City Builder Book Club

Week 12 wrap-up – We’re all done!

Heather Ann Kaldeway — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:00:58 +0000

We made it! Another fabulous sketch by Yen Trinh of City Love :)

We made it! Thank you to all of our Guides, the Toronto Public Library, our Twitter followers and Facebook fans, mailing list members, commenters, and to those of you who wrote and sketched your way through the book on your own sites! We have really enjoyed seeing this book through your eyes and learning from your experiences in cities around the world. Fill out our survey to let us know what you thought and to sign up for the next round!

We have a few questions for you!

How has the City Builder Book Club contributed to your understanding of cities? What should we be doing differently? And how many of us made it all the way to the end?? Fill out our survey!

Get out and walk!

On May 5th and 6th, celebrate Jane Jacobs’ legacy by going on a Jane’s Walk in your city!

Jane’s Walk is a series of free neighbourhood walking tours that helps put people in touch with their environment and with each other, by bridging social and geographic gaps and creating a space for cities to discover themselves. Since its inception in 2007, Jane’s Walk has happened in cities across North America, and is growing internationally.

Jane’s Walk honours the legacy and ideas of urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs who championed the interests of local residents and pedestrians over a car-centered approach to planning.

All Jane’s Walk tours are given and taken for free. These walks are led by anyone who has an interest in the neighbourhoods where they live, work or hang out. They are not always about architecture and heritage, and offer a more personal take on the local culture, the social history and the planning issues faced by the residents. Jane Jacobs believed strongly that local residents understood best how their neighbourhood works, and what is needed to strengthen and improve them. Jane’s Walks are meant to be fun, engaged and participatory – everyone’s got a story and they’re usually keen to share it.

Blog round-up

City Love sketches the maze of planning offices in Chapter 21
"Citizens and officials can wander indefinitely in these labyrinths…"
City Love sketches important habits of thought when thinking about cities in Chapter 22
Guest Guide Nathan Storring expands on his thoughts on image-making and place-making
Upper Toronto leaves us with some parting thoughts about the limitations of Death & Life
City Love leaves us with congratulations and some final thoughts (and sketches!) about Death & Life
by Yen Trinh of City Love

Recommendations from the Toronto Public Library

The Toronto Reference Library at 789 Yonge St. now houses the collection of the Urban Affairs Library, formerly located at Metro Hall. As a specialized collection devoted to all aspects of urban planning and local government, the library contains far more than the materials cited here. Titles were selected by librarian Cynthia Fisher to give you an overview of some new and some old books and reports that you can find at the library to complement (and perhaps contradict) some of Jane Jacobs’ views. When viewing the catalogue records for the books, click on some of the subject headings to give you a broader range of materials.

Walking home: the life and lessons of a city builder

Ken Greenberg has not only advocated for the renewal of downtown cores, he has for thirty years designed the very means by which that renewal can happen. Walking Home is both Ken’s story and a lesson in turning the world’s urban spaces back into places that can give us not only a platform to face the challenges of the future, but also a place we can call, with pride and satisfaction, home.

City building : nine planning principles for the twenty-first century

Good city building is not created by complex statistics, functional problem solving, or any particular decision-making process. Successful cities instead come from people advocating easily understood human values and principles that take into account the sensory, tactile, and sustainable qualities of environment and design in relation to what is the best of human endeavor.

Local motion : the art of civic engagement in Toronto

Decisions about the things that matter most on a daily basis – our roads and schools and houses – happen at the city level. So, how do we influence these decisions? What motivates ordinary citizens to take action and improve their community? How do neighbours organize together? Does City Hall facilitate engagement, or stand in the way? Local Motion explores how we, as citizens, can make a positive change in our city.

Local government in a global world : Australia and Canada in comparative perspective

Local government plays a critical role in the lives of all citizens, from remote towns to capital cities. As the political legitimacy and importance of municipalities grow, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to strike a balance between local and higher levels of government. The contributors to Local Government in a Global World provide insights into key themes impacting local governance in two federations with much in common historically, culturally, and politically: Australia and Canada.

Merger mania: The assault on local government

Outside the United States, forced municipal mergers were a popular policy in many European countries and Canadian provinces during the 1960s and 1970s. The city of Laval, just north of Montreal, and the “unicity” of Winnipeg owe their origins to this period – both amalgamations failed to meet their original objectives. Despite the emergence of “public choice” theory – which justifies municipal fragmentation on market principles – some politicians and public servants in the 1990s have continued to advocate municipal amalgamations as a means of reducing public expenditure, particularly in Ontario. In Merger Mania Andrew Sancton demonstrates that this approach has generally not saved money. He examines the history of amalgamation, as well as studying recent forced municipal mergers in Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Sudbury.

Canadian local government : an urban perspective

Written by esteemed political scientist Andrew Sancton, Canadian Local Government: An Urban Perspective is a comprehensive introduction to municipal government in Canada. The text emphasizes that what happens in local government affects our lives on a daily basis just as much, if not more, than what happens at the provincial and federal levels.

Foundations of governance : municipal government in Canada’s provinces

Canada’s municipalities function in diverse ways but have similar problems and, in this way, are illustrative of the importance of local democracy. Foundations of Governance shows that municipal governments require the legitimacy granted by a vibrant democracy in order to successfully negotiate and implement important collective choices about the futures of communities.

Governance of Toronto : challenges of size and complexity

Contributors: Stren, Richard.

Understanding local government in Canada

This 2006 video offers students an easy-to-follow, fun, fast-paced look at how their local governments manage communities and their everyday lives.

Ken Greenberg on cities as ecologies

Ken Greenberg — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:31 +0000

Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder

(This post is adapted from my book, Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder.)

