sociology

THE DEATH · AND LIFE

OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

. -

Jane Jacobs

VINTAGE BOOI CS

A Division of Random H ouse

NEW YORX

Ackno" ,le dgment is n1ade to t h e following publications fo r p er mission. to repr int porcious of th.is book ,vhic h ~st a~pear:d in their pages: A rclJitectural. Fortnn , the Colu111bia Unive rnty F orurn , 1-Iarper's J'vl.ag,r.:;me, T he Reporter.

© Copyright, 19611 by Jane Jacobs

Al t r igh ts reserv ed unde r Inte rn atiooal and Pa n -Am erican Copy - right Conven t ions . P ublis h ed in N ew Yor k by Ra n d om Ho use, In c., and sim u ltan eo usly in To ronto , Ca nada, by R.-in do m H ouse " of Can ad a,Limit ed .

,\,laoufacture d io c.he Urute d S ta tes of A meri c a

Contents

1 lnttoduction, 3

Part One THE PECULIAR NATURE OF CITIES -

2 The uses of sidewalks: safety, 29 3 The uses of sidewalks: contact., s s 4 The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children, 74 S The uses of neighborhood parks, 89 6 The uses of city neighborhoods, 1 , 2 I

Part Two THE CONDITIONS FOR CITY DIV.ERSrrY

7 The generators of diversity, 143 8 The need for primary mixed uses, 151

• 1

9 The need for small blocks, 178 10 The need for aged buildings; 187 11 . The need for concentration, · · 200 12 Some myths about diversity, 2 2 2

Part Three FORCES OF DECLINE AND llEGENEBA"CtON

13 !he self-destruction of diversity, 241 14 · The curse of border vacuums, 2 57 15 Unslumming and slumming, 270 lfl Gradual money and cataclysmic money, 291

Part Four DIFFERENT TACfl<'.S

17 Subsidizing dwellings, 321 18 Erosion of cities or attrition of auromobiles, 338 19 Visual order: its limitations and possibilities, 3 71

20 Salvaging projects, 392 21 Governing and planning districtS, 405 22 Th~ kind of problem a city is, 428

Index, 449

. ,

.,

1 Introduction

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those · now taught in everything from schools of architecrure and plan-

-- ning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines. My at- tack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hair- splitting about fashions in design. I~ is an attack, rather , on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city plan-

. ning and rebuilding. In setting forth different principle,s. I shall mainly be ~riting

abouc-common, ordinary things: for instance, what kinds of ciry- streets arc safe and what kinds are not; why some city parks are marvelous and . others are vice ttaps and death traps; why some slums stay slums and other slums regenerate . themselves even against financial and official opposition; what makes downtowns shift their centers; what, if anything, is a city neighborhood, and

\

4] INTRODUCTION

what jobs, if any, neighborhoods in great cities do. In short, I shall be ~iring about how cities work in real life, because this is . the only way to learn what principles of planning and what prac- tices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attri- butes.

There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend-the figure is usually put ar a' hundred billion dollars-we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday's and day-befor~-yes- terday's suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wan- dering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem. . But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projec ts which arc truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing · projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultur:il centers that are unable to support a good bookstore, Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums; who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lack- luster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Pr omenades. that go from no place to nowh ere and have no prom- enaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not t he rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Under the surfa~e, these accomplishments prove even poorer than their poor pretenses. They seldom aid the city areas around them, as in theory they are supposed to. These ampurated areas typically develop gall~ping gangrene. To house people in this planned fashion, price tags arc fastened on t he population, and each sorted-out chunk of price-tagged populace Jives in growing suspicion and tension against the surrounding city. When two or more such hostile islands are juxtaposed the result is called "a balanced neighborhood." Monopolistic shopping centers and monu.mental cultural centers cloak, under the public relations

: hoohaw, the subtraction of commerce, and of culture too, from . the intimate and casual life of cities. •

Introduction [ s

That such wonders· may be accomplished, people who get marked with the planners' hex signs are pushed about, expropri- ated. .and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a con- que~ng power, Thousands upon thousands of small businesses are

. destroyed, and their proprietors ruined, with hardly a gesture ·at compensation. Whole communities are torn apart and sown to the winds, with a reaping of cynicism, resentment and despair that must be heard and seen to be believed. A group of clergymen in Chicago, appalled at the fruits of planned city rebuilding there, i.sked, ·

Could Job have been thinking of Chicago when he wrote:

H ere are men that alter their neighbor's landmark .. shoulder the poor aside, conspire to oppress the friendless.

Reap they the field that is none of theirs, strip they the vine- yard wrongfully seized from its owner . . .

A cry_ goes up from the city streets, where wounded men lie groaning ..•

If so, he was also thinking of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, St. Louis, San Francisco and a number of other places. The economic rationale of current city rebuilding is a hoax. The economics of city rebuilding do not rest soundly on reasoned investment of public tax subsidies, as urban renewal theory proclaims, but also on vast, involuntary subsidies wrung out of helpless site victims. And the increased tax returns from such sites, accruing to the cities as a result of this "investment," are a mirage, a pitiful gesture against the ever increasing sums of public money needed to combat disintegration and instability that flow from the cruelly shaken-up city. The means to planned city

. rebuilding are as deplorable as the ends. . Meantime, all the art and science of city planning are helpless to

stem decay-and the spirirlessness that precedes decay-in ever more massive swatches of cities. Nor can this decay be laid, reas- suringly , to lack of opportunity to apply the arts of planni.ng. It seems to matter little whether they arc applied or not . Consider the Morningside Heights area in New York City. According to

6] INTRODUCTION •

planning theory it should not be in trouble at al~ for it enjoys a great abundance of parkland, ·campus, playground and other open spaces. It has plenty of grass. It occupies high and pleasant ground with magnificent river views. It is a famous educational center with splenclid· institutions-Columbia University , Union Theological Seminary, the Juilliard School of J\1usic, and half a dozen others of eminent respectability. It is the beneficiary of good hospitals and churches. It has no industries. lts streets are toned in the main against •~incompatible uses" intrucling into the preserves for solidly constructed, roomy, middle- and upper-class aparonents. Yet by the early 195o's Morningside Heights was beco~ing a slum so swiftly , the surly-kind of slum in which peo- ple fear to walk the streets, tha~ the situation posed a crisis for the institutions. They and the planning arms of the city government got together, applied more planning theory, wiped out the most run-down pan of the area and built in its stead a middle-income cooperative project complete with shopping center , and a public l;iousing project. all inrer_spersed with air, light, sunshine and ~andscaping. This was hailed as a gyeac demonstration in city sav- mg. .

