Sublime

New Haven’s efforts to replace old neighborhoods with brutally modern architecture received national attention, and won many design awards, but by the late 1960s they had largely failed because they concentrated poverty, isolated residents

Instead of worrying about where enough work is to come from, the first problem is to identify where, in residential districts, it does exist and is being wasted as an element of primary use. In cities you have to build from existing assets, to make more assets. To think how to make the most of work and dwelling mixtures, where they exist or give pr

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

Yet neither of these parks is so complex in plan as all that. Intricacy that counts is mainly intricacy at eye level, change in the rise of ground, groupings of trees, openings leading to various focal points—in short, subtle expressions of difference. The subtle differences in setting are then exaggerated by the differences in use that grow up amo

this model lays waste to the small business model that supported our great middle class.

Too much is expected of city parks. Far from transforming any essential quality in their surroundings, far from automatically uplifting their neighborhoods, neighborhood parks themselves are directly and drastically affected by the way the neighborhood acts upon them.

One final point must be discussed. The magic of a great city comes from the enormous specialization of human effort there. Only a city such as New York can support a restaurant where you can eat chocolate-covered ants, or buy three-hundred-year-old books of poems, or find a Caribbean steel band playing with American folk singers. By comparison, a c

The exact reasons for scantness of use at a border vary. Some borders damp down use by making travel across them a one-way affair. Housing projects are examples of this. The project people cross back and forth across the border (usually, in any appreciable numbers, at only one side of the project or at most two sides). The adjoining people, for the