The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The reason Greenwich Village can reconcile such high densities with such great variety is that a high proportion of the land which is devoted to residences (called net residential acres) is covered with buildings. Relatively little is left open and unbuilt upon. In most parts, the buildings cover the residential land at averages estimated as rangin

You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicio

The exact reasons for scantness of use at a border vary. Some borders damp down use by making travel across them a one-way affair. Housing projects are examples of this. The project people cross back and forth across the border (usually, in any appreciable numbers, at only one side of the project or at most two sides). The adjoining people, for the

Certain qualities in design can apparently make a difference too. For if the object of a generalized bread-and-butter neighborhood park is to attract as many different kinds of people, with as many different schedules, interests, and purposes as possible, it is clear that the design of the park should abet this generalization of patronage rather th

Sun is part of a park’s setting for people, shaded, to be sure, in summer. A high building effectively cutting the sun angle across the south side of a park can kill off a lot of it. Rittenhouse Square, for all its virtues, has this misfortune. On a good October afternoon, for example, almost a third of the square lies completely empty; the great b

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

It is hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams. Expressways and their ramps are examples. Moreover, even in the case of large parks, campuses or waterfronts, the barrier effects can likely be overcome well only along portions of perimeters. The only way, I think, to combat vacuums in these cases is to rely on extraordinarily strong counte

The second potential tool for hampering unbridled duplication of uses is what I call staunchness of public buildings. By this I mean that public and quasi-public bodies should adopt, for their properties, a policy somewhat like Charles Abrams’ private policy for his property on Eighth Street. Abrams combats the excessive duplication of restaurants

Neighborhoods in cities need not supply for their people an artificial town or village life, and to aim at this is both silly and destructive. But neighborhoods in cities do need to supply some means for civilized self-government.