Tangentially Pynchon. see today's Google Doodle

[David Morris]

Design does matter, as does concentrated poverty.  Money might trump (is
that word still usable?) poor design. But design can help mitigate the
effects of poverty.  At the very least, reducing the  density of poverty in
a community has beneficial effects, and that is a form of possible design
(housing policy).  But there are other ways good design can mitigate
poverty's bad effects.

Design is much more than aesthetics.  Jacobs was a pioneer of an urban
concept called "defensible space," a concept closely related to her "eyes
on the Street" concept. That concept was the result of careful observation
of how healthy urban spaces are generally configured (designed) with
clearly defined levels of separation between public space and private
space.  Old housing projects modeled after the modernist vision of
high-rise residential towers dispersed in a continuous and open green space
make the distinction between public space and private space reduced to
inside the building versus outside the building, with no in-between levels:
everything outside the building is public, not "owned" by those inside the
building.

In more traditional urban environments the public space was primarily the
"street," free for everyone to occupy.  But there were also semi-private
street spaces like stoops, front porches, fire escapes, even windows, that
the "owners" of the private spaces inside the building can occupy and thus
own/police/observe the activity on the Street.  Owners tend to defend what
they own against threats to such ownership.  Good design keeps the public
realm semi-owned by those inside the buildings.  It's a simple idea that
worked for ages before Modernism blew-up urbanism in favor of their ideal
anti-urban concept of continuous "free" green space sprinkled with
high-density residential object in that field of green.  Streets were no
longer discrete domains.  They were now engulfed into a universal field of
public, indefensible space.  As a result the only safe (defensible) space
was inside the heavily-locked-up apartment inside the tower.

The New Urbanism movement is the product of much of Jane Jacobs (and many
others') work.  Unfortunately its anti-modernism attitude produces retro
aesthetics that often look like Disney depictions of the good old days.
But that isn't in it's core philosophy.  Modern architecture can easily
adopt the "rules" of New Urbanism.  This is why I object to Jane Jacobs
being called an Anti-Planner.  She was for smart planing that went beyond
the aesthetics of her day.

David Morris


On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 1:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Umm -- space the buildings a bit more widely, add more lawns and trees,
> and you get this -- 25,000 residents in 110 buildings :
>
>  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Peter_Cooper_Village_and_Stuyvesant_Town.jpg
> <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Peter_Cooper_Village_and_Stuyvesant_Town.jpg>
>
> Which I hope didn't dehumanize me too much at 10 when my family moved
> there from a single-family home in a low-density Boston suburb, or my
> parents as they lived there for 25 years until they retired. We found it a
> safe, comfortable, impeccably maintained place to live, with a local social
> network not all that different from what we'd had before.
>
> Which might be a hint that looking like a computer chip -- or the streets
> of San Narciso looking like copper traces on a circuit board -- doesn't
> actually tell you much. PCV-Stuyvesant Town differed from Pruitt-Igoe,
> above all in higher tenant income and social capital (and yeah, that meant
> mostly white and upper-blue-collar to middle-white-collar at the time),
> private ownership and management (and no, that is not a way of saying
> government can't do urban housing right). Those far outweighed the
> influence, if any, of design. Let's not aestheticize too much.
>
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