Mixed Use, City Blocks, Old Buildings, and Population Density

Chapter 8

Here, Jane repeats her main thesis: that a city spot will thrive (safety-wise, economically, in vibrancy) if a diversity of people use it at a diversity of times. As such, I was able to skim much of it. The only fresh thing is her vantage point: she is fighting for primary use buildings as essential in remedying the unbalance of users in an area, as this is the root of city decay. Precepts of orthodox planning and one of its approaches to revitalization, the clean-it-up approach, is nothing but an expensive quick fix, in Jane's eyes, because they do not emphasize or prioritize the primary use. Furthermore, often the places city planners choose to clean up are already thriving off of the principles of mixed use.
A second myth Jane dispels is that nice-looking, well-kept residences are the cause of vitality in an area; rather, the truth is that houses start to be taken care of and get face lifts after the district has found its balance of users. Nice houses are a sign that vitality has already taken place. Say a new museum has brought visitors to an area on weekends and in afternoons, whereas it was previously dead then. That primary use building becomes a "chessman," because it converts pawns to queens (167)! (Wow, what a fabulous analogy: creative, memorable, but still belonging in academic text.)
Jane's word use usually gets my imagination flowing, with the exception of her loose use of "economic." She states that mixing people together on a sidewalk or other public area will breed "economic mutual support"(164), but doesn't specify how. I guess I will have to ask T., who wrote an article in the Boom Jackson magazine about converting an old broken-down factory into a mixed-use building (i.e., like an urban version of a mini-mall, putting the suburban version, strip malls, to shame). I guess it feeds economics because peoples' pathways are easily distracted. That is, I meant to just grab lunch with my friend Gladys, but the bookstore across the plaza had a book display that brought me in, which was perfect for a gift I had to buy anyway. Bada-bing, bada-boom. That mixed-use building doubled their profits on me.

Chapter 9

In this chapter, about the need for small blocks, Jane uses picture diagrams for the first time. Up till now, she has been relying on words to describe spatial things. She offers a way to create diversity in public spaces other than primary use buildings: create center use areas by bisecting long city-blocks with extra streets. This gives city walkers alternate routes to choose from, instead of the same monotonous, self-isolating, long streets that only pool at the end where there is a central point of use (i.e., a subway station). Jane cites the Rockefeller Plaza's extra north-south street as a perfect example of this (how cool that would have been to reference in my St. Patrick's Cathedral section of my undergrad thesis!).
Diversity grows flexibly, and so perhaps for this very reason, short city blocks must be simply committed to in faith in the city planning stage; they may seem wasteful, especially to the orthodox planner, but their payoff is the end of safety and vitality that is achieved wherever diversity is nurtured.
How surprising it is to me, with my own small background in urban studies, that open space is actually pathogenic to city life. Central Park, I suppose, is an exception. I'd be interested to hear Jane's view on why it is successful.
Reading about city blocks, superblocks, sidewalk use...it all makes me incredibly nostalgic for New York. My time there is no vague, watercolor-washed memory, but is rather as crisp as the apple cider and donuts that farmers brought into the city ever Sunday and Thursday. Ah! New York! If only I had enjoyed and appreciated you more while I had you. I think I did enjoy you to the max, but I also think two years was too brief. I wonder, wonder how Atlanta will stack up, or contrast. Now I have a language and a logic to employ as I actively indwell it.

Chapter 10

Ah! the chapter that gives aged buildings the glory they deserve! I am partial to older city buildings because my church and my physics and foreign language (heck, all my) classes were in old, old buildings. Unlike the way buildings age in smaller towns, city aging has a very magnetic quality to it. Maybe it's just that mildew isn't such a foe in NYC as it is here in Jackson. Mildew will quickly remove any magnetic quality!

Perhaps to prevent compromising Jane's once-again brilliant thinking, I will stick with one excerpt that says it all:

"Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity" (193) <---speaks to the fact that building tons of commercial stores at once is a recipe for misuse and disuse of area. Business owners who rent cannot keep up with high renting costs of new buildings. The city-making recipe of newness cuts out those often-ordinary enterprises that cannot make it there, economically (such as "unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries," music supply stores, book stores). Think about it: "large swatches" of new construction lack DIVERSITY. They are inefficient. That being said, new buildings are also needed to avoid stagnation of use and users. What Jane cautions against is the conversion of large swatches of land and buildings. Variety needs to be left intact, for the mingling of old and new, she argues, is the incubator of diversity, new primary use buildings, and truly new city life- not in the form of cheap big-box plastered walls, but in the form of "ingenious adaptations" as store-owners adjust the old uses of old buildings to new ones.

Chapter 11

I just realized the ironic lack of diversity in my writing here. I am, with my writing and summaries, doing the very thing Jane hates: routinizing. Using large swatches of predictable text, or rather, forcing you, my reader (are you out there?) down long, monotonous city-streets with no alternate routes. Maybe I can use this project of mine (reading then writing a response, so I read better and remember this book more) as an opportunity to do what I need to do as a writer: write more concisely. Conciseness can persuade, spark, educate and attract a reader far better than deep detail can. It's a quality of writing I most want to master. After all, some sociologists (such as Georg Simmel) made it into the history books simply because of their ability to publish short volumes on social phenomena. That attracted a far larger audience!

I will give myself a 100-word limit:

Jane argues that the presupposed "correlations between high densities [of people] and trouble ... is simply incorrect," but that dense city populations are rather an asset. To offset the standardization that occurs if a population is too dense or overcrowded, the solution is to cover as much ground as possible with residences. Jane tampers remedy this with a reminder of the previous three diversity-generators: widespread dwellings must also be mixed in with non-residential buildings (mixed use around a primary building), and short streets are needed to avoid endless rows of housing.

With all this in mind, the reader wonders as to how suburbs, with their un-dense, un-overcrowded, far-from hitting the "in-between density" spot, flourish. I've understood for the first time how monotony in stores (building use) can generate a population equally monotonous. Jane is making me all the more skeptical of the suburbs as a healthy living arrangement or option.

That was more than 100 words, and it was an explication (reader's interpretation of text). Maybe next time I will try to use the 4-sentence precis (author-centered summary) formula. That's sure to stretch me lingually!