After years of hearing about the Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I finally got around to reading it – and it’s pretty good!
Notes and quotes…
Jacobs notes how concerned multi-floor neighbors keep an eye on the neighborhood (along with shopkeepers, etc):
509 As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in-law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours. That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was.
Buildings can be designed to foster healthy “surveillance” –
537 Because the buildings of Blenheim Houses are sixteen stories high, and because their height permits generous expanses of shunned ground area, surveillance of the open corridors from the ground or from other buildings offers little more than psychological effect, but this psychological openness to view does appear effective to some degree. More important and effective, the corridors were well designed to induce surveillance from within the buildings themselves. Uses other than plain circulation were built into them. They were equipped as play space, and made sufficiently generous to act as narrow porches, as well as passageways. This all turned out to be so lively and interesting that the tenants added still another use and much the favorite: picnic grounds—this in spite of continual pleas and threats from the management which did not plan that the balcony-corridors should serve as picnic grounds. (The plan should anticipate everything and then permit no changes.) The tenants are devoted to the balcony-corridors; and as a result of being intensively used the balconies are under intense surveillance. There has been no problem of crime in these particular corridors, nor of vandalism either. Not even light bulbs are stolen or broken, although in projects of similar size with blind-eyed corridors, light bulb replacements solely because of theft or vandalism customarily run into the thousands each month.
People who live in cities really value privacy:
682 Architectural and planning literature deals with privacy in terms of windows, overlooks, sight lines. The idea is that if no one from outside can peek into where you live—behold, privacy. This is simple-minded. Window privacy is the easiest commodity in the world to get. You just pull down the shades or adjust the blinds. The privacy of keeping one’s personal affairs to those selected to know them, and the privacy of having reasonable control over who shall make inroads on your time and when, are rare commodities in most of this world, however, and they have nothing to do with the orientation of windows.
Another unhealthy belief: low status drives out high status.
1050 Here it is necessary to take issue with a common belief about cities—the belief that uses of low status drive out uses of high status. This is not how cities behave, and the belief that it is (Fight Blight!) renders futile much energy aimed at attacking symptoms and ignoring causes. People or uses with more money at their command, or greater respectability (in a credit society the two often go together), can fairly easily supplant those less prosperous or of less status, and commonly do so in city neighborhoods that achieve popularity. The reverse seldom happens. People or uses with less money at their command, less choice or less open respectability move into already weakened areas of cities, neighborhoods that are no longer coveted by people with the luxury of choice, or neighborhoods that can draw for financing only upon hot money, exploitative money and loan-shark money. The newcomers thereupon must try to make do with something which, for one reason or another, or more typically for a complexity of reasons, has already failed to sustain popularity. Overcrowding, deterioration, crime, and other forms of blight are surface symptoms of prior and deeper economic and functional failure of the district.
- Read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs