Jane Jacobs was not an urban planner, but her ideas have influenced urban planners all over the world and continue to be the basis of city planning today. Jacobs was, by profession, an urban writer and activist. In her novel, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs details her ideas and theories of urban planning, what makes it successful and what to watch out for. Jacobs emphasized the importance of making public spaces “usable” and enabling locations to be people friendly so citizens would feel comfortable using a space (Greco, 2007). One of the many different types of development advocated by Jane Jacobs was mixed use development, meaning that communities are varied with different residences, businesses, and structures. There …show more content…
As mentioned above, mixed-use development is a component of Smart Growth, which includes plans to promote sustainable growth and city planning in order to build a more sustainable society. A huge characteristic of smart growth is the idea that communities should be mixed with shorter distances between residential and businesses in order to provide residents with low cost ways to get around (smart growth). I think smart growth is one of the most promising urban planning techniques in order to build better sustainable societies and to improve society. While I believe this to be the most important advantage, there are many others, which I was both happy and surprised to learn. Mixed-use development increases the community potential and character by providing a place where people want to go and look around. This can increase the sense of community and the living arrangements within the community. Mixed-use development also can increase the profits of local businesses within the community, which can boost local economies. Mixed-use development creates a “live, work, play” environment where people live in the same neighborhoods where they work and where their homes are and where they go out for entertainment (Rabianski, 2009). This creates a closer community where people can travel shorter distances and work closer to home. For example, where I live I work at least thirty minutes from home …show more content…
Mixed-use development is so important because it can help our cities become more sustainable and can bring us to that point where we can move forward as a society. Cities utilizing mixed-use development can improve on their transportation and infrastructure. Communities will flourish in their new capacity to provide for those around them. People will need to travel shorter distances to get what they need and money will be kept within the community. Mixed-use development leads to all these benefits and can be a solution to a lot of today’s growing population problems. One of the main issues this type of development can help is keeping the local economy strong. When people have to travel shorter distances to get what they need, the money stays within those distances and the local economy is able to provide for infrastructure improvement, better schools, and maintenance. In “The Modern City Re-Invented” Shafik Rifaat, emphasizes the unprecedented population growth that our current world is undergoing. He talks about the need to revise our cities and to rejuvenate our urban developments in order to accommodate the growing number of people living in urban environments. Rifaat goes so far as to even assign numbers for optimal mixed-use communities. He claims that there needs to be a fifteen minute walk, followed by a bike ride or train ride
The following case study critiques Upton’s vision to establish a sustainable community through implementing comprehensive sustainable strategy. The urban periphery development is thought to demonstrate superior execution of sustainable principles in development (Jackson 2007). As a parallel, the report focuses on the development of Upton’s design code and demonstrates how large -scale mix-use developments can incorporate sustainable practice and principles of urban growth.
TRIANGLE The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle The book, TRIANGLE The Fire that Changed America, written by David Von Drehle, is set in New York City primarily in the tenements of the Lower East Side and in Greenwich Village. The story provides a detailed account of life as an immigrant during the early 1900s, the garment workers strikes, the corrupt political structure of the time, several eye witness accounts of the blaze that killed 146, the missing safety procedures that could have saved them, the trial that attempted to bring the owners to justice and finally the political change and work force standards that came about as a result of the tragic event. The book begins by describing participants in a garment industry strike and how any form of challenge to the authority, the factory owners, would be handled. He describes the money-driven political corruption that allowed the owners to thwart any upheaval by sending out the muscles of the not-so-underworld to beat the strikers, women included.
Within society, there are certain standards of behavior and expectations that one must be expected to comply by, and failure to do so can result in critical and discouraging prejudice, which is demonstrated significantly in The Fall of a City, by Alden Nowlan. In the story, Teddy, an eleven year old boy, is mocked at by his uncle for occupying himself with paper dolls, failing to meet society’s standards of maturity that a boy of his age is expected to abide by. As a result of his uncle’s mockery, Teddy’s passion and fondness of his imaginary world disappears, and in a fit of rage and anger, he demolishes his paper world. Teddy’s destruction of the paper world is symbolic of society’s expectations of maturity, justified by the uncle ridiculing
Ellis portray New York as a city where it is horrible to live, filled with homeless men,
The Tomorrow City by Monica Hughes The plot of this book centres around two adolescents, David and Caro and an evil supercomputer which aspires to control the futuristic city of Thompsonville. Dr. Henderson, Caro's Father creates the "perfect" computer designed to solve all of the problems of Thompsonville by gaining almost complete power of the city. The computer then begins to make rash decisions of it's own. It decides that humans are incapable of making decisions of there
Cities by John Reader, the acclaimed historian attempts to dive readers deep into the territory of urban historians, depicting and analyzing the greatest cities of planet earth. From the earliest examples of cities to the ultra modern cities, 7000-9000 years later, of Mumbai or Tokyo, Reader paints the picture loud and clear. Cities around the globe are home to half of the entire planets population! Those living in cities, consume nearly 75% of all natural resources in the entire world. From the ruins of the earliest cities to the present, Reader will explore how cities develop and thrive, how they can decline and die, how they remake themselves. In the beginning of chapter two, Reader states, “The first cities are said to have arisen from rural communities whose intensified farming practices produced surpluses large enough to free craft workers and other specialists from working on the land (Reader 10).” With that being said, the first cities were basically an intensification of agriculture. He starts with extreme detail describing the “oldest-known cities” from around 9000 years ago. Starting with the claimed first city Çatal Hüyük. This was a large Turkish neolithic site, has been described as the world's first city. Stretching back over 9000 years, at times up to 10,000 people might have lived there. As Reader stated, the site was discovered in 1958 by the British archaeologist James Mellaart. He was unsure in categorizing Catal Huyuk as a city or a town. From what we think as of a city today, like New York or Paris, classifying Catal Huyuk as a city can be difficult. Catal Huyuk was a settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. Certainly it is a site of immense historic and social...
