INCOMING JANE JACOBS QUOTE
“If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting. If they look dull, the city looks dull…
I wanted this substack to appeal to a broad audience, and Jane Jacobs is the closest any planner has come to a household name. I don’t worship at the Jacobs alter, she had her blind spots and her libertarian streak, but her basic description and analysis of streetlife in The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains one of the most concise and powerful descriptions of what many people love about cities. Her argument for lively streets summed up below.
“Large numbers of people entertain themselves off and on by watching city street activity.”
“A well used city street is apt to be a safe street…”
“(streets) bring together people who do now know each other in a private social fashion.. and a certain amount of contact is both useful and enjoyable.”
Jacobs believed a lot of street life was the result of “characters.” In London, there is a man with flowing white hair who sits on a pedestrian island in the middle of a six lane road outside the Clapham North tube stop, playing a small recorder while traffic swarms around him. I would inevitably end up waiting for the light on this little island during my commute and was happy to have some music while I did. A woman who had her morning cigarette on her stoop became a fixture of my commute in Brooklyn some years back. “You’re late!” she would chirp at me with a smile on my way to the Atlantic Ave subway. These characters, the shopkeepers, grannie in the window, the dad watching their kids draw chalk designs on the sidewalk, are all part of the intricate choreography of street life that keeps streets safe and pleasant. In an era of increasing social isolation they also offer us some modicum of interaction, a nod, a wave, or the mythical “running into someone.”
But buildings play a role in this life too. You can’t wave to the old woman smoking on her stoop if there is no stoop.
Recently I came back to NYC after living in London and I’ve been thinking about how buildings make (or unmake) lively streets. When I was in London I was renting a room in a terrace house, probably dating from the mid 1800’s when miles of them were built. Here is a street not far from mine.
The entrances are on the ground floor, behind a narrow front yard which is just big enough to store trash and recycling cans. The setup doesn’t exactly invite liveliness as there is no real place or reason to hang out or look upon the public street. This isn’t necessarily a criticism. I always found my street to be a peaceful reprieve in an otherwise noisy and energetic neighborhood. Here is a photo of some brownstones (which I certainly don’t live in) in my Brooklyn neighborhood, Clinton Hill.
The main entrances are elevated from street and accessed by the stoop, and the front yard is wide enough that it can hold both trash cans and a modicum of landscaping and seating. This obviously invites more exterior life and interaction between the building and whatever is happening on the street. Of all the stereotypes of the NYC streetscape, people hanging out on stoops is something that does actually happen, but we can get even better. Here is Abel Ave in Baltimore. The covered porches obviously invite a high degree of exterior activity.
The bottom floor literally and metaphorically connects a building to the street and the life that goes along it. But all these examples are variations on the row-house. How about something a bit more modern? Here is the Barbican Centre, the beloved modernist housing development in London.
The above shot is the interior of the development. Below is what the Barbican looks like from much of the surrounding streets: A fortress like facade devoid of activity.
The Barbican sits on top of its own parking garage and this is what you walk along when you walk next to it. Modernist architects thought buildings shouldn’t relate to the street at all. The street was for cars, and pedestrian and public life should be separated, and ideally elevated from the street. The Barbican’s network of elevated walkways was once envisioned as part of a system that would cover the entire city. Here is the ground floor of another modernist gem, Le Corbusier’s Cite Radiuse outside Marseille.
The building floats above the ground on concrete stilts. There is no reason to be on the groundlevel except to pass from your car to the entrance. Its not even clear from most angles how you get into this building. Below is a picture of the CCTV building designed by OMA, I remember thinking this thing was awesome when it would pop up on TV during the Beijing Olympics.
But the whole thing looks much less awesome from the ground. Imagine walking the length of a city block from your car to the door along the same repetitive glass facade. This is not a space that encourages lingering or doing anything other then moving along.
These buildings are beautiful in their own way, but all highlight the degree to which the meeting point between building and street is often forgotten, even for celebrated buildings. The Project For Public Spaces put Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in it’s “hall of shame.” One of the most celebrated pieces of 21st century architecture creates a total black-hole of street life despite being on a river in the middle of a dense city. On an observational visit, PPS found people struggling to find the door and even witnessed a couple get mugged in the deserted front plaza. The results of a google image search almost always show the building with no one in front of it.
