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share neighborhood stories or reveal interesting facts about the area that people might not otherwise know.” The Jane’s Walk festival happens each May in hundreds of cities around the world, in honor of urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs, who is remembered for her pioneering research on what makes for vibrant, healthy cities.
Jane McGonigal • Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
The wonderful convenience of city sidewalks is an important asset to children too. Children are at the mercy of convenience more than anyone else, except the aged. A great part of children’s outdoor play, especially after they start school, and after they also find a certain number of organized activities (sports, arts, handcrafts or whatever else
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The success of Lübeck demonstrates important tools for creating thriving cities that apply to this day. Even in the Digital Age, businesspeople like to get together and gossip, trade, compete, and collaborate.
Jonathan F. P. Rose • The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life
Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities
Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
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
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities. A city
... See moreJane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Evidence also suggests that when average incomes tend to rise in a neighborhood relative to its surrounding areas, the racial demographics of the areas are slower to change. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for example, finds that the lessening of poverty in US neighborhoods between 1970 and 2000 is not associated with white residents displacing
... See moreJohn MacDonald • Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning
These planners had said—the Regional Plan Association had been saying it since 1929 and, after the opening of Moses’ creations during the 1930’s, with increasing urgency—that the movement of people and goods in a great metropolitan region required a balanced transportation system, one in which the construction of mass rapid transit facilities kept
... See moreRobert A. Caro • The Power Broker
The first necessity in understanding how cities and their parks influence each other is to jettison confusion between real uses and mythical uses—for example, the science-fiction nonsense that parks are “the lungs of the city.” It takes about three acres of woods to absorb as much carbon dioxide as four people exude in breathing, cooking and
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