Jane’s Walk Weekend is this May 4th and 5th!

The fact that Jane Jacobs’ name is so often attached to the idea of gentrification today seems a cruel irony. Jane’s writing was focused on how to create strong neighborhoods that fostered robust social networks; she was far from a “NIMBY”, and her interest in preservation was more about economics than aesthetics. Unfortunately, the complexity of her ideas is often vastly oversimplified or taken out of context today by people looking to generate a bit of controversy. Reports that ‘Jane was wrong’ are greatly exaggerated, often by people who wind up making many of the same arguments that Jane, herself, made.

So it is always wonderful to see people gathering in communities across the country for Jane’s Walk Weekend. Over the next two days (May 4th & 5th), thousands will meet their neighbors to explore, observe, and appreciate what makes their neighborhoods great. In honor of one of our very favorite Placemakers, we’ve rounded up several walks scheduled to take place this year that focus on the theme of resilience, a concern at the core of much of Jane’s work. She was a champion of complexity and flexibility in urban form because these qualities allow communities—and the people that inhabit them—to address challenges more nimbly and effectively. Or, in her own eloquent words:

“Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties … Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

And now, without further ado:

1.) Levee Disaster Bike Tour, New Orleans: The Crescent City’s comeback post-Katina, while far from frictionless, has been nothing short of miraculous. This bike tour will visit the sites of several levee breaches around the city, giving participants an opportunity to discuss what happened to their city, and how far they’ve come since.

2.) Not Your Typical Regent Park Walk, Toronto: This walk, in the city where Jane moved after her time in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, will “[shine] a light on the capacity of local residents and [reframe] Toronto’s negative ‘public housing’ narrative,” focusing on the importance of generating new economic opportunities from within local communities rather than attracting them from somewhere else.

3.) The Roots of Mack Avenue, Detroit: This tour will focus on an historic neighborhood commercial corridor in the Motor City, which recently played host to the Placemaking Leadership Council’s inaugural meeting. The tour will explore Mack Avenue’s economic decline, and look forward to the bright future outlined through the “Green Thoroughfare” revitalization plan.

4.) Hometown Security, The Bronx, NYC: Led by South Bronx-based advocate Majora Carter, this tour will examine the impact of the Spofford juvenile detention facility on the neighborhood. The tour will end with a performance by a group of people whose lives were affected by Spofford, and who have worked with the Theater of the Oppressed to tell their stories. Observations from the performances will inform how the 5-acre Spofford site will be re-developed in the future.

5.) Recycle Kingdom Walk, Calcutta: This year Jane’s Walk is making its way to several cities in India. This unique walk will meander through the East Calcutta Wetlands, providing an intimate look at the vital role that the site plays in the city’s ecological resilience. The wetlands “take in all the solid and liquid waste of the city and generates fish, rice and vegetables and sends it back.”

One last thing: if you’re in New York, the Municipal Art Society will be offering a host of free tours of neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy last fall. You can check out the full list of related events by clicking right here.

Pittsburgh’s brand may be rusty, but like every city, it has its bright spots / Photo: Brendan Crain

“At the heart of my argument,” writes Jim Russell in his response to last Wednesday’s blog post, “is the fact that [Placemaking] initiatives are intrinsically place-centric. Instead of place-centrism, I’m looking at talent migration through a lens of people-centrism…I’m convinced that placemaking is useful, but not for talent attraction/retention. People move for purposes of personal economic development.”

Focusing on talent attraction and retention is what leads to gentrification, the phenomena that people who voice concerns about Placemaking are most often trying to avoid. There is an oft-voiced belief today that there is a finite amount of talent and creativity available in the world, and that cities must compete to draw creative people away from rival communities in order to thrive. But truly great places are not built from scratch to attract people from elsewhere; the best places have evolved into dynamic, multi-use destinations over time: years, decades, centuries. These places are reflective of the communities that surround them, not the other way around. Placemaking is, ultimately, more about the identification and development of local talent, not the attraction of talent from afar.

A key difference in definitions here is that what some would call ‘place’, I (and others) would call branding. There’s an oceans-wide gap between those two things. “Young, college-educated talent is moving from decaying Pittsburgh (brain drain) to cool, hip Austin (brain gain),” writes Russell, explaining the Creative Class concept. “It’s a place-centric understanding of talent relocation.” In fact, what he’s describing is a brand-centric understanding. Pittsburgh’s brand is rusty (heh); Austin’s brand gleams with the silvery-green gloss of techno-optimism. But to categorize entire cities as singular places gets you nowhere at all. Pittsburgh has its bright spots, and Austin has its warts.