Why do the streets in front of the Guggenheim feel so cold? Here is a list of criteria written by Canadian planner Tristen Cleveland for buildings that invite street life. Its pretty obvious how many of these principles are violated by the Guggenheim.
Enclosure. Buildings should line up along the street to create a coherent edge, so that the street feels like a room with two walls and a floor.
Transparency. Buildings should have windows and doors at street level. Buildings should also bring human activity to the street to the extent possible using such features as porches, gardens, balconies, benches, retail entrances, or restaurant terraces.
Human scale. Buildings should not impose large, uninterrupted walls that make people feel like ants.
Physical Comfort. Buildings should offer protection from the elements. In hot climates, they should cast shadows and encourage a breeze, whereas in cold climates, they should maximize sunshine and minimize wind.
Visual diversity. Buildings need to provide the eye with lots of visual information at large and small scales.
I think these are largely spot-on, although there are always exceptions. Being back in New York I’m struck by how many of our biggest, decidecly un-human scale buildings actually relate quite well to the street. Consider the Empire State building, which you certainly wouldn’t call “human scale.”
The experience of being on the street in front of it is relatively pleasant because the tower doesn’t really meet the street, rather it sits on a five-story podium with stores and restaurants and plenty of windows. A nice little trick to make a very tall building seem like a shorter one when you’re up close to it.
For my taste the masterpiece of big-building-inspired street-life is Rockefeller Center. The Channel Gardens, as the strip of landscaping leading up to 30 Rock is known, actually slopes down gently towards the statue of Prometheus, forcing the perspective and drawing people into the center. The British Empire Building and Maison Francaise which flank the gardens are lined with retail and restaurants and there is always action and activity. And of course the entire thing is oriented around the Ice Rink, maybe the most iconic little square in the whole city.
Decoration plays a huge roll here as well. The massing of many of the center’s buildings is well done yet relatively simple, their joy is in artistic detail and repetitiveness is avoided with liberal use of different frescos and carvings.
Its an example of how something can be monumental and intimate at the same time. The mix of classism and Art Deco, the whirl of people, the reliefs and sculpture dedicated to industry, myth, and science, the sheer diversity of activity. Even though its a tourist trap, there isn’t a place that makes me feel as quintessentially New York.
Rockefeller Center’s street-life is remarkably well-executed but it isn’t rocket science. Put stores and places to sit on the ground floor. Don’t build massive blank walls. Make sure the building doesn’t just look interesting from a helicopter but looks interesting up close. New buildings like One Vanderbilt, with its glass lobby and attractive plaza (built for the public in exchange for permission to build a little higher) show that contemporary architects haven’t totally abandoned this playbook (pictured below before it was open, I can assure you it is quite busy normally).
Planning is not architecture, and the quality of street life is impacted by many factors of which buildings are just one. But research suggests that people are less likely to walk in boring places, and when they do they experience higher levels of stress and discomfort. Coming back to Jacobs, boring places also end up being empty and thus unsafe and anti-social. As Cleveland says, “buildings have a responsibility to the street,” and it’s frustrating to see how many celebrated buildings undermine street life. We need to stop celebrating buildings as artistic “objects in space” to be plopped down wherever, and instead consider them as functioning parts of a wider context that can give (as well as take) something from the life outside their walls.
Makes me think of the porches of West Philly, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (in many ways already very gentrified). And what gives Berlin such a lively street-life? The outdoor cafe tables, I suppose (though not in winter-time).
I am thinking and writing about a "linear city". One imagined example would be a string of 370 blocks.
>>Our vision of a linear city consists of a long string of city blocks with highrise buildings along the sides and a continuous park in the middle. About ten blocks to a mile (1.6 kilometers). Blocks are typical size: 160 meters wide by approximately 160 meters long (along the city). The park in the middle is 80 to 100 meters wide (around 300 feet). Buildings are limited to 12 stories and 40 meters high for efficiency reasons and to maintain human scale. Special buildings (like a capitol) can occupy most of a block.
Underneath the park is a high-speed vacuum-transit system for passengers and freight. Because line cities need extremely fast transport and vactrains prefer to travel in straight lines, this is perfect.<<
Rodes.pub/LineLoop
There is no street at all and no cars (though there is a highway that parallels the city and cars can be parked outside of the city). To go to work or shopping you walk or bike through the park.