07/miss-brooklyn-would-be-3x.html]

Density and bulk have implications beyond sentimentalism -- it will impact infrastructure, public services, and quality of life for decades to come.

The reality of the density and bulk of Ratner's Atlantic Yards proposal also supports Karrie Jacobs's argument that the project would "exacerbate the division" [between neighborhoods] by expanding the "border vacuum." Keep in mind that the current "border vaccum" is on the 8-acre railyard, the entire project extends well beyond those boundaries to 22 acres.

Local land-use review reforms were enacted after Jane Jacobs and other activists from her generation insisted that existing residents and businesses should have input into the destiny of their neighborhoods. These reforms are being entirely circumvented in the case of Atlantic Yards because NY State has taken over the project and superceded all local review, approvals and zoning (which determines "scale").

Sorry to go on about this -- I only wanted to point out that Karrie Jacobs was more correct than you may have initially thought and that Jane Jacobs still has much to teach residents of New York City.

[dreadnaught]

"to object purely to the scale of the project strikes me as being a kind of sentimentalism.""

Uggh, it would make this area of brooklyn the most densley populated area in the United States...I guess I am sentimental, but I would prefer Brooklyn to be Brooklyn not, well, Hong Kong.
Look at the shadow that this project will cast over our neigborhood:
http://www.southoxford.com/images/Real_Shadow_Sweep.pdf
Brooklyn may not be Bedford Falls, but that's no reason to turn it into Pottersv- err Ratnerville.

[fitnr]

Objecting to a project solely because it will increase traffic is less defensible than objections based (supposedly) on sentimentalism. After all, even a wonderful, holistic, community-supported, connective project would bring added traffic. Replacing a void with active buildings would slow traffic on Atlantic Ave no matter what - healthy buildings (i.e. with streetlife), moreso.
To a certain extent, traffic is the sign of a healthy city. Private cars are not the ideal mode of urban tranport, but consider a city with no traffic. What does that imply about the built environment, the economy and the cultural life? Manhattan has the worst traffic in the country, and it's also (arguably) the nation's most vibrant 23 sq miles in those terms.
Sentimentalism for preserving the mental map of Brooklyn, on the other hand, is a well placed critique. I agree with 'NoLandGrab' here. See The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch for more about the value of landmarks and 'legibility' - this project would deface both.

[A]

Fitnr,

Mayor Bloomberg made your very same point this morning. He is wrong too.

In the 21st century, lots of bikes, pedestrians and bus riders might be the sign of a healthy, vibrant urban economy. Motor vehicle traffic gridlock is not.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2006/08/02/mayor-bloomberg-says-nycs-traffic-congestion-is-good/

[alan rosner]

guess i'm a bit late to this string of comments, but it occurred to me that density has another unsentimental consequence that Jane never might have considered: post 9/11 terrorism...

not to put too fine a point on it, but not only does A Y create the densest ever urban tract, it concentrates in that tract three significant terrorist targets: a glass sports arena and glass skyscrape over the target of a 1997 suicide bomb plot at the Atlantic Ave Station.

to be generous and allow that the ESDC may right that a WTC level attack is "unreasonable", except the ESDC is providing no information for the PACB to use when deciding if building this private development is itself "reasonable"... In fact, why didn't the ESDC use a suicide bombing as their "reasonable worse case scenario" in the EIS.

if Silver & Spitzer - after 9/11, after katrina, after Iraq - say trusting a developer to make decisions behind closed doors about public safety is "good enough" government for them, we'll know what to expect these next few years...

So what would jane say? Would she ask if vehicles needed to be diverter or searched to protect this all glass spanking new gleaming core... or if A Y will get insurance companies to rethink their risk exposure the way Allstate did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina... or if the interior, privately held publicly accessable open space will become defended & not quite so accessable... or....

you get the idea

alan from brooklyn