Looking at cities from what Jan Gehl calls the “airplane scale” is what allows proponents of cut-and-paste urbanism to do what the Modernists did, using lifestyle instead of architecture. Rather than suggesting that the city be reorganized into tower blocks amidst grassy lawns, today’s one-size-fits-allers call for cafes and artisan markets. They are presuming that the city as a whole will benefit from the indiscriminate application of a specific set of amenities. It won’t. Neighborhoods need to define their priorities for themselves; in so doing, they often discover that there are untapped opportunities to grow their own local economies, without needing to import talent from elsewhere. Even if your city’s brand is busted, your community is still capable of re-building itself. As Jane Jacobs once argued, “the best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.”

“The best cities are actually federations of great neighborhoods.” — Jane Jacobs / Photo: Brendan Crain

When cities jump into the talent attraction death match arena, they often wind up losing to win: they spend millions of dollars on insane tax incentives to woo corporate headquarters and factories; they drop millions more on fancy amenities that haven’t really been asked for, in the hopes that (since it worked elsewhere) each bauble will magically cause a crowd of American Apparel-wearing, Mac-toting graphic designers to materialize out of thin air; they sell their souls in order to “create” jobs that are, in fact, merely shifted over from somewhere else.

If “people develop, not places” as Russell argues, economic development and gentrification are one and the same. If your strategy for improving local economic prospects is to drink some other city’s milkshake, you won’t get very far. It’s economic cannibalization. To really grow an economy, opportunity has to be developed organically within each community, and that requires that people dig in and improve their neighborhoods, together, for the sake of doing so–not convincing Google to open a new office down the road.

As Aaron Renn put it in a recent post on The Urbanophile, “We need to be asking the question of what exactly we are doing to benefit the people without college degrees beyond assuring them that if we attract more people with college degrees everything will be looking up for them. We need to sell ideas like transit in a way that isn’t totally dependent on items like ‘enabling us to attract the talent we need for the 21st century economy.’ If I read half as much about providing economic opportunity and facilitating upward social mobility for the poor and middle classes as I do about green this, that, or the other thing, we’d be getting somewhere.”

Places aren’t about the 21st century economy. They are about the people who inhabit and develop them. They are the physical manifestations of the social networks upon which our global economy is built. Likewise, Place-making is not about making existing places palatable to a certain class of people. It is a process by which each community can develop place capital by bringing people together to figure out what competitive edge their community might have, and then working to capitalize on that edge and improve local economic prospects in-place, rather than trying to import opportunity from elsewhere.

Decades ago we, as a society, detached people from place. We decided that places should be shaped based on theories and ideas, rather than the needs of people who already lived, worked, and played there. The development of people and places is the same process. If we keep trying to separate the two, our cities will remain divided.

Families peruse stands offering a variety of fresh foods at a farmers market in downtown Milwaukee / Photo: Ethan Kent

According to Dr. Richard Jackson, a pioneering public health advocate and former CDC official now serving as the Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA, the idea that buildings, streets, and public spaces play a key role in the serious public health issues that we face in the US “has undergone a profound sea change in the past few years. It’s gone from sort of a marginal, nutty thing to becoming something that’s common sense for a lot of people.”

That’s good news, but as a profile of Dr. Jackson in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, today’s click-driven media climate means that the message of public health advocates like Jackson is “often pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-catching headline: ‘Suburbia Makes You Fat.’” And while these pithily-titled articles may do some good in alerting more people to the problems inherent in the way that we’ve been designing our cities and towns for the past half-century, they oversimplify the message and strip out one of the most important factors in any effort to change the way that we shape the places where we live and work: social capital.

Highways, parking lots, cars, big box stores–these are merely symptoms of a larger problem: many people have become so used to their surroundings looking more like a suburban arterial road than a compact, multi-use destination that they’ve become completely disconnected from Place. Real life is lived amongst gas stations and golden arches; we have to visit Disneyland to see a thriving, compact Main Street. To question a condition that’s so pervasive, as individuals, seems futile.