After that, Morningside Ji eights went downhill even faster. Nor is this an unfair or irrelevant example. In city after city,

precisely the wrong areas, in the light of planning theory, are de- caying. Less noticed, but equally. significant, in city · after city the wrong areas, .in the· light of planning theory, are refusing to <J.ecay.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in . which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. Instead the practitioners and teachers of this discipline (if such it can be called) have ignored the study ·of suc- cess and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons fo_r unexpected success, and · arc guided instead by principles de- rived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuber-

. culosis sanatoria, fai~;and imaginary dream cities-from anything but' cities themselves. ~ If it appears that the rebuilt portions of cities arid the endless new developments spreading beyond the cities arc reducing city

Introduction [ 7

and countryside alike to a monotonous, unnourishing gruel, this is not strange. It all comes, first-, second-, third .. or fourth-hand;out of the same intellectual dish of mush, a mush in which the quali- ties, necessities, advantages and behavior of great cicies have been utterly confused with the qualities, necessities, advantages and behavior of other and more inert types of settlements.

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about ei- , ther the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the

new unurba~ urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated for a full quarter of a century to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and

- vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by expens have gone into convincing us and ou.r legislators that mush like· this must be good for us. as long as it comes bedded with grass • .

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains re- sponsible for the ills ~f cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city buildµig. Of course planners, including the highwaymen with fabulous sums of money aqd enormous powers at their disposal, are at a Joss to make automobiles and cities compatible with one · another. They do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how 'to plan for w orkable and vital ciries anyhow -with or without automobiles.

The simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities, and a growing num- ber of planners and designers have come to believe that if they can on!y solve the problems of traffic, they will thereby have solv~d the major problem of cities. Cities have much more intri- cate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You can't.

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick,

8] INTRODUCTION

' · I • easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

Specifically, in the case of' planning for cities, it is clear that a large number of good and earnest people do care deeply about building and renewing. Despite some corruption, and considerable greed for the other man's vineyard, the intentions going into the messes we make are, on the whole, exemplary. Planners, architects . of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are nor consciously disdainful· of the importance of know- ing how things work. On the contrary , they have gone to great pains to learn what the saints and sages of modern orthodox plan- ning have said about how cities ought co work and what ought to be good for people ;ind businesses in them. They take this with such devotion chat when contradictory reality intrudes, threaten- ing to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug !Cality aside.

Consider, for example, the orthodox planning reaction to a dis- trict .called the North End in Boston.• This is an old, low- rent area merging into the heavy industry of the waterfront , and it is officially considered Boston's worst slum and civic shame. It em- bodies attributes which all enlightened people know are evil be- ca\lSe so many wise men have said they arc evil. Not only is the North End bumped right up against industry , but worse still it has all kinds of working places and commerce mingled in the greatest complexity with its residences. It has the highest concen- tration of dwelling units, on the land that .is used for dwelling units, of any part of Boston, and indeed one of the highest con- centrations to be found in any American city. It has little · park- land. Children play in the streets. Instead of super-blocks, or even decently large blocks, it has very small blocks; in planning parlance it is "badly cut up with wasteful streets." Its buildings are old. Everything conceivable is presumably wrong with the North End. In orthod ox planning terms, it is a three-din)ensional · textbook of "megalopolis" in the last stages of depravity. The North End is thus a recurring-assignment for M.I.T. and Harvard • Please remember the North End. I shall refer to it frequently in this book,

Introduction [ 9

planning and architectural smdents, who now and again pursue, under the guidance of their teachers, the paper exercise of con- verting it into super-blocks and park promenades, wiping away its nonconforming uses, traosfonning it to an ide~I of order and gentility so simple it could be engraved on the head of a pin.

Twenty years ago, when I first happened to see rhe North End, its buildings-town houses of different kinds and si1.es con- vened to flats, and four- or five-story tenements built to house the flood of immigrants first from Iceland, then from Eastern Eu- rope and finally from Sicily-were badly overcrowded, and the general effect was of a distcict taking a terrible physical bearing and certainly desperately poor.

When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint. h1any of the small, converted houses now had only one or two families in them instead of the old crowded three or four. Some of the families in the tenements (as I learned later, visiting inside) had uncrowded themselves by throwing rwo older apartments together, and had equipped these with bathrooms, new kitchens and the like. I looked down a nar- row alley, thinking co find at least here rhe old, squalid North En<!, but no: more neatly repointed brickwork, new blinds, and a burst of music as a door opened. Indeed, this was the only city district I had ever seen-or have seen to this day-in which the sides of buildings around parking lots had not been left raw and amputated, but repaired and painted as neatly as if they were in- tended to be seen. Mingled all among the buildings for living were an incredible number of splendid food stores, as well as such en- terprises as upholstery making. metal working, carpentry, food processing. The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting.

The general street atmosphere of buoyancy , friendliness and good health was so infectious that I began asking directions of people just for the fun of getting in on some talk. I had seen a lot of Boston in the past couple of days, most of it sorely distress- ing, and this struck me, wit.h relief, as the healthiest place in the

··~

10) IN:raoDUCTION

city. Bue I could not imagine where the money had come from for the rehabilitation, because it is almost impossible today to get any appreciable mortgage money in districts of American cities that are not either high-rent, or else imitations of suburbs. To find out, I went into a bar and restaurant (where an animated conver- sation about fishing was in progress) and called a Boston ·planner I know. ·

"Why .in the wo rld are you down in the Nonh End?" be said. •~Money? Why, no money or work has gone into the Nonh -End. · Noching 's going on down there. Eventually , yes, but not yet. That's a slum!"

"It doesn't seem like a slwn to me," I said. . "Why, that 's the worst slum in the city. le has two hundred and

seventy-five dwelling units to the net acre ! I hate to admit .we have anything like that in Baston, but it's a fact."

"Do you have any other figures on it?" I asked. "Yes; funny thing. It has among the lowest delinquency, disease

and infant mortality rates_ in the city. It also has the lowest ratio of rent to income in the city. Boy, are those people getting bar- gains. Let's see . . . the child population is just about average for the city, on the nose. The death rate is low , 8.8 per thousand, against the average city rate of 11.2. The TB death rate is very low, less than , per ten thousand, can't understand it, it's Jower even than Brookline's. In the old days the North End used to be the_ city's worst spot for tuberculosis, but all that has changed. Well ; they must _be strong people. Of course it's a terrible slum." -

"You should have more slums like this," I said. "Don't t\!ll me ch~re are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as.much as you can from it."

"I know how you feel," he said. "l often go down there myself just to walk around the streets and fe.el that wonderful, cheerful street life. Say, what you ought to do, you ought to come back and go.down in the summer if you think it's fun now. You'd be crazy .about it in summer. But of course we have to rebuild it eventually . We've got to get those people off the streets."

Here was a curious thing . .l\1y friend's instincts told him the Nof!h End was a good place, and his social statistics confirmed it. But everything he had learned as a physical planner about what is

;'

Introduction [ 11

- good for people and good for city neighborhoods, everything that made hin1 an expert, told him the North End had to be a bad place.