Jane Jacobs was one of the first to identify clear parallels between the complex workings of cities and the ecology of natural systems. She developed an appreciation for complex, “self-organizing” survival mechanisms and was frustrated with the kind of institutional wrong-headedness—bureaucratic, political and pseudoscientific—that impedes the creative process of human adaptation. She argued for the fundamental efficiency of cities that used pre-existing resources to provide shelter and sustenance and to produce goods and services. Though couched in different language, her observations presaged the current focus on sustainability.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City

Jacobs’ arguments posed the most fundamental challenge to the still-potent antiurban values and pervasive imagery rooted in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. In contrast to these seductive visions of cities in an idealized end state, this determined inductive observer demonstrated that there were more sophisticated processes at work in real existing cities, which consisted of perpetually unfinished, intensely interactive webs of relationships. She was dislodging the underpinnings of modernist thinking.

Borrowing from American scientist and mathematician Dr. Warren Weaver, Jacobs identified three types of problems: problems of simplicity, which deal with two variables; problems of disorganized complexity, which deal with more variables that are not connected; and problems of organized complexity, which deal with more variables that are connected in subtle ways. Her conclusion: cities are not simple mechanical constructs, nor are they randomly chaotic. Instead, as if better understood through the science of living organisms, cities are problems in organized complexity. This insight came not from nostalgia for a city lost to history but from the intellectual pursuit of hard-headed and practical answers. Jane Jacobs perceptively saw an order to the city reflected in the productivity of heterogeneous wetlands (to be richly described in works like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which came out in 1962). The parallel, which was initially ridiculed and took some time to be fully appreciated, is described in the seminal last chapter of Death and Life (entitled “The Kind of Problem a City Is”).

“While city planning has thus mired itself in deep misunderstandings about the very nature of the problem with which it is dealing,” Jacobs wrote, “the life sciences . . . have been providing some of the concepts that city planning needs. . . . And so a growing number of people have begun, gradually, to think of cities as problems in organized complexity—organisms that are replete with unexamined, but obviously intricately interconnected, and surely understandable relationships. . . .”

Boston's North End

Other important urban observers were also getting back down to street level. The Urban Villagers (1962) by Herbert Gans chronicled Boston’s fabled North End and contributed to saving it and its lively street life from the wrecking ball. Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects (1964) illustrated the cultural richness, ingenuity and adaptability of vernacular architecture. It offered provocative glimpses of the kinds of urban places that emerge from methods of construction that use locally available materials and traditions of design that have evolved over time to reflect their environmental, cultural and historical contexts. Such points of view represented the polar opposite of the modernists’ universal formula of mass-produced towers in the park. Later, William H. “Holly” Whyte, author of The Organization Man, produced a number of seminal works, including The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). In this modest tome, Whyte used techniques like time-lapse photography to illustrate the sterility and relative emptiness of many so-called urban plazas that lacked the qualities that foster active street life. His Street Life Project began in 1969 while he was assisting the New York City Planning Commission in their attempts to understand why some public spaces were consistently well used, while others remained relatively empty throughout the day. Despite being over three decades old, many of Whyte’s conclusions and proposed antidotes are still essential ingredients for creating successful public spaces: paying close attention to sitting space; providing sun, wind, trees, and water; taking care of the need for food: and allowing for “triangulation”—those third things that provide the pretexts for bringing people together.

These works, along with Death and Life, were, collectively, a revelation. Here were more fresh eyes that keenly observed what the modernists had overlooked. Their perspectives offered more compelling arguments for keeping and protecting the traditional city and provided ammunition for the many citizens who intuitively understood that there was something wrong with emptying their cities and rebuilding them in unappealing ways.

Mary Rowe on cities, nature, and chaotic systems

Mary Rowe — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:59:08 +0000

I think this is the most beloved chapter for any of us who were ever considered a ‘problem child’. I am afraid I can just imagine some well meaning teacher approaching my parents, “Well, this is the kind of child your daughter is ….”

Miss Mischievous by Johan Larsson

I don’t think Jane Jacobs saw cities as a problem at all (just as most parents don’t see their children to be). They have problems, but they are not problems themselves.

Rough City and Smooth Gherkin by Ian Mansfield

But, just as there are always some well intentioned teachers or child-minders who feel compelled to suggest corrective actions to make children more conforming, in Jacobs’ time, as now, there are critics of city life, just dying to ‘clean them up’, fix this, beautify that. Urban scolds. We all know them.

There is an earthiness to Jane Jacobs: she appreciated things just as they were, observed clearly, and generally without judgment saw ways in which cities were being inhibited from sorting themselves out in creative, generative ways. She loved these ‘problems’, knowing that vibrant cities find creative ways to address their challenges.

So I think Jacobs titled this chapter ironically, suggesting well if we have to insist on referring to cities as problems, then at least let’s define what kind of ‘problem’ they are.

Image by Flickr user Danny McL

This chapter is so important to the Jacobs’ oeuvre because it signals a pursuit she initiated then and continued for five more decades: what is now referred to as complexity science, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, Jacobs is largely credited with being one of the early advocates of understanding how systems actually work when there are a number of interacting factors. Her analysis dismissed simplistic causation: a with b makes c.

Fifty years hence there is now an extensive literature detailing cities in this sophisticated way, as there are books about understanding organizations, human behavior, natural systems, climate changes, financial markets, plant colonies. They all form an ecology, a system, of finely connected parts.

Photo by Ton Rulkens

Jacobs addresses in this chapter the misanthropic tendency to sentimentalize nature and demonize human settlements (they’re such ‘problems’). Suburban development was a way to get closer to ‘nature’ and away from the nasty density (misanthropy again) of the city: but in fact what it did was consume nature. Jacobs understood cities to be of nature, perfectly natural: that humans and nature were of a piece, not ‘at odds’ or ‘at war’, but inextricably linked.

Jacobs’ promulgation of a holistic view of interconnectedness is so profound: it moves me to this day.