Bikers and walkers chat at a market in Portland, OR / Photo: npGREENWAY via Flickr

That’s why, if we want to see people challenging the way that their places are made on a larger scale, we need to focus first on developing the loose social networks that are so vital to urban resilience. This is the stuff Jane Jacobs was talking about when she wrote, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.” When people are connected enough to feel comfortable talking about what they want for their neighborhood with their neighbors, it’s much easier to muster political will to stop, say, a highway from cutting through Greenwich Village–or, in contemporary terms, to tear down a highway that was actually built.

In Dr. Jackson’s words: “The key thing is to get the social engagement. Community-building has to happen first; people need to articulate what’s broke, and then what they want.” Serendipitously, gathering to discuss a vision for a healthier future is an ideal way to build the social capital needed to turn the understanding that our built environment is hurting us into action to change the existing paradigm. At PPS, we have seen first-hand how the Placemaking process has brought people together in hundreds of cities around the world with the goal of improving shared public spaces; it’s a process that strengthens existing ties, creates new ones, and invigorates communities with the knowledge of how they can make things happen.

The Healthy Places Program (HPP), which began last year as a collaboration between staff members working in PPS’s Public Markets and Transportation programs. “There are many different elements that make up a healthy community,” says Aurash Khawarzad, an Associate in PPS’s Transportation division, and a key player in getting HPP off the ground. “There are social factors, environmental factors, etc–and what we at PPS can do is take these people in our offices who are focusing on their own areas and bring them together.”

Aurash Khawarzad leads a Healthy Places workshop in upstate New York / Photo: PPS

With that collaborative mission in mind, Khawarzad and Kelly Verel, a Senior Associate in PPS’s Public Markets division, set out on a trip across New York last fall to facilitate a series of day-long Healthy Places workshops with local, regional, and state public health officials and a host of community partners. In partnership with the New York Academy of Medicine’s DASH-NY, the PPS team visited a range of communities, from rural towns, to suburban stretches, to major and mid-sized cities. The workshops were designed to help participants understand how multi-modal transportation systems can be better designed to create a network that links a series of destinations, including healthy food hubs and markets, to create a built environment that promotes well-being by making healthy lifestyle choices (like walking, biking, and eating fresh food) more convenient and fun. They focused not just on what wasn’t working, but on brainstorming ways that participants’ communities could become truly healthy places.

Any expert worth their salt will tell you that maintaining good health is not just about exercise or diet, but both together. In much the same way, addressing the problem of bad community design and its impacts on Public Health requires that we not just promote better transportation or better food access alone, but that we focus on both simultaneously. “The reaction we got from the the Healthy Places training attendees was really good,” notes Verel. “I think people have been really siloed in their efforts. We would ask people what they were doing and they would say ‘access to food in schools,’ or ‘rails to trails,’ and that they focus exclusively on that area.”

Understanding public health within the context of Place is essential, because the problems created and reinforced by our built environment are so broad in scope. HPP takes that case directly to local decision-makers and creates a learning environment where they can build their understanding of how Place effects health together, in a cross-disciplinary setting. This “silo-busting” is absolutely critical; as Dr. Jackson writes in the introduction to his latest book, Designing Healthy Communities (a companion to the four-part PBS special of the same name):

“For too long we have had doctors talking only to doctors, and urban planners, architects, and builders talking only to themselves. The point is that all of us, including those in public health, have got to get out of the silos we have created, and we have got to connect—actually talk to each other before and while we do our work—because there is no other way we can create the environment we want. Public health in particular must be interdisciplinary, for no professional category owns public health or is legitimately excused from it.”

The emphasis, there, is added, as this phrase strike at the heart of the problem we face. To shift the default development model from “low-density, use-segregated, and auto-centric” to one that promotes healthy, active lifestyles and more vibrant communities will take strong leadership from people who aren’t afraid to work across departments, and “turn everything upside-down to get it right side up.” PPS is certainly not the only organization to recognize this, and we’re thrilled to be part of a growing movement. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has its own Healthy Community Design Initiative program. Internationally, Urban Age made designing for public health the subject of a major conference in Hong Kong held late last year (from which a full report is now available).