“You are heading for humiliation and pain,” Elena’s mother advised her as she sat there not knowing what to do about the president’s death. This statement was created by the author of American History, Judith Ortiz Cofer. There was a great amount of silence when President Kennedy got shot at Dallas, Texas. Elena was frightened by the way her P.E. teacher, Mr.DePalma dismissed her (Ellen’s) class as he was wailing over the sound of kids smirking. She loves a classmate of hers, Eugene, and wants to go to his house “to study”.
Two stories show the circle of life through the eyes of characters who have suffered and lost. William H. Armstrong wrote the book Sounder to show the tragedy of death affects the boy. Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town to show the cycle of life and death with two characters named George and Mr. Webb. His Stage Manager says, “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” These two stories are extremely different in the story line but have the same basic idea that although people lose and suffer, they look for the positive side of things.
Urban sprawl is a widespread concern that impacts land use, transportation, social and economic development, and most importantly our health. Poorly planned development is threatening our health, our environment and our quality of life. Sprawl is blamed for many things such as asthma and global warming, flooding and erosion, extinction of wildlife, and most importantly the public health such as social isolation and obesity due to people driving everywhere. Building offices, homes, shops, schools and other buildings influences the building of roads, transit and other transportation modes. This relationship that can lead to safe, walkable, diverse and lively communities or out of control, poorly planned urban sprawl. Unfortunately sprawl has been winning and the public health is at risk.
Gentrification is the keystone for the progression of the basic standards of living in urban environments. A prerequisite for the advancement of urban areas is an improvement of housing, dining, and general social services. One of the most revered and illustrious examples of gentrification in an urban setting is New York City. New York City’s gentrification projects are seen as a model for gentrification for not only America, but also the rest of the world. Gentrification in an urban setting is much more complex and has deeper ramifications than seen at face value. With changes in housing, modifications to the quality of life in the surrounding area must be considered as well. Constant lifestyle changes in a community can push out life-time
NEW DIRECTIONS IN PLANNING THEORY By Susan S. Fainstein. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Generally, this chapter discusses the examination of three planning theory approaches: the communicative model, the new urbanism and just city. Each approach has different planning applicable as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The communicative model is an approach which highlighted the role of town planners as a medium to negotiate and persuade stakeholders regarding planning matters.
Jane Jacobs believed that creating a community is the soul and the life of a city. To create this environment was by having contact, create relationships with your neighbors and having common areas, such as: candy stores, bars and even the stoop, to build bonds with your neighbors (Jacobs 1961). The vision Jacobs paints cannot be achieved due to urban planners like Moses. What Moses envisioned
Jacobs views diversity as the number of ways in which limited areas of space are allocated, as opposed to having an inherent racial or cultural connotation. Jacobs emphasizes that various types of business and residences are the elements of prospering city neighborhoods. Jacobs begins to explore three main myths. These myths are arguments often cited by city planners against diversity. To begin, the first myth that Jacobs attempts to discredit is that diversity is unattractive. She repudiates this assertion by saying that the opposite is in fact true, in which homogeneity is unappealing. I believe that it is quite detrimental when city planners attempt to create a contrived atmosphere of diversity in order to conceal the existing homogeneity. This is accomplished by artificially building different shapes and styles of buildings to give outsiders the impression of diversity. Jacobs underscores the flaws of contrived diversity in the following excerpt:
In Signs of Life in the USA, Francine Prose states that it is an essential semiotic principle that, one way or another, everything connects up in a society. Prose, an author of sixteen books of fiction and five nonfiction books (for children and adults) is a contributing editor at Harper’s and a writer on art for the Wall Street Journal. Prose also reviews books, teaches creative writing, speaks in many places about fiction, and is a member in a special Art program. In her provocative analysis of the underlying ideology of reality television (RTV), Prose discovers what may seem a surprising connection between the RTV craze and current trends in American politics. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon state that today’s office-related entertainments are neither happy nor have happy endings and that their humor, when comical, become a combination of Schadenfreude, (taking pleasure in the suffering or misfortunes of others), and a certain rueful satisfaction taken by watching the sorts of things that one has to endure in real working life exaggerated for the sake of comedy (172). Like in NBC’s Average Joe, contestants are voted off and embarrassed throughout the show just to be rewarded with something they think is worth it all. While the whole show is based on Schadenfreude and they act as if they do not notice.
The impact of transport infrastructure on the land-use policies can be seen from the formation of the rapidly changing urban landscape, this is related to the land-use rezoning, including residential, commercial, and industrial site for living, work, shopping and leisure activities, the modes of travel that commuters use to access these places of employment, shopping and entertainment is a private vehicle dominated area, with a low utilization of public transportation. Modes of public transportation that are used are mini-bus taxis and to a lesser extent busses. A relatively large number of people access employment, shopping and entertainment opportunities by foot. These pedestrians are potential user of the planned BRT system within the