Photo by zen Sutherland

But not in a sentimental way, because Jacobs was a matter-of-fact, intellectually rigorous, infinitely curious, non-ideological critic of modern life. She was no hallmark card, pushing the Gaia hypothesis. She called it as she saw it: a genius of common sense, as so rightly proposed by Glenna Lang in her wonderful book about Jacobs bearing that title. Wrangling natural systems doesn’t work. (Come to New Orleans, where I had the privilege of living for some time post-Katrina, and see for yourself. If you can’t actually go there, watch this video which poses the prophetic question New Orleans shares with so many cities around the world: how to design with nature.)

Another key point in this chapter is Jacobs’ observation that cities possess the capacity to address their own challenges:

“ Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties” (p 447)

CCE urbanist and artist Nathan Storring in an earlier post on this site said if he were teaching Death and Life he’d assign the Introduction to the 1992 reissue, and this last chapter. I share his enthusiasm because these as he suggest bookend the Jacobsean approach.

As I mentioned in my first post, the Centre for City Ecology (who initiated this book club along with Creative Urban Projects) took its name from Jacob’s notion of a city as an ecology. Jacobs’ subsequent writing continues this observational thread: economies self-organize, city economies evolve by interacting with each other, exports are generated and imports are replaced, societies are structured with two values systems of ‘survival’, relational feedback loops help economies — and cultures even — grow, self-fuel and course correct. And when those intricately balanced systems of interaction are blocked, feedback loops obscured or inhibited, then a society may face a dark age, indeed.

Jane Jacobs Way by Tim Alamenciak

This is a shameless plug for continued reading of the other books Jane Jacobs penned, following the success of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. They build on these concepts, delve more deeply into the intricacies of city economies and the value systems that underpin them, and introduce a richly and rigorously drawn case for what we now call sustainability. I tease my American friends and colleagues, some of whom seem to think Jacobs stopped writing after 1961 (or, when she arrived to Canada). Her first book is a classic, but there is a fight to be had on which of her volumes is the most important. Some say The Economy of Cities, others Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and still others The Nature of Economies. One of my colleagues here at MAS told me hers was Dark Age Ahead, hands down.

My personal favourite is Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Although written in the dialogue format, which some readers find irksome, this is a demanding, profound book that raises for me so many important questions about the values that underpin the different functions necessary to contemporary life.

Jacobs herself suggested that in some ways she thought she had spent her career rewriting the same book. You be the judge. The advantage to continuing your reading is you will see the Jacobsean continuity of reasoning and approach. And you can see the fruits of her labors, of following the three habits of thought she advocates for here in the final chapter of The Death and Life of Great America Cities (p 440):

Think about processes.
Work inductively, reasoning from the particular to the general.
Look for the ‘unaverage’ clues.

Habits to live by.

Some more resources on Jacobs’ identification of cities as problems of ‘organized complexity’:

Portland-based planner and thoughtful Jacobsean critic Michael Mehaffy wrote a pithy perfect post on Planetizen last year: http://www.planetizen.com/node/53128

For people with math and science curiosity read these:

Cities and Regions as Self-Organizing Systems: Models of Complexity by Peter M. Allen (Routledge, 1997)
Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals by Michael Batty (MIT Press, 2007) with a great Introduction that ties Dr. Batty’s work back to Jacobs.

And as an illustration of the currency of Jacobs’ thinking on this, and its far reaching implications, read this recently published article, Cities as Emergent Systems: Race as a Rule in Organized  Complexity, co-written by urban ecologist Charlie Lord (who founded the Urban Ecology Center in Boston) in the Environmental Law journal.

A final note

Just a final note to thank CCE for this remarkable effort! The curation of these posts, and the elegance with which they were laid out is the brilliance of Heather Ann Kaldeway! Steven Dale of Creative Urban Projects provided the early encouragement of this initiative and has invested enormous amounts of time posting his own thoughts and experience here as a Jacobsean practitioner. CCE Director Gillian Mason has added her sage experience as a town planner (often in exile) and global organizer to her posts here and to the thought leadership CCE provides. And to all the book club contributors, amongst whom I am privileged to be!

Steven Dale on ‘The kind of problem a city is’

Steven Dale — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

So here we are at the end. Or should I say “the beginning?”

When reading Chapter 22 I couldn’t help but reflect on how much more potent this chapter would be had it been the very first chapter of the book. Before embarking on a really massive and oftentimes confusing book, wouldn’t it have been valuable to know Jacobs’ viewpoint of what kind of a problem a city actually is?

Wouldn’t that have informed our entire reading of the text?

At its core, D&L is a polemic and plea to start the actual act of studying a city as though it were a biological entity. Jacobs ask us to spend time creating a taxonomy of cities; to understand its individual organs; to theorize and test our assumptions about how those organs interact; to learn the internal processes that make a city actually work; and how to diagnose, treat or prevent the diseases that inevitably will come to affect any given city.

Most importantly of all she asks us to stop thinking about a city in simple ways.

Cities are not two-variable problems where one can ignore “the minor influence of other factors.” In Jacobs world, the minor influences of other factors is the very definition of what makes a city a city – and we must contemplate them in this way. To her, a city is a “problem which involves dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole.

In other words, the city is a wonderful, beautiful, all-consuming hurricane. No single particle of it can be described or measured independent of every other particle. It eats, it breathes, it grows, it contracts, it’s born and it dies. And for better or worse, it dramatically impacts everything it touches.

Only the willfully ignorant would conduct an experiment within the eye of the hurricane believing the hurricane will cause no impact on his results. Yet that’s what we do all the time.

50 years after D&L’s initial publication we still tend to act as though urban problems are of the simple, two-variable kind. We preach simplistic theories as solutions to problems far more complex than we’re willing to admit. We show up to a towering inferno with a water pistol:

If we build transit in this impoverished area, the area will thrive!

If we build a park, people will have picnics!

If we build a bench on this sidewalk, the sidewalk will have pedestrians!

If we build an aquarium, tourists will flock to our decrepit downtown!

If everyone owns their own home, those homes will maintain and grow in value!

If we et cetera, then et cetera will happen!