New bike lanes are just one part of Pro Walk / Pro Bike: "Pro Place" host city Long Beach, CA's strategy to become "Biketown USA" / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

Of course, individual citizens have hardly been waiting around and twiddling their thumbs. Active transportation, healthy food, and community gardening advocates have been working for decades on the ground, pushing for incremental changes to the way our cities and towns operate. Just through the robust conversations taking place online around issues like #completestreets, #biking, and #urbanag, it’s easy to see how well-organized and resonant these movements have become. Mounting public awareness is pushing more public officials toward programs like HPP, to learn about how focusing on Place can facilitate inter-agency collaboration around the common cause of improving public health.

Whether you’re looking at this issue from the top-down or the bottom-up, there will be several opportunities to gather with active transportation and public markets professionals, advocates, and enthusiasts from around the world this fall for debate, discussion, and more of that vital social capital development. As part of the Healthy Places Program, PPS is hosting two conferences, just one week apart: the 17th Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place” conference in Long Beach, CA (Sept. 10-13); and the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, OH (Sept. 21-23).

Cleveland, which will host the 8th International Public Markets Conference in September, is home to the historic, bustling West Side Market / Photo: Catherine V via Flickr

If you’re approaching Healthy Places from the transportation world, Pro Walk / Pro Bike (#prowalkprobike) will explore how efforts to advocate for safer and better infrastructure for active transportation modes are being greatly enhanced as more and more people learn about the benefits of getting around on their own two feet (with or without pedals). If you’re more of a “foodie,” the Public Markets conference (#marketsconf8) will highlight the burgeoning local food scene in Cleveland and throughout Northeastern Ohio, and will spotlight the iconic West Side Market, arguably the most architecturally significant market building in the US. Both events will focus on how supporters of active transportation and public markets, respectively, can grow their movements by busting down silos and thinking h0listically about how their chosen cause can be part of the effort to create Healthy Places.

If you can’t make it to Long Beach or Cleveland, there are plenty of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper steps that you can take to get your neighbors together and talking, out in public space, building local connections. “Something like a playstreet or a summer street shows people that, not only do they like this kind of varied activity and flexibility and want more of it in their community’s streets, but that they can actually make it happen,” Verel explains. “It takes more basic manpower–putting up tents, handing out flyers–than actual lobbying or money to get the DOT to shut down a street for one day and focus on social interaction and healthy activity.”

And you can start even smaller than that. PPS mentor Holly Whyte once wrote that “We are not hapless beings caught in the grip of forces we can do little about, and wholesale damnations of our society only lend a further mystique to organization. Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man.” If our problem is that we have become siloed and isolated, at work and in our neighborhoods, then the most immediate way for us to start re-organizing is to reach out to the people around us, with something as simple as a friendly “hello” on the street. An interaction like this might seem ‘lowly, unpurposeful, and random’–but at the very least, it will make you feel happier and more connected to your community. And guess what? That’s good for you, too.

So, here’s to your health!

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Click here to register for Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place”
(Early Summer rate available until June 29)

Click here to register for the 8th International Public Markets Conference
(Early bird rate available until July 31)
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A Playstreet-style fundraiser for cicLAvia in Los Angeles / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

Wanna go for a walk? / Photo: JaneJacobsWalk.org

The annual Jane’s Walk Weekend is just around the corner! On Saturday, May 5th, and Sunday, May 6th, hundreds of free walking tours will take place in cities around the world. We were going to try to round up the best walks for people interested in Placemaking but, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Jane was the doyenne of human-scaled urbanism, it’s pretty much impossible to find a tour that isn’t great in that regard. Instead, we sifted through all of the listings to find some of the most original and offbeat tours on the roster.

We highly encourage you to visit the two main websites with listings of walks around the world, JaneJacobsWalk.org and JanesWalk.net, to see what’s going on in your city or town, whether it involves unicycles and ugly houses, or a good old fashioned exploration of the history, people, and architecture of a unique place.

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City of Labyrinths Project (Toronto, Ontario)
Toronto, where Jane lived during the latter half of her life, will be the setting for more walks than any other city during the weekend; still, several stand out. This walk ont he 5th, organized by a group that aims “to place a semi-permanent labyrinth within walking distance of every Torontonian,” celebrates the city’s existing sidewalk mazes, and explores the history of labyrinth design.

Cityscape/Soundscape (Toronto, Ontario)
Most walking tours tend to rely more on what we see than what we hear, but Toronto will play host to a “soundwalk” on the 5th. This tour will “show how Toronto’s diverse downtown spaces can be distinguished by their own characteristic soundscapes.” Sounds cool enough already, but take a look at the photo–it seems this walk will even include blindfolds to heighten your hearing!

