Tag Archives: Jane Jacobs

Richard Florida: we lack systematic data to compare cities

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As he considers Jane Jacobs’ impact, Richard Florida suggests we need more data about cities:

MCP: Some of the research around the built environment is pretty skimpy and not very scientific, in a lot of cases.

RF: Right. And it’s done by architects who are terrific, but are basically looking at it from the building level. We need a whole research agenda. A century or so ago John Hopkins University invented the teaching hospital, modern medicine. They said, medicine could be advanced by underpinning the way doctors treat people and develop clinical methodologies, with a solid, scientific research base. Think of it as a system that runs from laboratory to bed-side. We don’t have that for cities and urbanism.  But at the same time we know that the city is the key economic and social unit of our time. Billions of people across the world are pouring into cities and we are spending trillions upon trillions of dollars building new cities and rebuilding, expanding and upgrading existing ones. We’re doing it with little in the way of systematic research. We lack even the most basic data we need to compare and assess cities around the world. There’s no comparable grand challenge that we have so terribly under funded as cities and urbanism. We need to develop everything from the underlying science to better understand cities and their evolution, the systematic data to assess them and the educational and clinical protocols for building better, more prosperous and inclusive cities. Right now, mayors are out there winging it. Economic developers are out there winging it. There’s no clinical training program. There are some, actually, but they’re scattered about and they’re not having much impact. It’s going to take a big commitment. But we need to build the equivalent of the medical research infrastructure, with the equivalent of “teaching hospitals” for our cities.  When you think of it cities are our greatest laboratories for advancing our understanding the intersection of natural, physical, social and human environments—they’re our most complex organisms. This is going to be my next big research project: I’m calling it the Urban Genome Project. It’s what I hope to devote the rest of my career doing.

The cities as laboratories language echoes that of the Chicago School. But, much of the sociological literature suggests a basic tension in this area: how much are cities alike compared to how much are they different? Are there common processes across most or all cities that we can highlight and work with or does their unique contexts limit how much generalizing can be done? Hence, we have a range of studies with everything from examining large sets of cities at once or processes across all cities (like Florida would argue in The Rise of the Creative Class) versus studies of particular neighborhoods and cities to discover their idiosyncratic patterns.

Of course, we could just look at cities like a physicist might and argue there are power laws underlying cities…

Cities will need to adapt to self-driving cars

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If self-driving cars arrive soon, cities may not be ready:

Just six percent of long-range transportation plans in major US cities are factoring the impact of autonomous cars, according to a report released in the fall by the National League of Cities. That’s a bad sign. “Even though driverless cars may be shoehorned to fit the traditional urban environment in the short term, it won’t be a long-term solution for maximizing potential benefits,” says Lili Du, an assistant professor of transportation engineering at Illinois Tech.

The Driverless Cities Project is developing a comprehensive answer, folding in urban design, landscape architecture, transportation engineering, sociology, urban networks, and planning law. (The project is a finalist for the university’s $1 million Nayar Prize for research with meaningful social impacts.) The idea is to explore current research around the country, along with the more forward-thinking planning initiatives, and fold in their own studies to create a suite of guidelines—including model urban codes that determine so much about city environments—for municipalities to incorporate into their planning.

There’s plenty to consider. For example, we don’t know how parking will work for autonomous vehicles. Should cities be building lots outside urban centers? Is parking still necessary at all? Wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication will lets cars pack together more tightly, which raises questions about how we fit them onto our streets.

Their autonomous operation alone can obviate the need for traffic signals and road signs. That’ll go a long way toward beautifying city streets, Marshall says, but brings up other problems regarding pedestrian safety, speed limits, roadway design, and the need for and sizes of driveways and curbs. Even further, vehicle ownership and usage patterns will change, once we’re able to summon an autonomous car through an app and then shoo it away once it delivers us at our destination. Who’s going to own and operate those cars, and what will they do when not serving their owners? Park in the ‘burbs? Infinite-Uber-loop?

