Jane Jacobs on downtown(s)

Before she wrote Death and Life of the Great American City, Jane Jacobs wrote a piece that ran first in Fortune Magazine (and later included in the book, Exploding Metropolis, published in 1958), entitled "Downtown is for People."

This article is online, typed in by some people at Cooper Union (so it has typos). But it's probably the best slimmed down version of the "Jane Jacobs" principles (as well as some key thoughts about cities as dynamos for small-scale commerce rather than the large-scale commerce that we tend to associate with downtowns, ideas expanded in her second book Economy of Cities.)
Downtown DC today, photo from Beyond DC. Click here for more downtown photos from Beyond DC.

For those of us in Washington, DC, I suggest reading this article thinking all the while about Downtown DC, and why today, in the 21st Century, it has no soul.Metropolitan Theater on F Street in the 1950s. Image from Reston Paths.

And despite the Verizon Center, 7th Street NW does have soul, which is why it is increasingly the most dynamic place to be downtown.

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking