The problem with ‘Start-up’ Urbanism
In 1958, three years before her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote an article called “Downtown Is for People.” In it she noted:
The street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, the sights. It is the major point of transaction and communication. Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
Jacobs feared that this chaotic but human landscape was under threat, lost forever in the rationalizing schemes of planners who desired order rather than life. The message has maintained its power, growing in urgency, so that today Jacobs has become the touchstone to whom all urbanists must pay homage. One of the accidents of this process is that her anger has become neutralized into a road map of acceptable truths. Her wrath has been reduced into unthreatening…
View original post 2,320 more words
Reading Development 