It sounds like there is a lot of good that could be done in helping to reverse the changes that occurred from the early to mid-1900s where cities were altered in significant ways – wider streets and smaller sidewalks, the construction of highways – to make it easier for cars to operate in the city. Of course, making some of these roadway changes doesn’t necessarily lead to a Jane Jacobs urban paradise. Take downtown Manhattan: you could reduce the size of roads and give pedestrians more space. Yet, the scale of the buildings often would not help; you can create all sorts of sidewalks but if they are shrouded in shadows from skyscrapers, is it inviting? Or, adding more pedestrian space may not necessarily lead to more lively street life if there isn’t a mix of uses to attract people. On the whole, having to emphasize cars less could be very attractive but a lot of additional work would need to be done to truly take advantage of the opportunity.

Early American urban planning at the Boston Common

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Several weeks ago we visited the Boston Common which has this plaque located at its eastern corner:

BostonCommonPlaque

Established in 1634, the Boston Common provided common space for grazing and later served as a military camp, site for public hangings, place for public assemblies and speeches, and a major urban park. But, it is hard to imagine central Boston without this large open space. What would it be otherwise – more space for office buildings and residences? To have it set aside at an early date and originally toward the edge of the city just like Central Park looks quite prescient today. Having the city grow up “organically” around it also helped compared to new cities and major developments where parks may be planned but have a difficult time developing a welcoming atmosphere. (Perhaps this is where Jane Jacobs’ ideas about parks needing more than just existence to be successful could be useful.)

Although this area isn’t really nature (too much ongoing human interference), it still is a welcome respite from the activity all around it. Indeed, urban parks like these really do help make cities all that they are even if they might be “negative space” in their lack of buildings.

San Francisco street character, Bushman, dies

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For years, Bushman could be found “interacting with” tourists in San Francisco:

For 30 years Gregory Jacobs spent his days at Fisherman’s Wharf hiding behind branches, often up against a trash can, silently waiting for unsuspecting tourists to come by.

When they did, and when they least expected it, he would push those branches towards them, often giving them a little growl. Almost always, without fail, they would jump scream and run.

It is one of those iconic San Francisco experiences. Few people can forget a run-in with the bushman.

But Jacobs hadn’t been in his usual spot lately. He’s been in and out the hospital with heart problems. Last Sunday, his family told KTVU, his heart finally gave out and Jacobs passed away.

The article goes on to note that there are actually two Bushmen so there will still be one at these tourist sites.

Bushman might be considered one of Jane Jacob’s “public characters.” Sociologist Mitchell Duneier discusses this idea in the introduction to his classic ethnography Sidewalk.

Not long after we met, I asked Hakim how he saw his role.

“I’m a public character,” he told me.

“A what?” I asked.

“Have you ever read Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities?” he asked. “You’ll find it in there.”

I considered myself quite familiar with the book, a classic study of modern urban life published in 1961, and grounded in the author’s observations of her own neighborhood, Greenwich Village. But I didn’t recall the discussion of public characters. Nor did I realize that Hakim’s insight would figure in a central way in the manner in which I would come to see the sidewalk life of this neighborhood. When I got home, I looked it up:

The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function—although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest.

Jacobs had modeled her idea of the public character after the local shopkeepers with whom she and her Greenwich Village neighbors would leave their spare keys. These figures could be counted on to let her know if her children were getting out of hand on the street, or to call the police if a strange-looking person was hanging around for too long: “Storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order,” Jacobs explained. “They hate broken windows and holdups.” She also modeled the public character after persons like herself, who distributed petitions on local political issues to neighborhood stores, spreading local news in the process.