It doesn’t happen like that, we know it and we need to admit it.

The more I turn this chapter over in my head, I can’t help but feel that Jacobs’ insights here are the greatest contribution D&L makes to the philosophy and theory of urban planning. Eyes on the Street might be popular and known – but Chapter 22 should be scripture.

Unfortunately it’s not scripture and I believe that making this last chapter the first could’ve changed that. Whether we wish to believe it or not, the majority of people who pick up D&L (for whatever reason) are unlikely to finish it.

That’s not because it’s a bad book or that people are lazy.

It’s because it’s a hard book and people are busy.

An observation as poignant as that found at the core of Chapter 22 needs to be more front-and-centre. People may disagree with me on this (in fact I’m sure people will disagree with me on this), but the reason Eyes on the Street became such an essential concept had as much to do with the the quality of the idea as it did with its appearance on page 35 rather than 429.

The usefulness of an idea, after all, is generally proportional to the number of people who encounter it.

Jacobs’ imperative to treat cities as living organisms may sound like a trite and naive holdover from the 1960’s but it’s not. It’s a call to abandon a planning culture that still uses leeches to balance our humours. It’s a call to change how we think about cities. It’s a call to adopt a more rigorous, honest and humble culture of admitting there’s a lot about these living creatures we call cities that we really don’t understand and need to learn about.

And we need to do that soon because like any living organism, cities aren’t forever. They get sick. They die.

Detroit and Cleveland are dying right before our eyes, in our lifetime, and yet we struggle to come to terms with it. We still throw out simplistic solutions like downtown baseball stadia and urban downsizing, yet certainly the problems are more complex than that. There must be a way to save Cleveland! we pledge to ourselves, and maybe there is.

And maybe there isn’t.

Perhaps Detroit and Cleveland are past the point of no return. That’s the thing with a living creature – it can only take so much abuse before the family has to decide whether it’s time to pull the plug or not.

Or perhaps Detroit and Cleveland are afflicted by other unseen diseases such that only exhibit themselves as sprawl, economic inequality, little innovation and poor export prospects.

Or perhaps after closer analysis we discover that Detroit and Cleveland’s decay is nothing more than Jacobs’ natural slumming/de-slumming process writ large with an inevitable boom waiting just around the corner.

Or perhaps it’s something else entirely.

Trouble it, we don’t know which it is. But wouldn’t it be great to know?

Like, really, actually know?

Random Thoughts

If you’d like to learn more about organized complexity, there’s a great book by Phillip Ball titled Critical Mass. Warning: It’s difficult and wordy, but well worth the effort.

“(Planners) have inevitably come to regard “unaverage” quantities as relatively inconsequential, because these are statistically inconsequential. They have been trained to discount what is most vital.” I love this. Consider that quote in the context of the restaurant industry. On average, most fail within a few years. Those that succeed are in the minority. Were we to use the average as a guide for us, we would conclude that all restaurants fail. Instead, we should be examining why some restaurants thrive and apply those lessons to those that fail. We spend far too much time in our profession ignoring the outliers.

My page quoting is based on an old edition of the text.

Thanks to everyone who read along! I know it was tough going sometimes, but I hope it was worth the effort!

Anyone have any ideas for the next book?

Pamela Robinson on ‘Governing and planning districts’ – Thinking local, acting city-wide

Pamela Robinson — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:00:05 +0000

This chapter of Death and Life, like the others, is rich on ideas backed up with concrete suggestions for change. Some 50 years later, much of it still resonates.

From the outset, Jacobs quickly sets the scene for why we still find ourselves in 2012 with a need to talk about governing cities and their planning districts:

“Even more discouraging […] is the sense one soon gets of problems which are out of control of everyone. Their ramifications are too complex; too many different kinds of trouble, need and services are interlocked in a given place – too many to be understood, let alone helped or handled when they are attacked, one-sidedly and remotely, by the sprawling municipal governments separate administrative empires each by each (p. 529)”

Homelessness, poverty, transit planning and crumbling infrastructure are among the myriad complex challenges Toronto and other great cities struggle with. Our persistent inability to find workable solutions reminds us that the frustration Jane Jacobs diagnosed in 1961 continues some 50 years later.

Jacobs’ discussion about a city’s scale, size, and structure and the organization of urban governments are connected.

She argues that great cities must be divided into administrative geographic districts with diversely skilled staff tasked to effectively respond to the urban issues that these districts face.

Jacobs felt that if we scaled down our governance structure, then city staff would have a more intimate connection with the people and their neighbourhoods that form the pieces of our cities. She felt that when cities are too big the staff lose perspective and are less effective.

What is an appropriate size for a government district?

Similar to her approach in Chapter 11 on density, Jacobs takes a Goldilocks Principle approach: Government districts should be small enough to connect with local issues, and large enough to connect with city-wide issues.

Governments: "Can't see the forest for the trees?" Or the other way around? (Photo by Matt Becker)

She ascribes an optimal size and scale of urban government based on the logic that in smaller cities staff can know the people and the place better than in a bigger city. She specifically prescribes that big cities should break down their management into smaller administrative units with 1.5 square mile geographies. This would allow the staff, with their horizontal management structures, to know the people, places and intricacies well and thus manage their affairs effectively.

This argument is a familiar one in Toronto. In the late ‘90s the Harris government amalgamated the City of Toronto with its metropolitan structure (Metro Toronto) and the surrounding four local governments (East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, York). One of the many significant concerns at the time was that a new amalgamated Toronto would be too big and impersonal to govern. But what might these specifics mean for Toronto in 2012?

If we take Jacobs’ geographic recipe and apply it to Toronto our city would require 162 administrative units. Interestingly, the City of Toronto has 140 official neighbourhoods. Is it possible to imagine governing the City of Toronto by neighbourhood administrative units?