Food Foraging (Flesherton, Ontario)
For a thoroughly rural ramble (say that five times fast), head to Flesherton on the 6th to learn all about what can and can’t be eaten during a walk in the woods. Organizer David Turner “will also point out plants, roots, barks and leaves that can be used for tinctures, salves and teas.”

IRUBNY Celebrates Gramercy Park (New York, New York)
Artist Carol Caputo will lead participants in New York on a walk around Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood on the 5th, armed with paper and crayons to create rubbings of the architectural details that define this historic district.

Levee Disaster Bike Tour (New Orleans, Louisiana)
Led by an organization lobbying for safer levees to protect New Orleans (sad that we even need sustained advocacy for that), this bike tour on the 6th will visit the sites of two levee breaches that flooded the Crescent City shortly after Hurricane Katrina blew through town.

Not a Cakewalk (Toronto, Ontario)
There are a number of food-related tours scheduled during the weekend, but only one will focus specifically on the design of bakeries, and “illuminates the relationship between emotions and desire with architecture.” The walk will take place in Toronto’s West End neighborhood on the 5th.

Seersucker Ride (Sacramento, California)
If you’re the kind of person who regrets not being born during the Victorian Era, you’re in luck! On the 6th, the group Sacramento Tweed will lead an olde-fashioned bike tour of the historic city core “that encourages period dress and a more relaxed style of riding.”

Silent Midnight Walk (Regina, Saskatchewan)
If the Cityscape/Soundscape walk in Toronto sounded fun but a bit too easterly, you can experience another soundwalk in Regina on the evening of the 5th. During this one-hour traipse, “participants may choose to practice walking meditation or to simply allow their senses to take over.” Tranquil or spooky, depending on your perspective, it certainly sounds like an interesting experience!

Ugly Houses (Karlskrona, Sweden)
There’s not much information available about this walk on the website, but the title suggests that, if you happen to be in Karlskrona on the 6th, this walk has potential to be very entertaining!

Unicycling for Change (Bozeman, Montana)
While Jane’s Walk Weekend will feature several biking tours, we only found one that will be conducted via unicycle! If you’re a fan of transportation of the one-wheeled variety, head out to Montana on the 5th to help promote the cause! (Don’t worry, the route includes several breaks for weary legs).

All Photos: JaneJacobsWalk.org

Click to view the Table of Contents / Photo: Princeton Architectural Press

As Placemaking Blog readers already know, we’re in the midst of launching a public conversation about the need for an Architecture of Place. In researching the current state of architectural criticism, we came across design critic Alexandra Lange’s brand new book, Writing About Architecture, which serendipitously provides an in-depth look at how to write effectively about the very subject we were arguing needs to be written more effectively about!

Lange, who teaches criticism at New York University and the School of Visual Arts, has created a hybrid that is part anthology, part handbook. Writing About Architecture presents six essays by well-known critics, including Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and Jane Jacobs, using them to illustrate various aspects of successful and effective criticism. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the author via email about activist criticism, improving communication between citizens and designers, and how the democratization of media is opening up this field to new voices.

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Brendan Crain: You devote a good deal of ink in Writing About Architecture to activist criticism, focusing (necessarily) on specific examples. Thinking more broadly, what would you say is the state of activist criticism today? Can you think of people who are doing a particularly good job with this kind of writing? And if there are any, what are some of the broader goals of contemporary activist design criticism?

Alexandra Lange: In the last chapter of my book I discuss Jane Jacobs, and how she might have reacted to the Atlantic Yards project. I think it needed a Jane Jacobs to stop it — an advocate as eloquent about the costs, and the alternatives, as those seductive Gehry renderings — and for whatever reason, one did not appear. But the activist spirit was by no means dead. It just got diffused into activist non-profits and activist blogs and activist essays. The diffused media landscape made it easier to follow the saga week by week, but perhaps made it harder for any one person to become the voice.

Activist criticism now is less likely to be on the pages of a major media outlet and more likely to be on a purpose-built blog. Jane Jacobs and Michael Sorkin had the Village Voice; today, I think of Aaron Naparstek and Streetsblog, which he founded but has now become a larger, multi-writer entity. He built his own platform for what the New York Times would not cover. That’s incredibly exciting but also potentially limiting — what if you have activist thoughts about other topics? Preservation is another area where I think critics can be effective, but I wouldn’t want to write about modernist preservation all the time.