The leading Boston savings banker, "a man 'way up there in the power · structure," to whom my friend referred me for my inquiry about the money, confirmed what I learned, in the mean- time •. from people in the North End. The money had not come through the grace of the great American banking system, which now knows enough about planning to know a slum as well-as the planners do. "No sense in lending money into the North End," the banket- said. "It's a slum! It's still getting some immigrants! Furthermore, back in the Depression it had a very large number of foreclosures; bad record." {I had heard about this too, in the meantime, and how families had worked and 'pooled their re- sources to buy back some of those foreclosed buildings.)

The largest mortgage loans that had been fed into this district of some 15 ,ooo people in the quarter-century since the Great . Depression were for $3,000, the banker told me, "and very, very few of those." There had been some others for $ 1 ,ooo and for $2,000. The rehabilitation work had been almost entirely financed by business and housing earnings within the district, plowed back in, and by skilled work bartered among residents and relatives of residents.

By this time I knew that this inability to borrow for improve- ment was a galling worry to North Enders, and that furthermore . some North Enders were worried because it seemed impossible to get new building in the area except at the price of seeing them~ · selves and their community wiped out in the fashion of the stu- dents' dreams of a city Eden, a fate which they knew was not academic becall$e it had already smashed completely a so-

. ciaHy similar-although physically more spacious-nearby district called the West End. They were worried because they were .. aware also that patch and fix with nothing else could not do for- ever. "Any chance of loans for new construction in the North End?" I asked the banker.

"No, absolutely not!" he said, sounding impatient at my dense- ness. "Th:it's a slum!" ·

Bankers, like planners, have theories about cities on which they

• 11 l tNTRODUCTION

act. They have gotten their theories from the same intellectual . sources as the planners. Bankers and government administrative officials who guarantee mortgages do not invent planning theories nor, .surprisingly; even economic doctrine about cities. They are enlightened nowadays, and they pick up their ideas from. idealists, a .generation late. Since theoretical city planning has embraced no major new ideas for considerably more than a generation, theo- retical planners, financers and bureaucrats are all just about even to_~:1Y·

And to put it bluntly, they are all in the same stage .of elabo- ·- rarely learned superstition as medical science was early in the last

century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting, to draw out the evil humors which were believed to cause disease. With bloodletting, it took years pf learning to know precisely which veins; by what rituals, were to be opened for wh_at symptoms. A superstructure of technical complication was erected in such dead- pan detail that the literature still sounds almost plausible. How-

. ever, because people, even when they are thoroughly enmeshed - in descriptions of reality which are at variance with reality, are still seldom devoid of the powers of observation and independent thought, the science of bloodletting, over most of ics long sway, appears usually to have been tempered with a certain amount of common sense. Or it was temperecJ.. until it reached its highest peaks of technique in, of all places, the yo~ng United States. Blqodlctting went wild here. It had an enormously influen~ proponent in Dr. Benjamin Rush, still revered as the greatest staresman~physician of our revolutionary and federal.periods, and a genius of medical administration. Dr. Rush Got Things .Done. Among the things he got done, some of them good and useful, were to develop, practice, reach and spread the custom of blood- letting .in cases where prudence or mercy had heretofore re- strained its use. He and .his students drained the blood of very young children, of consumptives, of. the greatly aged, of almost anyone unfortunate enough to be sick in his realms of influence: His extreme practices aroused the alarm and horror of European bloodletting physicians. And yet as late as 18 5 1, a comni.ittee ap- pointed by the Scace Legislature of New York solemnly defended. the thoroughgoing use of bloo~etting . lt scathingly ridiculed and

'

Introduction [ 13

censured a physician, William Turner, who had the temerity to- write a pamphlet criticizing Dr. Rush's doctrines and calling "the practice of taking ·blood in diseases contrary to common sense, to general experience, to enlightened reason and to the manifest laws of the divine Providence." Sick people needed fortifying, not draining, said Dr. Turner, and he was squelched. ·

J\,ledical analogies, applied to social organisms, are apt to be far- fetched, and there is no point in mistaking mammalian chemistry for what occurs in a city. But analogies as to what goes on in the brains of earnest and learned men, dealing with comple?C phenom- , ena they do not understand at all and trying to make do with a ' pseudoscience, do have point. As in the pseudoscience of · blood- letting, just so rn the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and plaQ- ning, years ·of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. The tools of technique have steadily been perfected, Naturally, in time , force- ful and able men, admired administrators, having swallowed the initial fallacies and hiving been provisioned with too ls and with public confidence, go on logically to the greatest destructive ex- cesses, which prudence or mercy might previously have forbade. Bl~dletting could heal only by accident or insofar as it broke the rules, until the time when it was abandoned in favor o{ the hard, complex business of assembling, using and testing, bit by bit, true descriptions of reality drawn not from how it ought to be, but from how it is. The pseudoscience of city planning and its com- - panion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the spc"" cious comfort of wishes, familiar superstit ions, oversimplifications, • and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.

So in this book we shall start, if only in a small way, adventur- ing in the real world, ourselves. The way to get at what goes on· in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behavior of cities is, l think, to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scent;s and events, and attempt to · see what they mea11 and whether any threads of principle emerge among them. This is what I cry to do in the first pan of this book.

·,

14] INTRODUCTION

One pri,nciple emerges so ubiquitously, and in so many and such complex different forms, that I turn my attention to its nature in· the second part of this book, a part which becomes the l1eart of my argument. This ubiquitous principle is the need of cities for .a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially.

· The components of this diversity can differ enormously, but they must supplement each other in certain concrete ways .

.I think that unsuccessful city areas are areas which lack this · kind of intricate mutual support, and that the science of city plan- ning and the art of city design, in real life for real cities, must become the science and art of catalyzing and nourishing these close-grained working relationships. I think, from the evidence I can find, that there are four primary conditions required for gen- erating useful great city diversity, and that by deliberately induc- ing these four conditions, planning can induce city vitality (some-_ thing that the plans of planners alone, and the designs of designers alone, can never achieve). While . Part I is principally about the

. social behavior of people in cities, and is necessary for understand- ing what follows, Part II is principally about the economic b~- 'havior of cities and is the most important part of chis book. .

Cities are fant:1srically dynamic:places, and this is strikingly true -of their successful pam, which offer _a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people. In the third part of this book, I examine some aspects of decay and regen_eration, in the light of how cities are used, and how they and their people behave, in real life.

The last part of the book suggests changes in housing, traffic, design, planning and administrative practices, and discusses, finally, the kind of problem which cities pose--a problem in han- dling organized complexity.