Toronto's 140 Neighbourhoods, City of Toronto website

Toronto's 44 Electoral Wards, City of Toronto website

In our current climate of ‘less government is better,’ it is hard to imagine Council moving toward a neighbourhood-based type of administrative model. Setting all current political preoccupations aside, is there merit in a smaller administrative unit approach?

Local place-based knowledge and city-wide knowledge

Jacobs argued that:

“It is not enough for administrators in most fields to understand specific services and techniques. They must understand, and understand thoroughly, specific places.”

From Spacing Magazine to the Centre for City Ecology to Jane’s Walk, Toronto’s civic culture has benefitted from the breadth and depth of urbanists working toward to more place-based city-building. But do we also need to align the City’s bureaucratic structure to match these place-based efforts?

In the most recent Toronto transit debacle, many argued against the ward-based electoral system in which councilors represent specific districts. This alignment of political decision-making with smaller “units” of the city is being weighed against other political models (like Vancouver’s) where the councilors are elected to represent the city as a whole, rather than one section of it.

When responding to changes that are proposed for our local neighbourhoods that may surprise or alarm us, it is tempting to respond from a purely local perspective without considering the needs of the city as a whole. One of the challenges is that if the proposed development doesn’t go in our neighbourhood then it will end up in someone else’s. How can we balance the neighbourhood concerns with city-wide concerns? How do we balance the importance of local knowledge with a city-wide discussion about what Toronto needs a whole?

Local knowledge is valuable and necessary, but local knowledge alone isn’t sufficient in a complex city like Toronto.

We need place-based commitment joined up to big picture thinking and action.

Jacobs had it right when she said “no other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning, whether planning is creative, coordinating or predictive”. When Jacobs first shared this idea 50 years ago she recognized cities were complex ecosystems. But now in Toronto in 2012 we have an even fuller understanding of just how complex urban issues really are.

So, should we, as Jacobs suggests, move to Toronto with 140 neighbourhood offices? I think the answer is ‘no’, that’s too literal a reading of her work. Toronto is more than the sum of its neighbourhoods.

The governance challenge we continue to face is this: How can we find new ways to capture and mobilize that local knowledge and scale it up for city-building action that serves Toronto as a whole?

Gillian Mason on ‘Governing and planning districts’

Gillian Mason — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:00:43 +0000

In 1961, Jane Jacobs said: “if only [decisions-makers] knew… what the citizens of that place consider of value in their lives and why”. Further, she affirms that “Much of what [decisions-makers] need to know they can learn from no one but the people of the place, because nobody else knows enough about it.”

What Jacobs described in 1961, I see as still problematic in Toronto today. In fact, perhaps the problem is even more acute since the amalgamation of the six local governments and the one metropolitan government into one single-tiered government, the City of Toronto, in 1998. Fifty years ago, Jacobs asserted that we “do not have the means of gathering and comprehending …. big cities.”

Amalgamation of Toronto

In the 1970s in the former City of Toronto (the downtown portion of what today is the City of Toronto), the people of this city arguably had greater access to planners and plans through storefront planning offices. Jacobs had a broader view of what storefront offices such as these might offer in terms of access to city hall: that they would include other city services. But she also noted that, in the ideal governing and planning world, there would be “planning staff…. serving the city in [a] decentralized fashion… at the only scale where planning for city vitality can be comprehended, coordinated, and carried out.”

Jacobs affirmed that the bigger city government becomes, “the more blurred …localized issues, needs and problems become…. [the] more attenuated and ineffectual…. citizen action [becomes].”

Today, we often find ourselves, as residents of Toronto, without clear means by which to express our likes and dislikes about the neighbourhoods in which we live, to bring to bear our deep knowledge and interest in the future of the city in which we have lived our entire lives or have only recently chosen as our own, nor a way of building on that knowledge for the benefit of the whole city.

We used to have storefront offices into which any member of the public could wander to have a direct conversation with the planning staff. It is a more intimidating business accessing a City planner today. Planning staff used to have ongoing scheduled and unscheduled interaction with the people who lived in the community. They worked and did business in the neighbourhoods, and thus had the opportunity to get to know the community not only from their own daily observations but from people with a deep personal commitment to its success. Or as Jacobs put it: “staffs usually know a place as thoroughly as they know their jobs” in this decentralized scenario.

Today, it is unlikely that funds will be found to operate such neighbourhood-based planning offices again. The good news is that, in the 21st Century, we have many more means to seek and secure input from community members in the neighbourhoods of Toronto, many of which are being employed by decision-makers.

Actually, perhaps there are too many ways and means to distribute and collect information if we think of them in relation to the decisions-makers’ capacity and ability to integrate the sheer volume of information that could be made available to them about any given community.

'Information overload' by Flickr user verbeeldingskr8

But we know there is a growing interest in city building in Toronto. We at the Centre for City Ecology witness it daily (to wit: the number of people not only in Toronto, but around the world, who are participating in this book club). Simultaneously, there is greater range of vehicles and thus a greater capacity to have your say in the public domain (via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging, web sites, etc.). We have still not found the balance between ‘gathering and comprehending’ so we are still left with a community that, in Jacobs’ words, “cannot maintain the complexity on which it is built and on which it depends.” As a community, we still have not found “reliable and sensitive channels of [deep community] understanding.”

At the Centre for City Ecology we continue to seek ways to raise the level community members’ urban literacy so that they can articulate for themselves what they want to see in their neighbourhoods. As Jacobs said: “The vital time for coordinating intelligence is before and during the time that even tentative proposals are conceived… in any specific place.” We at CCE happen to agree, and are working to unleash the ‘genius of the people’ [quoting Joe Berridge, Urban Planner, Toronto]. Or as Jane Jacobs quaintly described community members: “very plain people… [have within them] grains of greatness.”

