Author and activist Jane Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they mingle “everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets.”

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

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The projects that today most urgently need salvaging are low-income housing projects. Their failures drastically affect the everyday lives of many people, especially children. Moreover, because they are too dangerous, demoralizing and unstable within themselves, they make it too hard in many cases to maintain tolerable civilization in their vicinit

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All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a d... See more

This ubiquitous principle is the need of cities for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially. The components of this diversity can differ enormously, but they must supplement each other in certain concrete ways. I think that unsuccessful city areas are areas wh

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