The look of things and the way they work are inextricab ly bound togethe r, and in no place more so .than cities. But people who are interest ed only in how a ·city "ought" to look and un- interested in how it works will be disappointed by this book. It is futile to plan a city's appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearancc,of _order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has. To seek for the look of things

Introduction [ '!

as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing out trouble. .

ln New York's East Harlem there is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. A social worker frequently a_t the project was astonished by how often the subject of the lawn came up 1 usually gratuitou sly as far as she could see, and how much the tenants despised it and urged that it be done away with. When she asked why, the usual answer was, ·"What good is it?" or "Who

· wants it?" Finally one day a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: "Nobody cared what we want~d when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don't have a place 3tound here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even; or borrow fifty cents . . Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that gral,-s and say, 'Isn't it wonder- ful! Now the poor have everything!' " ·

This tenant was saying what moralis.ts have said for thousands of years: Handsome is .as handsome does. All that glitters is not gold . . _She was saying more: There is a quality even meaner than out-

right ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to erist and to be served. ·

In trying to explain the underlying _order of cities, I use a pre- ponderance of examples from New York because that is where I live. But most of the basic ideas in this book come from things I first noticed or was told in other cities. For example, my first ink- ling about the pow erful effects of certain kind~ of functional mix• tu res in .the city came from Pittsburgh, my first speculations about- street safety from Philadelphia and Baltimore, my first notions about the meanderings of downtown from Boston, my first clues to the unmaking of slums from Chicago. Most of the material for these musings was at my own front door, but perhaps it is easiest to see things first where you don't ta~e them for granted. The

· basic idea, to try to begin u_nderstanding the intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities, was not my

-- ·16 ] INTRODOCTlON

idea at all, but that of William Kirk, head worker of Union Settle- ment in East Harlem, New York, ·who, by showing me East -Har- lem, showed me a way of seeing other neighborhoods, and down- towns too. In every case, I have tried to test out what" I saw or · __ heard in one city or neighborhood again$! others, to find how relevant each city 's or each place's lessons might be outside its own special case.

I have concentrated on great cities, and on their inner areas, because this is the problem that has been.most consistently evaded in planning theory. I think this may also have somewhat wider usefulness as rime passes, because many of the parts of today's cities in the worst, and apparently most baffling, trouble were suburbs or dignified, quiet" residential areas nor too long ago; eventually many of today's brand-new suburbs or semisuburbs are going to be engulfed in cities and will succeed or fail in that condition depending on whether they can adapt to functioning successfully as city districts. Also, to be frank, I like dense cities best and care about them most.

But I hope ·no reader will cry to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or -in suburbs which still are suburban. Towns , suburbs and even little cities. ar~ totally different organisms from great cities. We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of the behavior, and the imagined behavior, of towns. To ·uy to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound con- fusion.

I hope any reader of this book will constantly and skeptically test what I say against his own knowledge of cities and their be- havior. If I have been inaccurate in observations or mistaken in inferences and conclusions, I hope these faults will be quickly cor- rected. The point is, we need desperately to learn and to apply as much knowledge that is true and useful about cities as fast as posmble.

I have been making unkind remarks about orthodox city plan- ning theory, and shall make more as occasion arises to do so. By now, these orthodox ideas are part of.our folklore. They harm us

· because we take them for granted. To show how we got them,

•

Inuoduction [ 17

and how little they are to the point, I shall.give a _quick outline here of the most influential ideas that have contributed to the verities of orthodox modern city planning and city architecroral design.• .

The most imponant thread of influence stam, more or less, with Ebenezer Howard, an English court reporter for whom planning was an avocation. Howard looked at the living condi- tions of the poor in late-nineteenth-century London , and justifiably did not like what he smelled or saw or heard. He not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many people should get themselves into an agglomeration. His prescription for saving the people was to do the city in. .

The program he proposed, in 1898, was to halt the growth of London and also repopulate the countryside, where villages were declining, by building a new kind of town - the Garden City, where the city poor might again live close to nature. So they might earn their livings, industry was to be set up in the Garden City, for while Howard was not planning cities, he was not plan- ning dormitory suburbs either. His aim was the creation of self- sufficient small towns , really very nice tO\\o'IlS if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge. The , Garden City was to be encircled with a belt of agriculture. Industry was to be in its planned preserves; . schools, housing and greens in planned living preserves; and in the center were to be commercial, club an4 cultural places, h'eld in

• Readers who would like a fuller accou nt, and a sympathetic account which mine is n0t, should go to the sources, which are vecy intcresong, especially: Gtrrdm Cities of TumOTTow, by Ebenezer Howard; Tbe Cul- ture of · Cities, by Lewis Mumford; Ci1ies in Et1olution, by Sir Patrick . Geddes; Modern Housing, by Catherin e Bauer; T{)'IJ)ard Nt'W TO'Wfli for America, by Clarence Stein; Nothing Gained by Ot1ercrowding , by Sir luymond Unwin; and Tbe City of Tumorrow imd Its P"'1ming, by Le Corbusier. The best short survey · I know of' is' the group of excerpts under the tide "Assumptions and Goals of City Planning," contained in Land- Use Plmnmg, A Casebook on rbe Use, Misuse tmd Re -we of Urban umd, by Charles M. Haar.

•

18) INTRODUCTION

coinmon. The town and green belt, in their totality, were to be permanently controlled by the public authority under which the town was developed, to prevent speculation or supposedly irra- tional changes in land use and also to do away with temptations to increase its density-in brief, to prevent it from ever becoming a city. The maximum population was to be held to thirty thousand peQple.

Nathan Glazer has summed up the vision well in Architectural . Forum: "The image was the English country town-with the manor house and its park replaced by a community center, and with some factories hidden behind a screen of trees, to supply work."

The closest American equivalent would probably be the model company town, with profit-sharing, and with the Parent-Teacher Associations in charge of the routine, custodial political life. For Howard was envisioning not simply a new physical environment and social life, but a paternalistic political and economic society.

Nevenheless, as Glazer has pointed out, the Garden City was "conceived as an alternative to the city, and as a solution· to city problems; this was, and is still; the foundation of its immense power as a planning idea." Howard managed to get two garden cities built, Letchwonh and Welwyn, and of course England and Sweden have, since the Second \Vorld War, built a number of satellite towns based on Garden City principles. In the United States, the suburb of Radburn, N.J., and the depression-built, gov- _.ernment-sponsored Green Belt towns (actually suburbs) were all incomplete modifications on the idea. But Howard 's influence in che literal, or reasonably literal, acceptance of his program was as nothing compared to his influence on conceptions underlying all American city planning today. City planners and designers with no· interest in the Garden City, as such, are still thoroughly gov- erned intellecrually by its underlying principles.

Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: He conceived that the way to deal with the city 's functions was to son and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in ·relative ·self-containment. He focused on the pro- vision of wholesome housing as the central problem, co which everything else was subsidiary; furthermore he defined whole -

Introduction [ 19 /

some housing in terms only of suburban physical qualities and small-town social qualities. He conceived of commerce in terms of routine, standardized supply of goods, and as serving a self- limited market. He conceived of good planning as a- series of static actS; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes. He conceived of planning also ·as essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian. He was uninterested in the aspects of the city which could not be abstracted to serve his Utopia. In particular, he simply wrote off the intricate, many"' . faceted, cultural life of the metropolis. He was uninterested in such problems as the way great cities police themselves, or ex- change ideas, or operate politically, or invent new economic ar- rangements, and he was oblivious to devising ways to strengthen these functions because, after all. he was not designing for this kind of life in any case.

Both in his preoccupations and in his omissions, Howard made sense in his own terms but none in terms of city planning. Yet virrually all modem city planning has been adapted from, and embroidered on, this silly substance.

Howard's influence on American city planning converged on t~e city from two directions: from town and regional planners on the one hand, and from architects on the other. Along the avenue of planning, Sir Patrick Geddes, a Scots biologist and philosopher, saw the Garden City idea not as a fortuitous way to absorb popu- lation growth otherwise destined for a great city, but as the start- ing poi~t of a much grander and more encompassing pattern. He thought of the planning of cities in terms of the planning of whole regions. Under regional planning, garden cities would be rationally distributed throughout large territories, dovetailing into natural . resources, balanced against agriculture and woodland, fonnirig one far-flung logical whole.

H oward's and Geddes' ideas were enthusiastically adopted in America during the 192o's, and developed further by a group of extraordinarily effective and · d~dicated people-among them Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, the late Henry Wright, and Catherine Bauer. While they thought of themselves as regional planners, Catherine Bailer has more recently called. this group the

10 J 1NTIIODUCTION

"Decentrists," and this name is more apt, for the _primary result of regional planning, as they saw it, would be to decentralize great cities, thin them out, and disperse their enterprises and populaµons into smaller, separated cities or, better yet, towns. At the time, it appeared that the American population was both aging and level- ing off in numbers, anq the problem appeared to be not one of accommodating a rapidly growing population, but simply of re- distributing a static population.

As with Howard himself, this group's influence was less in get- ting literal acceptance of its program - that got nowhere-than in influencing city· planning and legislatio n affecting housing and housing finance. A-todel housing schemes by Stein and Wright , built mainly in suburban settings or at the fringes of cities, to- gether with the writings and the diagrams, sketches and photo- graphs presented by Mumford and Bauer, demonstrated and popularized ideas such as these, which arc now taken for granted in onhodox planning: The street is bad as an environment for humans; houses should be turned away from it and faced inward, toward sheltered greens. Frequent streets are wasteful , of a_dvan- tage only to real estate speculators who measure value by the front foot. The basic unit of city design is not the street, but the block and more particulMly the super-block. Commerce should be segregated from residences and greens. A neighborhood's demand for goods should be calculated "scientifically," and this much and no more commercial space allgca red. The presence of many other people is, at best, a necessary evil, and good <;ity planning must aim for at least an illusion of isolation and suburbany privacy. The Decentrists also pounded in Howard'.s premises that the planned community must be islanded off as a self-contained unit, that it mu•. resist future change, and that every significant detail . must be controlled by the planners from the start and then stuck to. In short, good planning was project planning. ~

To reinforce and dramatize the necessity for the new order of things, the Decencrists hammered away at the bad old city. They were incuriqus about successes in great cities. They were inter- ested only in failures. All was failure. A book like ~1umford's The Culture of C#ies was largely a morbid and biased catalog of ills. The great city was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis,

,

Introduction [ 11

a monsuosity, a tyranny, a living death. It must go. New York's midtown was "solidified chaos" (Mumford). The shape and appearance of cities was nQthing but "a chaotic accident . . . the summation of the haphazard, antagonistic whims of many self-centered, ill-advised individuals" (Stein). The centers of cities amounted to "a foreground of noise, dirt, beggars, souvenirs and shrill competitive advertising" (Bauer).

How could anything so bad be worth the attempt to under- ' stand ic? The Decencrists' analyses, the architectural and housing ,.

· designs which were companions and offshoots of these analyses, the national housing and home financing legislation so directly influenced by the new vision-none of t hese had anything to do with understanding cities, or fostering successful large cities, nor were they intended to. They were reasons and means for . jetti- soning cities, and the Decentrists were frank about this.

But in the schools of planning and architecture, and in u:,ngrcss, state legislatures and city halls too, the Decentrists' ideas were gradually accepted as basic guides for dealing constructively with big · cities themselves. This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them.

The man with the most dramatic idea of how to get all this anti-city planning right into the citadels of iniquity th emselves was the European architect Le Corbusier. He devised in the 192o's a dream city which he called the Radiant City, composed not of the low buildings beloved of the Decentrists , but instead mainly of skyscrapers within a park. "Suppose we are entering the city by way of the Great Park," Le Corbusier wrote. "Our fast. car takes the special elevated motor crack between the majestic skyscrapers: as we approach nearer, there is seen the repetition against the sky of the twenty-four skyscrapers; to our left and right on the outskirts of each particular area are the municipal and administrative buildings; and enclosing the space are the mu- seums and university buildings. The whole city is a Park." In Le Corbusier's vertical city the common run of mankind was to be housed at r,200 inhabitants to the acre, a fantastically high city density indeed, but because of building up so high. 95 percent

- · of the ground could remain open. The skyscrapers would occ:;upy only 5 percent of the ground. _Th e high-income people would be in lower, luxury housing around couns, with. 85 percent of their ground left open. Here and there would be restaurants and theaters.

Le Corbusier_·was planning not only a physical environment. He was planning for a social Utopia too. Le Corbusier's Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum individual liberty, by which he seems . to have meant not liberty i:o do anything much, but.liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City nobody, pre1umably, was going to have to be his brother's keeper any more_. Nobody was going co have to struggle with plans of his o,vn. Nobody was going to be tied down.

The Decencriscs and other loyal advocates of th e Garden City were aghast at Le Corbusier's city of rowers in the park, and still are. Their reaction to it was, and remains, much like that of progressive nursery school teachers confronting an utterly insti-

. tutional orphanage. And yet, ironicalJy, the Radiant City comes directly out of the Garden City. Le Corbusier accepted the Gar- den City's fundamental image, superficially at least, and worked to make it practica l for hi~h densities. He described his creation as the . ·Gar~en City made attainable. "The garden city is a will-

. o'-the-wisp," he wrote, "Nature melts under the invasion of roads and houses and the promised seclusion becomes a crowded setdemenc-. • • The solution -.vill be found in the 'verrical garden city.'" •

In another sense too, in its relatively easy public reception, Le Corbusier's Radiant City depended upon the Garden City. The Garden City planijers _and their ever increasing following among housing reformers, srudents and architects were indefatigably pop- , ularizing the ideas of the super-block, the project neighborhood, the unchangeable plan, and grass, grass, grass; what is more they were successfully establishing such attributes as the hallmarks of humane, socially responsible, functional, high-minded planning. Le Corbusier really did not have to justify his vision in either humane or city-functional terms. If the great object of city planning was that Christopher Robin might go hoppecy-hoppery on the grass, what was wrong with Le Corbusier? The Decen-

. .

