Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning
Even when well-developed systems of parks and pedestrian routes are available, children of all ages spend most of their time outdoors in or alongside the access roads. (Survey of children’s play habits in single-family house areas in Denmark [29]).
Jan Gehl • Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space
This order created uncoordinated systems that worked, without staff, as if by magic. Such was Jacobs’s “Sidewalk Ballet.” With density, she argued, came “eyes on the street,” a community-based security system that required neither barbed wire nor an extensive police presence. With wide sidewalks comes trusted interactions, even with strangers—a qua... See more
What’s Next for Jane Jacobs' Sidewalk Ballet?
Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu propose that a critical practice of care would “pay attention to the privileged position of the caring subject, wary of who has the power to care, and who or what tends to get designated the proper or improper objects of care.”Going further, we could imagine physical infrastructures that support ecologies o... See more
Places Journal • Maintenance and Care
When the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society turned over two hundred vacant lots in Philadelphia into green spaces by clearing debris and planting grass and trees, the incidence of depression among those who lived nearby dropped by 42 percent.