The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The problem is to hamper excess duplications at one place, and divert them instead to other places in which they will not be excess duplications, but healthy additions. The other places may be at some distance, or very close by indeed. But in any case they cannot be fixed on arbitrarily. They must be places where the use concerned will have an exce

inferiority. The notion that the fact of a subsidy required that these people be housed by someone other than private enterprise and normal landlords was an aberration in itself. The government does not take over the landlordship or ownership or management of subsidized farms or of subsidized airlines. Government does not, as a rule, take over the

Or consider the line drawn by Mr. Jaffe at the candy store around our corner—a line so well understood by his customers and by other storekeepers too that they can spend their whole lives in its presence and never think about it consciously. One ordinary morning last winter, Mr. Jaffe, whose formal business name is Bernie, and his wife, whose forma

Only experience and trial and error can indicate what diverse combinations of activities can operate effectively as demand goods for any specific problem park. But we can make some useful generalized guesses about components. First, a negative generalization: Magnificent views and handsome landscaping fail to operate as demand goods; maybe these “s

Mazes of coordination, conference and liaison tenuously connect these sprawling and randomly fractionated empires with one another. The mazes are too labyrinthine even to be kept mapped and open, let alone to serve as reliable and sensitive channels of interdepartmental understanding, or channels of pooled information about specific places, or chan

Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far eno

Zoning for diversity must be thought of differently from the usual zoning for conformity, but like all zoning it is suppressive. One form of zoning for diversity is already familiar in certain city districts: controls against demolition of historically valuable buildings. Already different from their surroundings, these are zoned to stay different

The third kind of money comes from a shadow world of investment, an underworld of cash and credit, so to speak. Where this money comes from ultimately, and by what avenues it finds its way, is concealed and devious. This money is lent at interest rates starting at about 20 percent and ranging as high as the market will bear, apparently in some case

Intricacy is related to the variety of reasons for which people come to neighborhood parks. Even the same person comes for different reasons at different times; sometimes to sit tiredly, sometimes to play or to watch a game, sometimes to read or work, sometimes to show off, sometimes to fall in love, sometimes to keep an appointment, sometimes to s