Introduction [ 13

trists' cries of institutionalization, mechanization, depersonaliza- riop seemed to others foolishly sectarian.

Le Corbusier's dream city has had an immense impact on our cities. It was hailed delitjously by architect's, and has gradually been etnbodied in scores of projects, ranging from low-income public housing to office building projects. Aside from making at least the superficial Garden City principles superficially practi- cable in dense city, Le Corbusier's dream contained other marvels. He attempted to make planning for the automobile an integral . part of his scheme, and this was, in the 192o's and early 193o's, a new, .exciting idea. He included great arterial roads for express one-way traffic: He cut the number of streets because "cross-roads are a·n enemy to traffic." He proposed underground streets for heavy vehicles and deliveries, and of course like the Garden City planners he kept the pedestrians off the streets and in the parks. His ciry was like a wonderful mechanical toy. Furthenno .re, his. conception, as an architectural work, had a dazzling clarity, sim- plicity and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to under- stand. It said everything in a Bash, like a good advertisement. This vision and its bold symbolism have been all but irresistible to planners, housers, designers, and to .developers, lenders and mayors too. It exem a great pull on °progressive" zoners, who write rules calculated to encourage nonproject builders to re- flect, if only a little, the dream. No matter how vulgarized ·or clumsy the design, how dreary and useless the open space, how dull the close-up view, ·an imitation of Le Corbusier shouts "Look what I made!" Like a great, visible ego it tells of some- one's achievement. But as to ·.how the ciry works, it tells, like the Garden Ciry, nothing but lies.

Although the Decentrists, with their devotion to the ideal of a cozy town life, have never made peace with the Le Corbusier vision, most of their disciples have. Virtually all sophisticated city designers today combine the two conceptions in various permuta- · tions. The rebuilding technique variously known as "selective removal" or "spot renewal" or "renewal planning" or "planned conservarion"-meaning that total clearance of a run-down area is avoided-is largely the trick of seeing how many old build.- ings can be left standing and the area still converted into a pm-

,· .:.-

14] INTRODUCTION

able version of Radiant Garden City. Zoners, highway planners, .. legislators, land-use planners, and parks and playground plan-

ners-none of whom live in an ideological vacuum--constantly use, as fixed points of reference, these two powerful visions and the more sophisticated merged vision. They may wander from the visions, they may compromise, thcy ·may vulgarize, but these are the points of departure.

We shall look briefly at one other, less important, line of ancestry in orthodox planning. This one begins more or less ·with the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, just about

1 the same time that Howard was formulating his Garden City ideas. The Chicago fair snubbed the exciting modern architecture which had begun to emerge in Chicago and instead dramatized a retrogressive imitation Renaissance style. One heavy, grandiose monument after another was arrayed in the exposition park, like frosted pastries on a tray, in a sort of squat, decorated forecast of Le Corbusier's later repetitive ranks of towers in a park. Th.is orgiastic assemblage of the rich and monumental captured the imagination of both planners and public. It gave impetus to a niovement called the City Beautiful, and indeed the planning of the exposition was dominated by the man who became the leading City Beautiful planner, Daniel Burnham of Chicago.

The aim of the City Beautiful was the City l\1onumental. Great schemes were d,rawn up for systems of baroque boulevards, which mainly came to nothing. What did come out of the move- ment was the Center Monumental, modeled on the fair. City after c ity built its civic center or its cultural center. These build- ings were arranged along a boulevard as at Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, or along a mall like the Government Center in Cleveland, or were bordered by park, like the Civic Center at St. Louis, or were interspersed with park, like the Civic Center at San Francisco. However they were arranged, the important point was that the monuments had been sorted out from the rest of the city, and assembled into the grandest .effect thought possible, the whole being treated as a complete unit, in a separate and well-defined way.

People were proud of them, but the centers were not a success. For one thing, invariably the or~ city around them ran

Introduction [ z s

down instead of being uplifted, and they always acquired an in- congruous rim of ratty tattoo parlors and second-hand-clothing. stores, or else just nondescript, dispirited decay. For another, peo- ple stayed away from them to a remarkable degree. Somehow, when the fair became pan of the city, it did not work like the fair. .

I

The architecture of the City Beautiful centers went out of style. But the idea behind the centers was not questioned, and it has never had more force than it does' today. The idea of sorting out cenain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their re- lationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings. The conceptions have harmoniously merged, much as the Garden City and the Radiant City merged, into a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, such as the im- mense Lincoln Square project for New York, in which a monu- mental City Beautiful cultural center is one among a series of ad- joining Radiant City and Radiant Garden City housing, shopping and campus centers. ·

And by analogy, the principles of sorting out-and of bringing order by repression of all plans but the planners'-have been easily extended to all manner of city functions, until today a land-use master plan for a big city is largely a matter of proposed placen1ent, often in relation to transportation, of many series of decontaminated sonings.

From beginning to end, from Howard and Burnham to the latest amendment on urban-renewal law, the entire concoction is irrelevant to the workings of cities. Unstudied, unrcspected , cities have served as sacrificial victims.

7 The generators of diversity

Classi.fied telephone directo ries tell us the greatest single fact about cities: the immense n umbers of pares that make up a c ity, and me immense diversity of mose pans. Divcrsit:Y is nanu;.l to ~ig_ _ . . . aaes ,

"I have often amused myse-lf," wro te James Boswell in 179 1, "with thinking how different a place Lo ndon is to different peo- ple. Th ey, wh ose narrow minds are conmctc d to the considera- tion of some one panicular pursuit, view it only throug h that medium . . . But the incellecnul 11\2n is smJck with it, as com- prehending the whole of human life in all its variety , the contem- plation of which is inexhaustible."

Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he pot his finger on one of the chief uoubles in dealing with them. It is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city 's uses one at a . time, by categories. Indee d, just th.is-analysis of cities, use by usc -has become a customary planning tactic. The findings on vari-

.... ) THE DEATH AND LIPB OP catAT AMI.RICAN CITIBI.

ous categories of use are then put together into "broad, overall pictures."

The overall pictures such met)iods yield are about as-useful as the pieture assembled by the blind men who felt the elephant and pookd their findings. The elephant lumbered on, oblivious to the

. notion that he was a leaf, a snake, a wall, tree trunks and a rope all somehow stuck together. Cities, being our own artifacts, enjoy less defense against solemn nonsense.

To understand cities, we have· to deal outright with ~ombipa- . rions Qr. mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phe- n9mena. We have already seen the importance of this in the case of neighborhood parks. Parks can easily-too easily-be thought of as phenomena in their own right and described as adequate or inadequate in terms, say, of acreage ratios to thousands of popula- tion. Such an approach tells us something about the methods of planners, but it tells us nothing useful about the behavior or value of neighborhood parks.