While Bushman didn’t necessarily provide needed services for local residents, being a fixture for so long and interacting with the tourists in a unique way helped make him a feature of Fisherman’s Wharf. I remember seeing him in action multiple times. The first time was surprising and yet it seemed to be the sort of thing that one could only find in a big city: a local man popping out of one of the more natural features along this stretch of the Embarcadero (yes, tearing the Embarcadero Freeway down was helpful but a lot of this road is still fairly ugly) and poking fun at the many tourists who bring lots of money into the city. This is quite different from other odd characters in American cities like the Naked Cowboy in Times Square or the various gold or silver-covered street performers on Michigan Avenue and elsewhere who perform and then ask for money. The key difference is that Bushman had a direct confrontation with tourists who were often quite frightened – until they realized that people were watching them and this was all “normal.”

Architecture to improve your health and increase your happiness

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Check out this guide from the American Institute of Architects on how certain designs can improve your health. A few examples:

Serenity Now: The spaces architects create can have a soothing and calming effect that reduces stress through mitigation of excessive noise, allowing visual connections beyond the building or within it, and providing access to natural daylight. Research indicates that short-term exposure to noise may negatively affect mental  well-being; prolonged exposures may exacerbate other issues, including aggression…
Stairs Can Save Lives: Well-integrated and -designed staircases can increase physical activity and cardiovascular health. A Harvard study found that men who climbed at least 20 floors per week had a 20 percent lower risk of stroke or death from all causes. New York City’s Active Design Guidelines recommends stair-design strategies that may increase physical activity.
Toxic Gas: Off-gassing from high VOC (volatile organic compound) materials can trigger respiratory health problems such as asthma or allergies in both users of buildings and the people who build them. A child that sleeps in a bedroom with fumes from water-based paints and solvents is two to four times likely to develop allergies or asthma…
Eyes on the Street: Street-level doors and windows encourage walkability and foster a strong sense of community, which aids people’s sense of environmental safety and broader community health. In a Bronx, N.Y., neighborhood where crime is prevalent, the Betances Community Center, designed by Stephen Yablon, AIA, illuminates a central staircase and gymnasium in natural light, wrapping its ground-level façade in windows as well. These transparencies give the building a welcoming presence and offer views to a public park across the street.

A lot to have to consider when designing and constructing a building. It is interesting that a number of these suggestions cross multiple areas of need. For example, stairs are necessary for safety if elevators stop operating. Toxic gas from VOC materials is a green issue. Eyes on the street is a classic phrase from Jane Jacobs to describe the kind of vibrant street life that helps social control without the need for formal policing. But, to also pitch these as health issues is likely a nice marketing tool. Not only can architects design a well-functioning building, they can improve people’s health outcomes.

In pointing to this story, Curbed provides a quote that architects can even do more: they “are often the architects of our happiness and unhappiness as well.” What can’t architects do?

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

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A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

Differentiating between playgrounds and parks in poor versus wealthy neighborhoods

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Researchers in recent years have looked at different amenities in poor versus wealthier neighborhoods, things like pawn shops, payday loan stores, and grocery stores. But what about parks and playgrounds? Here is a summary of a new study:

A recent study, published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, looked at the amenities in 165 parks in the four-county Kansas City metro region. Low-income neighborhoods actually had more parks per capita (perhaps a result, the authors suggest, of the fact that minority communities in the area are largely located in the older urban core where more parks were once planned into the city’s layout). Parks in predominantly minority communities were also more likely to have basketball courts.

But the researchers also found that these same parks were less likely to have aesthetic features like decorative landscaping, trails and playgrounds. As the authors explain:

These findings are problematic because playgrounds have been shown to promote increased [physical activity] intensity and healthier weight status among children. Areas of low [socioeconomic status] are perhaps the neighborhoods that need playgrounds the most due to the increased likelihood of those areas having a higher prevalence of youth who are overweight or obese.

These findings also suggest one simple strategy (among many needed) to address health disparities in low-income communities in any city: Make sure public parks seem like places a 7-year-old would actually want to spend the day.

Parks are complex spaces. Jane Jacobs discusses them in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and suggests they aren’t necessarily good – like other areas of a neighborhood, they require care and benefit from a mix of uses and people on surrounding streets. Parks can be planned for but also require physical and social maintenance.

