I enjoyed reading this classic volume recently on a camping trip, and here are some some main lessons that I take from this classic:
- Eyes on the Street
- Jacobs’s concept of “eyes on the street” isn’t about some government program to improve surveillance; It’s about the organic order that emerges when people are simply going about their lives. This organic network of informal, local obligations and shared knowledge helps build cohesion and deter criminal activity. It also fosters a sense of mutuality and neighborly concern. Walkable communities are conducive to this behavior.
- Organized Complexity > Centralized Power
- Jacobs articulates some principles of subsidiarity, that human needs are best met by the most proximate network of humans working together to resolve concerns in neighborly love and concern. Centralized power instead views top-down authority and distant government as the organizing principle to meeting needs. Organization by necessity, as a result of working outward and upward, is the natural ordering of affairs, and maintains the primacy of the individual and community.
- Don’t Throw Away the Old
- Jacobs was an advocate for historical preservation and embracing a diversity of uses within neighborhoods. She argued that old buildings, often with their lower rents and flexible spaces, are essential incubators for new ideas, small businesses, and community life. Adaptive change is usually better than the wholesale destruction of tearing down the old for a sterile, new, and often soulless, replacement. She understood that tradition and progress are not antithetical. New ideas often need old buildings as a home. She showed that a healthy society must be a careful steward of its legacy, not a reckless demolisher of it. This is more than sentimentality but rather an acknowledgement that our sense of place should be honored and preserved. Adaptive change should be prioritized over sweeping wholesale change. Resist the temptation to totally scrap the old.
Some technical lessons that will guide my future thinking is a careful analysis of our comprehensive plan, whether it builds a community, a real community, that’s focused on human behaviors and needs. Walking also scored as the top exercise behavior for most residents in a prior survey, which is all the more reason why we must prioritize the walkability of our community in order to cultivate the behaviors of “eyes on the street” and increased interactions among neighbors.
I’m also intrigued by the possibility of transitional building code to allow for adaptive changes in old buildings. This would allow for more phased progressions in buildings, rather than an all-or-nothing proposition that often attends existing or future uses.
Lastly, history matters. If you think of communities in a covenant of sorts, civic rituals and behaviors are the renewing actions that not only preserve history but literally breathe life into a community, shaping its identity and obligations one to another.
I’ll probably come back to this volume again in the future. Jacobs had many helpful insights and is critical of a centralized, technocratic society. To be fair, I probably need to give Robert Moses a fair reading to fully appreciate both sides of the struggle between community advocate and central planner. The book was a good reminder of how place and space ought to cultivate healthy communities.