The NFB's One Millionth Tower project, helping communities envision change for our highrise towers

We now have greater access to mapping, publishing, connecting, networking, drawing, and interpreting than we could ever have imagined. We have the means to overcome distance, language, and socio-economic barriers, and we should be able to access and engage community members like never before. And we must. The social and environmental challenges facing us are too great; the need for their resolution is too urgent; the number of groups springing up to leverage social media is too widespread, and the sheer will of the people to make a difference in their lives, their children’s lives and their community’s lives is too great for us to continue to muddle along.

Myself, I am indifferent as to whether or not a decentralized form of administration and governance as Jacobs discusses, is best. What I do know, to the core of my being, is that until and unless we are truly harnessing the knowledge and concern of the people who spend their days, their lives, in the community, we cannot build great cities.

Week 11 wrap-up – We’re almost finished!

Heather Ann Kaldeway — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:00:16 +0000

Can you believe next week is the last week of Death & Life? It seems like not so long ago we were talking about short blocks and eyes on the street, and now we’re gearing up for the last hurrah: how municipal governments work (or don’t), and the ultimate question — what kind of a problem IS a city?

As we wrap up, we’d like to hear from you. How has the City Builder Book Club contributed to your understanding of cities? What should we be doing differently? And how many of us made it all the way to the end??

Tell us what you think: Fill out our survey!

Bookworm by Jessica Finson

Blog round-up

City Love (Brisbane, Australia) sketches landmarks and city unifiers in Chapter 19
A City Guy (Chicago, USA) rejoins us with thoughts on narrow streets and visual order (Chapter 19)
City Love (Brisbane, Australia) sketches Jane’s Project Recipe in Chapter 20
Upper Toronto (Toronto, Canada) reflects on Jane’s comments on the limitations of Death & Life — Jane says these ideas might not apply to cities that are very successful or those that are very damaged
Build the City (Seattle) asks, Can Jane Jacobs teach us about grassroots urbanism?

[T]he vast majority of North Americans today live neither in the idealized small town community nor the Jacobean city district. Instead, we live in an atomized suburban world of automotive arterials, television, internet, membership gyms, big box stores, programmed children’s activities, anonymity and long commutes…

We urbanists believe that converting to an urban structure will yield many benefits. But what if a majority of a neighborhood’s residents like it the way it is? Jane Jacobs faced a different political and cultural environment, and cannot tell us how to convert gray city neighborhoods and suburbs into thriving urban districts. We have to develop new tools.

Recommendations from the Toronto Public Library

Civitas by design : building better communities, from the garden city to the new urbanism

Since the end of the nineteenth century, city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today’s New Urbanists, these visionaries have sought to deepen civitas, or the shared community of citizens. Many of the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that planners envisioned still remain, but frequently these physical designs have proven insufficient to sustain the ideals they represented. Will contemporary urbanists’ efforts to join social justice with environmentalism generate better results?

What Would Jane Say?: City-Building Women and a Tale of Two Chicagos

In response to the Burnham Plan’s centennial, author Janice Metzger digs into the 1909 Plan of Chicago, revealing not just what Burnham and the Commercial Club put into their master plan, but what they left out. What Would Jane Say? tells the tale of two approaches to city-building in the early 1900s and the people and ideas behind them. It also tells the story of what was created in Chicago and what could have been created. Metzger sets a detailed stage of Chicago at the turn of twentieth century—the players and the movements, the problems and the reform efforts, the conflicts and the possibilities—she takes readers into speculative chapters devoted to transportation, law, housing, neighborhood development, immigration, labor, health, and education. What would Jane Addams and her peers say if they had been involved in the Plan of Chicago? Using painstaking research, historical detail, and a pinch of imagination, Metzger thinks she has a pretty good idea…

Modernism and the spirit of the city

Modernism and the Spirit of the City offers a new reading of the architectural modernism that emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the fashionable postmodernist arguments of the 1980s and ’90s which damned modernist architecture as banal and monotonous, this collection of essays by eminent scholars investigates the complex cultural, social, and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture.

Edmonton’s urban villages : the community league movement

How did a collection of neighborhood volunteer organizations come to influence the development of a major Canadian city? Few other North American cities have embraced the community league movement with the vigor of Edmonton. For 87 years, tens of thousands of volunteers from the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) have often acted as a counterweight to large private and institutional interests, shaping municipal development by providing a voice and a training ground for grassroots civic participation. In its wake, the EFCL has left a host of sports, cultural, and civic initiatives for the improvement of Edmonton, and an important lesson on how to create community.

Rosanne Haggerty on ‘Salvaging projects’ in Brownsville, Brooklyn

Rosanne Haggerty — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:01:22 +0000

Contending with the failure of much post-war public housing has been one of the nation’s significant housing policy challenges. As more and more developments became unlivable as the result of poor design, inadequate maintenance, racial segregation, and the compounded effects of rising urban poverty — a process documented in the recent film, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth — demolition became the response of choice. The federal Hope VI program and newer Choice Neighborhoods Initiative begin with the premise that severely distressed public housing must be replaced by mixed income developments.But what of other approaches, that might preserve and improve the projects? Jane Jacobs offered a prescient blueprint for “salvaging the projects” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, anticipating in 1961 the challenges that would overwhelm public housing decades later. We believe it’s time to put her astute analysis to work. Additional models are needed for transforming challenged public housing neighborhoods into healthy, vibrant, mixed income communities — approaches that do not demolish buildings and displace residents.

Brownsville, Brooklyn

Our organization, Community Solutions, is working with a growing network of community residents and partner organizations to make Brownsville, Brooklyn, a safer, healthier, more prosperous neighborhood. To accomplish this requires salvaging the projects.

The Brownsville neighborhood Brooklyn has been described — in essence truthfully — as “one square mile of public housing”. More than a third of Brownsville’s residents live in one of the 10,000 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartments in the neighborhood. The NYCHA developments define Brownsville’s skyline and the neighborhood’s streetscape as well.

