Speaking of nexus

The Project for Public Spaces has done a nice page commemorating Jane Jacobs, Remembering Jane Jacobs. I wrote in email that I was grieving her death and a colleague sent me a note saying celebrate.

She's right. We celebrate Jane Jacobs every time we do something that contributes to making our cities great and our center cities something special.

I celebrated Jane Jacobs today, making a presentation favoring the designation of an important building as a historic landmark, picking up trash off the street in a neighborhood commercial
district, and taking some photos about changes in the city. And so it goes.

I love these Jane Jacobs quote from the PPS tribute:

-- "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."

-- "Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon… Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental."

-- "...that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact… they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated..."

-- "Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order."

(At a hearing last week, I intended to testify--I didn't--but I brought Death and Life with me and I planned to quote from it...)

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking