Wonderful essay by Andrew Blum about "Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change":

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

Comments

[Michael]

A very acute insight into how modern urban planning has largely missed Jacobs' point while attempting to follow her (very brilliant) recommendations without deviation. Jacobs emphasized that there should be enough different interesting neighborhoods that the few good ones don't crush themselves with their own success, which is so common in places like New York and San Francisco. Instead, there are attempts to preserve the superficial elements of interesting neighborhoods, so that the wealthy folks who take them over can still enjoy the things that appealed to them in the first place. Can we really do anything to preserve great neighborhoods other than cultivating enough of them to dilute the gentrification that ruins so many of them now?

[Bill Seitz]

Maybe instead of converting medium-density to high-density, it makes sense to build more medium-density instead of low-density: maybe instead of a tower at the SubWay stop, it should be TownHouse-s near the SubUrban CommuterTrain.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2007-10-19-BlumVsJacobsDensity