Jane Jacobs
When walking through Berkeley's neighborhoods and closely examining the First Bay architectural style, an abundance of porches tends to be noticed. Consenting to love holds complexity for me and I cannot recall a precise moment of when I decided to love Berkeley. It might have been the soft shell of acquaintance I formed with my local grocery store cashier, learning how to clap the mint leaves from my backyard to brew tea, biking to class on my yellow road bike, a lover brewing fig leaf syrup for me from the local fig trees, running to class during Bay Area spring showers when rain smells good as it falls upon earth, thanking the 51B bus driver and remembering that life is something you thank for reaching out to you. Yesterday, it was when my partner paused our stroll to the wine store in front of someone's porch. It was when they stopped and plucked the leaves from a Red Butterfly Wing plant because it would look beautiful on the cheesecake I had baked.
While the porch was designed in an era of slow movement, in comparison, a newer favorability in the patio is part of a world that places a premium on speed and ease of access. The father of a nineteenth-century family might stop on the porch on his way into the house, but the suburban man wishes to enter the house as rapidly as possible to accept the shelter that the house provides from the mass of people he may encounter if he chooses to remain in the view of his city.
I recently finished reading "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs. Since then, an overwhelming urge to seek her argument for strengthening community spaces and grassroots urban planning has consumed my purpose for presence as a student. San Francisco has fallen victim to the media's snowballing demonization of liberal policy and everyone seems to be obsessed with what is to become of it, already accepting its death despite its constant signs of very apparent life. There are varying standards for what is to be considered life in the fate of cities, but Jane Jacob tells us that there are four rules that confirm life:
“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...
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 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...
She criticizes the conventional measures of city success, such as land values and tax revenues, and proposes alternative criteria, such as the diversity of people and activities, the quality of public space, and the generation of innovation should define the well-being of a cosmopolis. Google moving headquarters out of San Francisco is not a will of death, it is an opening for engineering a regeneration. A term she frequently references is, "unslumming", a more-or-less spontaneous process by which the residents of a slum, if given the chance, put effort and time into improving the places where they live by a natural human drive from love of their living community, not limited to the middle or upper classes.
It is so easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic or the whimsies of the middle class. The decay of cities goes deeper and right down to what we think we want, to our ignorance about how we think cities work. Diversity is not wholly defined by statistics of present ethnic groups or marginalized peoples, it is of primary and secondary functions of the business, of times at which a city area is active, of the ages and types of people who would live in and monitor a city block. All of that diversity contributes to the resilience of the neighborhood resulting in a more livable area. The authenticity of a city applies control since one must know and be able to catalyze the best representation of a city’s authenticity. Because of this, giving tenants more control of their economic status and living situation gives them a greater opportunity to understand and develop their city’s authenticity.
I recently started a new position at a community land trust focused on redefining the traditional routes for navigating real estate in the Bay Area and ensuring permanent affordability by leasing the land for a renewable term of 99 years to its residents and community members in order to address their collective needs. I'm hoping I find fulfillment towards this new philosophy generating in my life from this book, and I highly recommend anyone who has found a love for prospering urban spaces and active presence of community.
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves."
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