Brownsville’s concentration of public housing is both the neighborhood’s greatest curse and greatest asset. At a time of diminished support for affordable housing, Brownville’s 10,000 units of affordable housing are an irreplaceable treasure and crucial to the stability of many of New York City’s poorest families and seniors. Yet to walk through Brownsville is to experience the bleak consequences of the disastrous urban design policies that governed urban renewal projects and the development of public housing in New York and elsewhere. In the fortress-like public housing blocks fear is palpable. There is limited street life, no retail or other natural meeting places, nothing to invite friendly interaction.

NYCHA, the nation’s largest housing authority with 178,000 units under management, has been a diligent property manager — to the degree its diminishing finances allow. Its properties in Brownsville and elsewhere are not in severe distress, but neither are they in good repair. NYCHA reports a maintenance backlog of over $7 billion as the result of many years of federal budget cuts. For residents of the Brownsville developments this translates to waits of a year or longer for maintenance requests, irregular elevator service, and persistent security problems.

Jacobs took a pragmatic view of the projects, the design of which contradicted every quality that in her view made for successful neighborhoods. She judged that the investment in the projects was too great to write off, and that a series of planning and management corrections could mitigate the effects of the projects’ typical design features. The task, as she described it, was to “un-slum” the projects. First, she urged that the “super blocks” — the “parks” created for public housing towers — be rewoven into the surrounding street grid. Reconnecting the complexes to the traditional neighborhood block pattern would restore normal street and sidewalk interactions, discourage crime and vandalism, and open up space for new mixed uses. It was not the density of the projects that made them problematic in her view, but the absence of diverse uses and diverse building types and of spaces to encourage natural public interactions.

Jacobs also advocated a level of management control that would provide confidence to residents in navigating the shared spaces of these impersonal developments. She suggested that elevator monitors be hired to assure the equivalent of “eyes on the street”.

In Brownsville, the four NYCHA developments that are the focus of our work have between them 4,100 apartments in 56 buildings on six super blocks and roughly 13,000 residents. There are also over 2 million square feet of unused development rights on the blocks. Following the Jacobs prescription, we investigated how the developments could be reconnected to the surrounding street grid to create sites for new mixed income housing, education and community facilities, and recreational and open space.

Brownsville, Brooklyn

By re-opening closed streets as new lane ways, sites for from 700-1,000 new units of environmentally sustainable infill housing could be built, a supermarket, school and cultural facility and playing fields, added, and many jobs created for local residents. As part of a comprehensive development plan, existing buildings could be upgraded to improve their livability and reduce their energy utilization. All this could happen without demolishing existing structures or displacing existing residents. It would mean a major, multi-year investment, but salvaging the projects in this way would almost certainly pay for itself in reduced crime, energy savings, increased employment and in a more stable and successful community.

Gillian Mason on ‘Visual order: Its limitations and possibilities’ – Can we talk about beauty in a post-utopian society?

Gillian Mason — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:17 +0000

Re-reading this chapter almost made me long for an era when town planners proposed top-down utopian schemes in the manner of the City Beautiful movement with their compelling, neat pen and ink renderings.

Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago: Michigan Avenue looking South: rendering, Image from Penn State Libraries Pictures Collection

I say ‘almost’ because, although these schemes speak strongly to a desire for visual order, beauty, and aesthetics which I share, they were dead ends intellectually and in practice. Unfortunately, I feel that in banishing the utopianism movement so completely (and rightly so!) we have perhaps lost much of our motivation to plan with even a nod towards beauty and order.

I begin with these musings because this chapter quickly disabuses us of the idea that the city can be seen as a work of art. This is absolutely correct and we should be very wary of approaches that attempt to solve problems through top-down architectural design.

Fifty years on from Death and Life, however, no one in the western world seriously views the modern city as a work of art in its totality as we are cautioned about in the chapter. In fact, I would argue that in the intervening time the tendency has been to relegate much overall city design to an afterthought. Our default bias is to eschew any discussion of art or beauty in cities. I base this, unfortunately, on my own direct experience over many years walking extensively in Toronto and other Canadian cities.

Beautiful? Toronto's Ellesmere Road in 1952 and 2009 (City of Toronto Archives and Flickr user Lone Primate)

I can only surmise as to the causes for our neglect of visual order, but the following would be good places to start:

the messiness of arriving at consensus on the meaning of beauty and order,
the transformation of town planning into a “pseudo science” (Jane Jacobs’ description) with nothing to say on aesthetics,
and the pressure to accommodate economic and efficiency concerns.

These factors effectively squash any discussion of the actual experience and view of a person walking the streets shown on a plan, let alone something on a grander scale. We are only now ex post facto revisiting the experience and visual design aspects of many of our streets, particularly those developed during the expansive decades following the Second World War.

This chapter suggests where and on what scale we might effectively intervene to bring visual order to streets (the principal visual scenes in cities, as noted). With apologies, I am not going to discuss Jacobs’ specific suggestions in any depth. They are well worth reading, but I wish to address the idea of bringing a serious discussion of art, beauty and overall city design back to the table. Aesthetics should not dominate or have primacy, but they should be considered.

How can we do this? As a first step, we must reclaim a language to describe aspects of city form and design in order to have conversations with our neighbours and other citizens. I don’t wish to engage in wistful nor utopian thinking, but I would like to try to reveal and share alternative designs (“the possible”) that help to shape humane environments. If citizens are not engaged in this conversation, we will still be asking ourselves: “Is this the best we can do?” without knowing the answer.

Which parking garage would you like on your street? (Photo by UrbanGrammar)

In banishing utopianism so completely, have we almost lost an entire language to describe our relationship to good city form and design? I think so. Happily, books such as Great Streetsby Alan B. Jacobs, which offer many fine examples of good street design, are gaining in popularity.

