What’s Next for Jane Jacobs' Sidewalk Ballet?

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

The idea was that infrastructure would attract firms, firms would attract other firms, and so on. Jane Jacobs, one of the most influential American urbanists of the twentieth century, was skeptical.

No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill o

In this group of chapters on decline and regeneration, I intend to dwell on several powerful forces that can influence, for good or for ill, the growth of diversity and vitality in cities, once an area is not crippled by lack of one or more of the four conditions necessary for generating diversity. These forces, in the form that they work for ill,

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 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 dif

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects. Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a s

And here we come to the third kind of city neighborhood that is useful for self-government: the district. This, I think, is where we are typically most weak and fail most disastrously. We have plenty of city districts in name. We have few that function. The chief function of a successful district is to mediate between the indispensable, but inheren