I was reminded again of some of these different amenities in a recent visit to a community gym in a nearby community. It was a busy weekday evening with a variety of activities taking place: the large room with aerobic and weight equipment was packed, the gym with gymnastics had a small class in there, and then there was another larger gym space. It was an open night for basketball with two possible courts. However, one court was being used for about 10 ping-pong tables and the other for basketball. In other words, how much are park amenities, like basketball courts or hiking trails, tied to the race and class status of the neighborhood?

Artists imagine post-apocalyptic world in terms of empty cities

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Two artists from France have put together a collection of photographs that feature famous city settings – with no people:

In Silent World, artists Lucie and Simon have taken the world’s most familiar and populous cities and removed all but one or two people to create the illusion of a lonely world.

In the thought-provoking work, places like the normally bustling Times Square and Tiananmen Square appear absent of their crowds.

Lucie and Simon are a duo of artists based in Paris, France, who have been working together since 2005.

According to their website, the award-winning artists focus on blurring the line between reality and fantasy in their work.

The pictures are interesting and there is even a video with the photographs and some ominous music.
But I’ll be honest: I don’t find these photos to be too jarring. There are two other forms in which I think these scenes are much more powerful:
1. Post-apocalyptic movies do a decent job with this. However, I think too many of them go for the destruction angle rather than the emptiness angle. Additionally, they often try to drive home the point too much with things like eerie music and/or loud wind noises.
2. Real life. While these artists have removed people and vehicles, you can approximate some of this in places by walking or driving around very early in the morning. That way, there is still some light but there may be no one else around. This can be very strange: the buildings are around and it looks like there should be activity but there is no one there. Or another example: walking through the Loop in Chicago later at night. Without the business activity, it is a lonely place.
What would be most disconcerting in these scenes if you were there all day by yourself. I’m reminded looking at these pictures that many of these cityscapes are not built to a human scale. For example, a lone person in Times Square without people around is simply dwarfed by the buildings. It is not just about being alone; it is also about the massive buildings around you that make you feel insignificant. Similarly, large plazas or wide highways are also not often conducive to human activity but we forget some of this when they are full of people. It reminds me of Jane Jacob’s work in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: it is more human-scale neighborhoods that people flock to anyway, not downtowns and their skyscraper canyons. In a post-apocalyptic world, people will look for other people and the majority of New Yorkers don’t live in places like Times Square. What might be even more jarring would be walking around an empty Greenwich Square.

The recent fate of suburban “lifestyle centers”

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In sprawling suburbia, there can often be a lack of central spaces where people come together. One recent solution proposed by developers is to build “lifestyle centers,” basically walkable outdoor shopping areas where people can park and spend a day. Here is an update on how these facilities have fared in recent years:

All forms of real estate were punished by the financial crisis, but among the hardest hit was the category that includes the Arboretum. Known as lifestyle centers, they are upscale suburban and exurban developments fashioned as instant downtowns, replete with lush landscaping, communal gathering spaces and a faux Main Street vibe. Eschewing traditional anchors and recession-proof tenants such as grocery stores, the centers promote traffic-building events such as wine tasting, concerts and exhibitions.

Nationally, lifestyle vacancy rates grew faster than any other retail segment, and rents declined the most, an average of $7.38 per square foot, during the last three years, according to CoStar…

Across the Chicago market, shopping center vacancy rates have made slow progress, dropping to 8.6 percent in the first quarter from a high of 9 percent last year, according to the CoStar Retail Report. In 2007, prerecession vacancy rates were below 7 percent…

The lifestyle center blueprint is generally credited to Poag & McEwen, a Tennessee-based developer that pioneered the concept outside Memphis in 1987. The firm has since built more than a dozen centers nationwide, including the north suburban Deer Park Town Center, which opened in 2000 as the area’s first…

I’ve been to a few of these facilities in the Chicago area and the experience is fascinating . I haven’t seen any sociological research on these relatively new spaces but here are some interesting facets:

1. This article suggests these centers can be “instant downtowns.” It would be interesting to see whether these facilities are typically built in places that already have downtowns (so they are competition or supplementary if the community is quite large, like the center at the northwest corner of Route 59 and 95th Street in Naperville) versus being built in suburban communities that never had downtowns (so these facilities are more like replacements). I would also imagine that many suburbanites also have a different image of downtown, more similar to a “Main Street” commonly found in small towns (and enshrined at Disneyworld). But perhaps “a faux Main Street vibe” is good enough for suburbanites. What would it take for one of these facilities to really catch on in a suburban community and replicate some of the functions of a downtown?