Dead street tree at Richmond and Spadina

A final observation

Towards the end of Chapter 19, trees are suggested as a visual unifier along a street with much detail and cacophony. As a design tactic to tie together such a street there is much to applaud (not to mention a tree’s many other benefits). Yet our single failure to maintain trees on our larger arterial streets in Toronto speaks volumes about how we have discounted the importance of visual order and humane design. Such is our neglect that we are failing at implementing even the most basic touchstones. I don’t expect Toronto (or Calgary, or North Bay, or Los Angeles) to look like Rome, but is it too much to expect some modest steps in that direction?

Some questions

If, as I believe, the pendulum has swung too far one way in not considering the importance of overall visual order and harmony and beauty, how does one right the situation? First, by acknowledging that the long and noble history of city design might hold lessons for our current situation. And secondly, by re-claiming a language to describe aspects of city form and design to share with citizens. Is it possible to achieve all of our other aims and some semblance of visual order that we all agree on too? What could this area look like?

Those pen and ink renderings are not coming back, but there are many times when I wish that utilitarian concerns had not completely trumped the humanizing effect of visual order and harmony seen in the designs of yore.

Nathan Storring on ‘Visual order: its limitations and possibilities’ in Toronto and West Hollywood

Nathan Storring — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:00:48 +0000

It’s not for naught that the word “authoritarian” starts with “author.” In societies where grand artistic ambitions are successfully imposed onto the life of cities, restrictions often extend far beyond the aesthetic realm—to an extent unacceptable in contemporary North America.

In this chapter, Jacobs contests this overbearing aesthetic control, advocating for a more open-ended approach to urban visual order—“a manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans”—that complements and clarifies the complex functional order she sets out in the rest of the book.

As a point of departure, Jacobs proposes a fundamental conflict between the view across the street and the view down the street in healthy cities. The density and intricacy of a vibrant street scene becomes overwhelming when duplicated endlessly into the distance, so if the viewer wants to concentrate on looking either at the nearby city or the city in the distance, they have to struggle to suppress the other view.

Ossington Avenue, by Nathan Storring

I live on Ossington Avenue north of College Street in Toronto, and this stretch of road suffers from exactly the kind of visual confusion that Jacobs describes, made worse by a distinct lack of functional diversity between major East-West intersections. Looking either way down the street is daunting and off-putting.

Jacobs suggests that designers should avoid emphasizing the endless view down the street, because in order to do so, they must destroy the distracting nearby diversity necessary to the proper functioning of the city. By emphasizing the immediate view, on the other hand, the designer leaves the necessary diversity intact and also visually communicates the functional importance of this diversity to the observer. She goes on to describe various aesthetic interruptions—parks that divide the road in two, new roads that break up large blocks in a jagged pattern, bridges between buildings, landmarks, small setbacks interspersed amongst buildings on the street, etc.—that can achieve intimate views in the city on previously long stretches of street.

Jacobs identifies an emphasis on the endless streetscape as a preoccupation of the trained architectural eye, while the intimate streetscape is how “most of us” see things since as users of the city the uses of the city are our primary concern. In the context of New York City in the 1960s, fixating on the connection between the architectural eye and this endless view of city streets made perfect sense given the popularity of restrictive zoning laws and enormous, mono-functional projects that crushed the diversity of the intimate street scene; that said, I think this anticity attitude could be equally attributed to seeing the city through maps, models, renderings and graphs rather than any view of the street itself.

'Gateway Village Rendering' by Michael Allen

I would argue that currently (if not then as well) this division of visual comprehension lies more between “foot people and car people” than between city-users and architects. As wayfinding theorist Kevin Lynch writes in The View From The Road, drivers are “a captive, somewhat fearful, but partly inattentive audience, whose vision is filtered and directed forward.” If this view down the street can be considered integral to the driver’s visual understanding of the city, it may complicate Jacobs’ conclusion that the intimate street scene is more in tune with city uses and users. Car people do not aestheticize the urban environment like the architects of her time; they are as much users of the city as foot people, but require different visual cues to make sense of the street. Almost a decade after Death and Life was released, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas, a book as averse to “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” architectural ideals as Jane Jacobs herself. It popularized a new kind of endless-streetscape design based on the sparse everyday landscape and big bold signs of Las Vegas—ideal for the forward-focused, nervous, distracted perspective of drivers.

Many great cities today contain disjointed patches of Venturian and Jacobsian landscapes, not to mention Radiant Garden City Beautiful ones, but here and there landscapes that attempt to accommodate the former two simultaneously have been emerging. Some of the most noteworthy experiments that I’ve found are in Everyday Urbanism, a collection of essays advocating for design that responds to the day-to-day routines and concerns of city dwellers, as seen in projects and urban phenomena throughout Los Angeles.

West Hollywood by Randy Stern

In one such study, John Leighton Chase explores how West Hollywood accommodates both foot people and car people. Recognizing the desirability of the area to competitive developers, the city exchanges the right to locate in West Hollywood for concessions to the active local pedestrian population. In some areas, the view down the street is mitigated, much as Jacobs would recommend. On Santa Monica Boulevard, for instance, landscaped islands complete with palm trees divide the road, periodically limiting how far ahead one can see; yet drivers can trust that the uncompromising rhythm of Los Angeles’ street grid endures throughout. Chain stores are discouraged from constructing “cookie-cutter franchise clones” in the area, resulting in storefronts that balance equal parts image-making and place-making; the theatrical and familiar signage can still easily be recognized from a moving car, but at the same time, the locations feel specific to West Hollywood. There is a there there.

Streets of LA by Anika Malone

The city also negotiates the inclusion of modest pedestrian amenities in these developments, like seating nooks and water fountains (for adults, children and dogs). In general, the character of West Hollywood combines the clarity and simplicity of sprawl’s symbols floating in a somewhat homogenous landscape with the density, diversity and intricacy of close-grained pedestrian usage by hiding the latter in nooks and crannies or behind repetitive rows of oak, camphor and palm trees. While this arrangement is neither perfect nor fully transferable to other locales, it is one alternative way of negotiating the tension of city imageability that Jacobs observes with a greater emphasis on the view down the street, a view so characteristic of Los Angeles.