A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiencly complex to sustain city safety, public contact and cross-use, needs an enormous diversity of ingredients. So the first question-and I think by far ~e most important qucscion-abo .ut planning cities is this: How can cities generate enough mixture among uses-enough divecsity -throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilization? ..

It is all very well to castigate the Great Blight of Dullness and to understand why it is destructive to city life, but in itself this docs not get us far. Consider the problem posed by the street with the pretty sidewalk park in Baltimore, which I mentioned back in Chapter Three. My friend from the street, Mrs. Kosrritsky, is quite right when she reasons that it needs some. commerce for its users' convenience. And as might be expected, inconvenience and lack of public street life are only two of the by-products of resi-

. dential monotony here. Danger is another-fear of the streets · after dark. Some people fear to be alone in their houses by day

since the occurrence of two nasty daytime assaults. Moreover, the place lacks _commercial chojces as well as any cultural interest. We can sec very well how fatal is its monotony.

Bur having said this, then what? The missing ,dµ'.s;qjcy. con-

The gener2tors of diversity [ 145

veniencc. interest and . vitality do "ot spring fonh because the area needs their benefits. Anybody who started a retail enterprise here, for example, would be stupid. He could not make a living. To wish a vital urban life might somehow spring up here is to play with daydreams. The place is an economic desert.

Although it is hard to believe, while looking at dull gray areas, or at housing projects or at civic centers, the fact is that big cities ,are nanu;al ,:encrators of diversity and prolific incu batgg of new ~nu:cprises and ideas of all kinds, l\•loreover big cities ace the natural economic homes of immense numbers and ranges of small encecpcises

-- The prin cipal studies of variety and size among city enterprises happen to be studies of JTI?O''facnuing, notably those by Ray- mond Vernon, author ;f Anatomy of a Metropolis, and by P. Sargant Florence , who has examined the effect of cities on manufacturing both here and in England.

Characteristically. Jbc larger a city, the greater the variety of · . its manufagutjne arut .aJso the erers;r borh rbc number and the proportion of its wall roaoufamicscs The reasons for this, in brief, are that big enterprises have greater self-sufficiency than small ones, are able to maintain within themselves most of the skills and equipment they need, can warehouse for themselves, and can sell to a broad market which they can seek out wherever it may be. Th ey need not be in cities, and although sometimes it is advantageous for them to be there, often it is more advantageous not to. But for small manufacturers, everything is reversed. Typi- cally they must draw on many and varied supplies and skills out- side themselves, they must serve a narrow market at the point where a market exists, and they must be sensitive to quick changes in this market Without cities, they would simply not exist. Dependent on a huge diversity of other city enterprises, they can add further to that diversity. This last is a most impor- tant point to remember. City diversity itself permits and stimu- lates more diversity. .

For many activities other than manufacruring, the situation is analogous. For example, when Connecticut General Life Insur- ance Company built a new headquarters in the countryside be-

• · .. ·..-.-· -·

146). THI!.·. DEATH AND LIFI!. OF GIU!AT AMl!IIICAN CITIB .S

yond Hartford, it could do so only by dint of providing-in addi- .tion to the usual working spaces and rest rooms, medical suite and the like-a large general store, a beauty parlor, a bowling alley, a c;afeteria, a theater and a great variety of games space. These fa- _cilities are inherently inefficient, idle most of the time. They re- .quire subsidy, not because they are kinds of enterprises which are 11ecessarily money losers, but because here their use is so limited. They were presumed necessary, however, to compete for a work-

- j_rig force, and co hold it. A large company can absorb the luxury ofsuch inherent inefficiencies and balance them against other ad- vantages it seeks. Bur small offices can do nothing of the kind. If ·th_ey want to compete for a work force on even tenns or better, . they must be in. a lively city setting where their employees find the range of subsidiary conveniences and choices that they want and need. Indeed, one reason, among many others, why the much- heralded postWar exodus of big offices from cities turned out to be mostly talk is that the differentials in cost of suburban land and space are typically canceled by the greater _ amount of space per worker required for facilities that in cities no single employer need provide, nor any one corps of workers or customers sup- port .. i\.nocher reason "vhy such enterprises have stayed in cities, along with small firms, is chat many of their employees, especially executives, need co be in close, face-to-face touch and communi- cation with people outside the firm-including people from small firms.

The benefits that cities offer co retail trade, cu rural facilities and entertainment. This is because city populations arc large enough to support wide ranges of vari- c_ty and choice in these things. And again we find that bigness has

• all the advantages in smaller settlements. Towns and suburbs, for instance, are natural homes for huge supermarkets and for little else in the way of groceries, for standard movie houses or drive-

. ins and for little else in the way of theater. There are simply not • enough people to support further variety, although there may be

people (too few of them) who would draw upon it were it there. Cities, however, are the natural homes of supermarkets and stan- dard movie houses plus delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, foreign groceries, art movies, and so on, all of which can be found co-

._ ... _

The generators of diversity [ 147

existing, the standard with the strange, the large with the small. . Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small · much outnumber the large.• Like the small manufactlll'ers, these · small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist.

]:he divcniry, ef •nhacevcc kind, thar is generated by cities rests.._ , on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, ano

them contain so man different castes skills needs, su .. p es, an ees in their bonnets.

Even quite standard. but smal~ operations like proprictor-and- one-clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars car) and do flourish in extraordinary numbers and incidence in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support their presence at short, convenient intervals, and in rum this con_ven-. ience and neighborhood personal quality are big pares of such enterprises' stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, th ey lose this advantage. In a given geographica l territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When dis- tance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal . · wither away.

As we have transformed from a rural and small-town country into an urban country, business enterprises have thus become more numerous, not only in absolute terms, bur also in propor- tionate terms. In 1900 there were 2 1 independent nonfarm busi-

• In reraiJ tnde, this rendency has been growing stronger, if anything. Richard Nelson, rhc Chicago real estate an alyst, examining the postwar rrend of retail sales in some twenty city downtowns, has discovered th:1t the large department stores have typically lost trade; the chain variety stores have stayed about even; and the small and special stores have in- creased their business and usually have also increased in number. There is no real competition outside the cities for these small and various city enter- prises; but it is relatively easy for the big and standardized, in their natural homes outside the city, to compete with what is big and standardized within. This h:appens, incidentally, to be exactly what has occurred in the · neighborhood where I live. Wanamaker's, the big department store for - merly located in Greenwich Village, has gon.e out of business here and established itself in a suburb instead, :at the same time that small and special stores in its immediate former vicinity have increased by the score and flourished mightily.