2. Can these really be “public spaces”? Do people actually come here regularly to sit and interact with others or are they more like outdoor shopping malls? It seems like there needs to be a critical mass of people who would visit these facilities and would also commit to them before they would be more than shopping malls. These places are a long way from the neighborhood life suggested by people like Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (I also wonder how much of these facilities are actually private property versus public property.)

3. How many of these facilities are accessible by anything other than cars? It is one thing to push New Urbanist concepts (walkability, denser spaces, more traditional architecture) but another to plop New Urbanist designs in the middle of typical auto-centric communities.

4. What sort of lifestyles are promoted by such centers? It is likely the typical American consumerism of middle and upper-class suburbia that one can find elsewhere with perhaps a few events or activities might to provide a touch of color and attract people (wine tastings, exhibitions, etc.).

5. Is an investment in a facility like this better than an investment in strip malls or more conventional shopping centers? I imagine communities might find them more visually attractive but do they generate more sales tax revenue?

Defining and explaining sidewalk rage

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There was road rage. But the anger is not just limited to the roadway: now there is sidewalk rage. Here is a description of this phenomenon that is being defined and studied by a several academics:

Researchers say the concept of “sidewalk rage” is real. One scientist has even developed a Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale to map out how people express their fury. At its most extreme, sidewalk rage can signal a psychiatric condition known as “intermittent explosive disorder,” researchers say. On Facebook, there’s a group called “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head” that boasts nearly 15,000 members…

Signs of a sidewalk rager include muttering or bumping into others; uncaringly hogging a walking lane; and acting in a hostile manner by staring, giving a “mean face” or approaching others too closely, says Leon James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who studies pedestrian and driver aggression…

How one interprets the situation is key, researchers say. Ragers tend to have a strong sense of how other people should behave. Their code: Slower people keep to the right. Step aside to take a picture. And the left side of an escalator should be, of course, kept free for anyone wanting to walk up…

People slow down when distracted by other activities, too. A 2006 study by the City of New York and the NYC Department of City Planning showed smokers walk 2.3% slower than the average walker’s 4.27 feet per second. Tourists creep along at an 11% more-leisurely rate than the average walker, while cellphone talkers walk 1.6% slower, according to the study. Headphone wearers, by contrast, clipped along at a 9% faster rate than average.

Looking at this from a sociological perspective, sidewalks are problematic because they have a lack of formal rules. They are often wide, particularly in big cities, but there are no markers of where to walk. The situation can become more complicated with dogs, skateboarders, bikers, strollers, tourists, segways, and more. So would the answer to this problem be to institute some guidelines? Why not post signs in public places that escalators should have open lanes on the left?

Yet this lack of rules on the sidewalk can often make them fascinating places to watch or study (if one is not walking at a quick pace through a crowd of people with other objectives). For Jane Jacobs, the sidewalk was where people in the neighborhood gathered to interact and check up on each other. For Mitchell Duneier in Sidewalk, these spaces are where homeless street vendors and others mix, conduct business, and react to differential treatment from the police.

(As a side note, the strategy of the journalist in the second paragraph to cite the size of a relevant Facebook group is a harmful one. This is an interesting article about academic research on a new phenomenon – how does a Facebook group support this exploration? It is simply a number divorced of any context. What if the group had 500 members or if it had 10,000 members? Perhaps it is an attempt to be relevant. But it doesn’t help establish the facts about the phenomenon of sidewalk rage.)