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From: "Architexturez." <admin-in@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sat, 06 May 2006 12:09:43 +0530
The Radiant City Beautiful conferred unprecedented power on the elites
of the new welfare state, notably architects, developers and planners.
They had money and a professional interest in new building. Governments
could spend billions eradicating slums without noticing that they had
been built for free and could be restored for free. Leave the city
alone, cried Jacobs, or at least understand which bits worked and why.
She accepted that neighbourhoods would gentrify, and un-gentrify, over
time, and was relaxed about cars. They were an extension of home and
work. Their excessive use in cities was because planners had destroyed
mixed-use neighbourhoods and increased the need to travel (even more
relevant in the internet age than when Jacobs wrote). Too much traffic
was a sign of bad planning.
Jacobs's coup de theatre was to start her book not with what she called
the "egotistical heroics" of architectural journalism but with an essay
on The Uses of Sidewalks. Get sidewalks wrong, she said, and cities will
go wrong, because the sidewalk is about security, the first requirement
of any city. Sidewalks, properly respected, police themselves by being
used and overlooked by doors and windows. They hold the key to the
mixed-use neighbourhoods of which successful cities are composed. Death
and Life ... must be the only book on architecture not to carry a single
illustration. For illustration, said Jacobs, readers need only open
their front doors.
On this simple insight Jacobs built her edifice. The classic Georgian
grid of streets had never been bettered as an urban form. It offers ease
of movement, wheeled or on foot, and embraces mixtures of activity, day
and night, rich and poor, "sacred and profane". Let the local property
market oversee its fluctuating fortunes. Destroy the street and ghettos
form, social institutions collapse, areas "fail" and fall prey to
architectural blitzkrieg. Large modern buildings, said Jacobs, were like
chessmen. They move across the urban landscape either killing or being
killed. Formal zones make the city rigid. They force residents to travel
more than they need, imposing either congestion or blight and leaving
vacuums for that urban curse, crime.
cont'd....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1767897,00.html