~ .- --

14ll.) THE DEATH AND LIFE 01> CREAT AMERICAN CITIES

nesses for each 1,000 persons in the total U.S. population. In 1959, · _in spite of the immense growth of giant enterprises during the interval, there were 26 ½ independent nonfann businesses for each 1,000 persons in the population. With urbanization, the big ,get bigger, but the small also get more numerous. · Smallness and diversity, to be sure, arc not synonyms. The

. diversity of city enterprises includes all degrees of size, but e,reat vari does mean a high pro rtion of small elements. A vely city scene is live y arge y y vutUe o its enormous.co ection of small elements,

Nor is the diversity that is important for city districts by any means confined to profit-making enterprises and to retail com- merce, and for this reason ir may seem that I put an undue empha._ sis on retail trade. I think not, however. J;gmmercial diversicy is, in itself, immensely important for cities, socially as well as eco- nomically. l\1osr of the uses of diversity on which I dwelt in Part I of this book depend directly or indirectly upon the presence of plentiful, convenient, diverse city commerce. But more than this, wherever we find a city district with an exuberant variety and piency in its commerce, we are apt to find chat it contains a good

· many other kinds of diversity also, including variety of cultural ooDonunicies, variety of srr;os; and a grsar yarisy in hs pqpu]a- tion and other users. Thi~ is more than coincidence. The same physical and economic conditions that generate diverse commerce are 'intimately related to the production, or the presence, of other kinds of city variety.

But although cities may fairly be called natural economic gener- . ators of diversity and natural economic incubators of new enter- prises, this does not mean that cities automatically generate diver- sity just by existing. They generate it because of the various efficient economic pools of use that they form. Wherever they fail to form such pools of use, they are little better, if any, at genera.r- ing diversity than small settlements. And the fact that they need diversity socially, unlike small settlements, makes no difference. For our purposes here, the most striking fact to note is the ex- traordinary unevenness. with which cities generate diversity.

On the one hand. for example,· people who live and work in Boston's Nonh End, or New York's Upper East Side or San

•

The generators of diversity (149

Francisco's North Beach-Telegraph Hill, are able to use and en- joy very considerable amounts of diversity and vitality. Their visitors help immensely. But the visitors did .not create the foun- dations of diversity in areas like these, nor in the many pockets of diversity and economic efficiency scattered here and there, some- times most unexpectedly, in big cities. The visitors sniff out where something vigorous exists already, and come to share it. thereby funher supporting it.

At the other extreme, huge city settlements of people exist without their presence generating anything much except stagna- tion and, ultimately, a fatal discontent with the place. It is not that they are a different kind of people, somehow duller or unappreci- ative of vigor and diversity. Often they include hordes of search- ers, trying to sniff out these attributes somewhere, anywhere. Rather, something is wrong with their districcs; something is !:\ek- ing to catalyze a district population's ability to interact economi- cally and help form effective pools of use.

Apparently there is no limit to the numbers of people in a city whose potentiality as city populations can thus be wasted. Con- sider, for instance, the Bronx, a borough of New York contain- ing some one and a half million people. The Bronx is woefully short of urban vitality, diversity and magnetism. It has its loyal residents, to be sure, mostly attached co little bloomings of street life here and there in "the old neighborhood," but not nearly enough of them.

In so simple a matter of city amenity and diversity as interest- ing restaurants, the 1,500,000 people in the Brome cannot produce. Kate Simon, the author of a guidebook, New York Places md Pleasures, describes hundreds of restaurants and other commercial establishments, particularly in unexpected and out-of-the-way parts of the city. She is not snobbish, and dearly likes to pre- ent her readers with inexpensive discoveries. But although Miss Simon tries hard, she has to give up the great settlement of the Bronx as thin pickings at any price. After paying homage to the two solid metropolitan attractions in the borough, the zoo and the Botanical Gardens, she is hard put to recommend a single place to eat outside the zoo grounds. The one possibility she is able to offer, she accompanies with this apology: "The neighborhood

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150] THI!. Dl!.ATH ANO LIFI!. OF CR.EAT AMl!.RICAN CITlf.S . . '

trails off sadly into a no man's land, and the restaurant can stand a little refurbishing, but there's the comfort of knowing that ..• th~ best of Bronx medical skill is likely . to be sitting all around

. you." Well, that is the Bronx, and it is too bad it is so; too bad for

the people who live there now, roo bad for the people who are going to inherit it in furure out of their lack of economic choice, and too bad for the ciry as a whole.

And if the Bronx is a sorry waste of ciry potentialities, as it is, con sider the even more deplorable fact that it is possible for whole cities to exist, whole metropolitan areas, with pitifully little city diversity and choice. Virtually all of urban Detroit is as weak 'on vitality and diversity as the Bronx. It is ring superimposed upon ring of failed gray belts. Even Detroit's downtown itself cannot produce a respectable amount of diversity. It is dispirited and dull, and almost deserted by seven o'clock of an evening.

So long _as we are content to b elieve that city diversity repre- sents accident and chaos, of course its erratic generation appears to represent a mystery.

However, the conditions that generate city diversity are quite easy to discover by observing places in · which diversity flourishes and studying the economic reasons why it can flourish in these places. Although the results are intricate, and the ingred ients pro-

. ducing them may vary enormously, this complexity is based on tangible economic relationships which, in principle, are much simpler than the intricate urban mixtures they make possible.

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districtS, four conditions are indispensable:

1. Jhc district, and indeed as many of its internal partS as pos- . sible; must serve more than one primary fun cao n; pref era6J>' .more than rwo . These must insure the rcscncc of o le w o

out diff crcn · ce for I er- . ent nncposcs h1Jt who are able m USC rnaof faciljtj,;s in common.

z •. Mmr: block:; must be short; t~~t is, streets and opponunities to turn comers must be frc

3. m le that va in a e and con - dition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they va!i

The generators of diversity [ I s I

.'j✓,,n the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. · -

4- There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there,. T!iis includes deq2s coocentrarion in rbe case of people who · are "diere because of residence

The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make. In combination, these conditions create effective economic poo ls of use. Given these four condi - ~ cions, not all city districts will produce a diversity equivalent to one another. The potentials of different districts differ for many reasons; but, given the development of the se four con ditions ( or the best approximation to their f~ll development that can be managed in real life) , a city district should be able to realize its best potential, wherever that may lie. Obstacles to doing so will have been removed. The rang e may not stretch to African sculp- ture or schools of drama or Rumanian tea houses, but such as the . . possibilities are, whether for grocery stores, pottery schools, movies, candy stores, florists, an shows, immigrants' clubs, hard- ware stores, eating places, or whatever, they will get their best chance. And along with them, city life will get its best chances.

In the four chapters that follow, I shall discuss each of these . four generators of diversity, one at a time. The p urpose of ex- plaining them one at a time is purely for convenience of. exposi- tion, not because any one--or even any three--of these necessary conditions is valid alone . All four in combination are necessary to generate city. diversity; the absence of any one of the four frus- · trates a district ' s potential.

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