Theory of Jane Jacobs
AMRUTA
DABHADE
SEM II F.Y.
M.ARCH
INTRODUCTION
• Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urban writer and activist who championed new, community-
based approaches to planning for over 40 years. Her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, became one of the most influential American texts about the inner workings
and failings of cities, inspiring generations of urban planners and activists.
• Jacobs had no professional training in the field of city planning, nor did she hold the title of
planner. Instead, she relied on her observations and common sense to show why certain places
work, and what can be done to improve those that do not.
• Jacobs was born in 1916 in the coal mining town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a
doctor and a former school teacher and nurse.
• While working for the Office of War Information she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs. In
1952 Jacobs became associate editor of Architectural Forum, allowing her to more closely
observe the mechanisms of city planning and urban renewal. In the process, she became
increasingly critical of conventional planning theory and practice, observing that many of the city
rebuilding projects she wrote about were not safe, interesting, alive, or economically sound.
• In 1961 she presented these observations and her own prescriptions in the landmark book The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, challenging the dominant establishment of modernist
professional planning and asserting the wisdom of empirical observation and community
intuition.
Ideas
• Cities as Ecosystems. Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested
that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in
response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city -
sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy - functions together synergistically, in
the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work,
how they break down, and how they could be better structured.
• Mixed-Use Development. Jacobs advocated for "mixed-use" urban development - the
integration of different building types and uses, whether residential or commercial, old or new.
According to this idea, cities depend on a diversity of buildings, residences, businesses and other
non-residential uses, as well as people of different ages using areas at different times of day, to
create community vitality. She saw cities as being "organic, spontaneous, and untidy," and views
the intermingling of city uses and users as crucial to economic and urban development.
• Bottom-Up Community Planning. Jacobs contested the traditional planning approach that relies
on the judgment of outside experts, proposing that local expertise is better suited to guiding
community development. She based her writing on empirical experience and observation, noting
how the prescribed government policies for planning and development are usually inconsistent
with the real-life functioning
Ideas
• The Case for Higher Density. Although orthodox planning theory had blamed high density
for crime, filth, and a host of other problems, Jacobs disproved these assumptions and
demonstrated how a high concentration of people is vital for city life, economic growth, and
prosperity. While acknowledging that density alone does not produce healthy communities,
she illustrated through concrete examples how higher densities yield a critical mass of
people that is capable of supporting more vibrant communities. In exposing the difference
between high density and overcrowding, Jacobs dispelled many myths about high
concentrations of people.
• Local Economies. By dissecting how cities and their economies emerge and grow, Jacobs cast
new light on the nature of local economies. She contested the assumptions that cities are a
product of agricultural advancement; that specialized, highly efficient economies fuel long-
term growth; and that large, stable businesses are the best sources of innovation. Instead,
she developed a model of local economic development based on adding new types of work
to old, promoting small businesses, and supporting the creative impulses of urban
entrepreneurs.
The death and life of American cities
• THE PECULIAR NATURE OF CITIES
• THE CONDITIONS FOR CITY DIVERSITY
• FORCES OF DECLINE AND REGENERATION
• DIFFERENT TACTIGS
THE PECULIAR NATURE OF CITIES
• STREET :
There must be; a clear demarcation between what is public space and private space.
Public and private spaces can not ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban
settings
There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural
proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to
insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot
turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.
The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of
effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch
the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a
window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people
entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.
The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public
responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody
learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of
kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public
responsibility for you.
convenience of location and the interest of the streets are both so important to children—
and good surveillance so important to their parents—that children will and do adapt to
skimpy sidewalk space.
• CITY PARK
In short, if a generalized city park cannot be supported by uses arising from natural,
nearby intense diversity, it must convert from a generalized park to a specialized park.
Effective diversity of use, drawing deliberately a sequence of diversified users, must be
deliberately introduced into the park itself.
The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday
streets, the more successfully, casually and economically, its people thereby interesting
and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their
neighborhoods instead of vacuity.
NEIGHBOURHOOD
Looking at city neighborhoods as organs of self-government, I can see evidence that
only three kinds of neighborhoods are useful:(1) the city as a whole; (2) street
neighborhoods; (3) districts of large, subcity size, composed of 100,000 people or morein
the case of the largest cities.
Effective neighborhood physical planning for cities should aim at these purposes:
1)to foster lively and interesting streets.
2) to make the fabric of these streets as continuous a network as possible throughout a
district of potential subcity size and power.
3) to use parks and squares and public buildings as part of this street fabric; use them to
intensify and knit together the fabric's complexity and multiple use. They should not be
used to island off different uses from each other, or to island off subdistrict neighborhoods.
4) to emphasize the functional identity of areas large enough to work as districts.
Neighborhood planning units that are significantly defined only by their fabric and the
life and intricate cross-use they generate, rather than by formalistic boundaries, are of
course at odds with orthodox planning conceptions. The difference is the difference
between dealing with living, complex organisms, capable of shaping their own destinies,
and dealing with fixed and inert settlements.
THE CONDITIONS FOR CITY DIVERSITY
• To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts,four conditions are
indispensable:
1.The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than
one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people
who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who
are able to use many facilities in common.
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be
frequent.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good
proportion of old ones so that they vary The generators of diversity in the economic yield
they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they
may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there
because of residence.
The need for mixed primary uses
• "A residential population would stimulate the development of shopping facilities,
restaurants, places of entertainment and garage facilities which would prove highly
desirable for use by the daytime working population as well.“
• a primary use is combined, effectively, with another that puts people on the street at
different times, then the effect can be economically stimulating: a fertile environment
for secondary diversity. Secondary diversity is a name for the enterprises that grow in
response to the presence of primary uses, to serve the people the primary uses draw
• Mutual isolation of paths, these paths would now be mixed and mingled with one
another. The supply of feasible spots for commerce would increase considerably, and so
could the distribution and convenience of their placement.