In terms of broader goals, I can think of three areas that seem to attract activism: public space (like PPS), preservation (like DOCOMOMO, Landmarks West!) and transportation (Transportation Alternatives, Streetsblog). But more people get their news about the city from places like Curbed and other real estate blogs, and I am still always hoping that those sites will get more critical, and put their readership to use. It isn’t really in their personality profile, but I’m an optimist.

BC: That raises the question of why, at a time when architecture is purportedly paying more attention to social issues, the audience for writing about it seems to be shrinking, with the “death of architecture criticism” meme making the blog-rounds over the past few months. Groups that are particularly well-organized online–bicycling advocates, urban gardeners, transportation wonks, and even real estate gawkers–seem to dominate the conversation about cities. Discussions about architecture seem much more insular. How might the conversation about the built environment be opened up to appeal to a wider audience?

AL: I’m not sure I think the “death of architecture criticism” meme is real. I am sad when publications that have longstanding critic positions decide they don’t need them anymore, but I wonder if the real story isn’t architecture criticism exploring the new media landscape. TV criticism went through a tremendous transition, embracing the recap, rejecting the recap, making a case for itself as the central cultural critique of our day. It could be amazing if architecture criticism made a similar transition and came out stronger.

For that to happen, I think criticism needs to take more forms: not just appear in the culture section, but in news and opinion; appear on Twitter, in conversations with other fields; point out how it is central to questions of development, and environmentalism, and even television, that people are already engaged with. Readers need to recognize that it doesn’t have a single personality. Unfortunately, the first people critics need to convince are the editors, and I know from experience that can be tough.

BC: In addition to diversifying the ways in which critical writing is being disseminated, does the scope of what what’s being written about need to widen? In the book, you’ve included “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” an essay by Charles Moore that contrasts architectural with social monumentality. You note that, by Moore’s definition, a place as simple and unadorned as a meadow can be considered monument if that meadow resonates with the surrounding communities — “people make monuments.” Do you think writing about more ordinary elements of the city could be helpful in broadening the audience for criticism?

AL: Moore’s essay is one of my all time favorites, and I constantly refer to it in my thinking about public space and the way we make cities. ‘Who is paying’ and ‘How are we paying’ are questions relevant to almost any public space. In that chapter I even review, in a sense, the Urban Meadow in my Brooklyn neighborhood as a monument. So yes, I do think critics need to widen their scope, but I also think people need to notice that they’ve already done that, and have been doing it. Justin Davidson has a piece in this week’s New York magazine about Times Square, and he’s written about it at least one other time. Michael Kimmelman is making the architects mad by writing about planning and not architecture for the Times. Karrie Jacobs has been doing this all along. There was a tendency to starchitecture criticism, but it wasn’t forever and it wasn’t everyone.

BC: Due to the technological changes that you spoke of earlier, it’s easy now for anyone with an interest in architecture and design to participate in the public discussion about these topics. Blogging and tweeting are to media, in a way, what “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” interventions are to design. In the book, you refer to Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities as “a primary document for a ground-up, deinstitutionalized form of architectural criticism.” Are there other books, essays, blogs, etc. that you think are particularly instructive for people who, like Jacobs, aren’t trained as designers or architects, but who want to write about how design affects their communities?

AL: I like the approach Alissa Walker takes on her own blog, Gelatobaby, as well in her freelance work (she now has a column at LA Weekly). I like the kind of events the Design Trust for Public Space organizes, creating social interactions in unusual parts of the city. I think Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City is well worth reading, even though it is dated, because his mental mapping project, and the five elements of the city he identifies (path, edge, district, node, landmark), remain useful in trying to figure out what’s missing. If you want to read more Lewis Mumford, I recommend the collection From the Ground Up, which has a lot about cars, housing and streets. I just read an essay on architecture and urban development in Kazakhstan by Andrew Kovacs, soon to be published in PIDGIN, that I found fascinating. Sometimes just reading an account of what it is like to walk around in a strange place is enough, and that’s a great place for the non-designer to start. Get out the AIA Guide and go explore.

BC: Getting out and observing how a place works is something we highly recommend! But sometimes people can sense things intuitively about a place that they may not be able to articulate in a way that design professionals respond to. We conducted one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops at the PPS offices in New York last week, and one of the attendees said that she was participating because she would like “for designers to think more like citizens, and for citizens to think more like designers.” You’ve included a bunch of great exercises in Writing About Architecture to help readers put lessons learned from the various essays into action. Can you think of one or two exercises that could help citizens to communicate their concerns more effectively to designers–and vice versa?

AL: I think for the non-designer, getting specific is really helpful. Achieving a higher level of noticing. Do you always trip on that step? Why do you take the stairs rather than the ramp? Is it just too hot in the park? Think about the height, the materials, the lighting level, the plants and try to figure out what it is that isn’t working. No one likes to hear, “I just don’t like it…” and I think making the problem as concrete as you can helps designers to hear you. Also, if you are in a place that isn’t working, try to think of a similar one that you do like. What does that one have that this one doesn’t? Compare and contrast is really effective.

As for the designers, I’m with the anti-archispeak contingent. Architects have to get specific too, and not talk about landscape elements rather than plants, etc. It is a kind of shorthand, but it is off-putting. More important, though, is to discuss the narrative of a project: why you chose this material rather than that, how it is supposed to make citizens (not users!) feel and act, what’s the point. Everyone wants places that work, but there are so many different ways to get there.

Jane Jacobs

“No one can find what will work for our cities by … manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities….You’ve got to get out and walk.” -Jane Jacobs

Jane’s Walk as a Way to Catalyze Change

Events like this are a great chance to come together to think critically about the public spaces you encounter every day- and imagine how small scale changes can make them extraordinary.

More than a nice way to spend an afternoon, events like these can actually help forge the personal connections and networks that are the foundation that makes community-led, lighter, quicker, cheaper projects possible. This year’s walks will occur throughout the U.S. on May 7th and 8th.

Sign up here to host a Jane’s Walks in your neighborhood!

Jane’sWalkUSA, a program of The Center for the Living City , is dedicated to honoring the legacy and ideas of urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs by facilitating free walking tours in neighborhoods throughout the country, in cities from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

Anyone who ever met Jane Jacobs or read her books couldn’t help but be infected by her enthusiasms. She loved cities and celebrated the life that teems within them. She articulated better than anyone how the best ideas about making cities great come not from theories and master plans but from careful observation of what goes on around us. This was a startling, radical idea when she first proposed it in the 1950s and 60s, and it changed the way North Americans think about cities.

But above all else, Jane Jacobs loved people. Whether chronicling the habits of fellow city-dwellers or organizing a campaign with her neighbors to save important places from destruction, she was always engaged in the life of her community.

It is hard to imagine a world without Jane Jacobs, harder still to imagine what shape our cities would be in had she never come along. Today her books are classics, taught in universities all over the world. Her ideas are well-known by planners, architects, and activists everywhere. But at the time The Death and Life of Great American Cities was released in 1961, she was a brave, singular voice challenging the dominant theories of the entire planning establishment. Without any formal training in city planning, she managed to transform the field. Indeed, her lack of a degree in architecture, planning or even journalism is often cited as the secret of her wisdom and innovation. She took a fresh look at what makes cities work and what makes them fail, never blinded by the assumptions and orthodoxy of a particular profession. Jane Jacobs was a true original.

One of her earliest champions was William “Holly” Whyte, then an editor at Fortune Magazine who encouraged her to write a series of articles in the late 1950s that became the basis for Death and Life. Later in life, Jane always professed a special affinity for Holly, who had gone on in the early 1970s to create the Streetlife Project, which in turn led to the founding of Project for Public Spaces. She was one of the first people to visit the PPS office in 1975, and we were fortunate to have spoken with her and shared our progress every few months in recent years. Her advice, encouragement, and dedication to the cause of making places great have been invaluable to us and to our mission.

It has become fashionable of late for certain architects and critics infatuated by high design to pooh-pooh her thinking as rigid and out-of-date. But such groundless criticism has never made even a dent in her legacy, since so many people from so many fields have been influenced and inspired by her wisdom.

We are greatly saddened by Jane Jacobs’ death yesterday, but confident that her infectious love for cities will be carried on by many followers far into the future. We will miss her dearly.

– The Staff of Project for Public Spaces

For more about the life and ideas of Jane Jacobs, see her Placemaker Profile.