THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

THE USES OF CITY NEIGHBORHOODS- JAN JACOBS

The word neighbourhood has come to sound like a valentine. Neighbourhood as a
sentimental matter, it is harmful to city planning, also plays with good intentions in a place of
good sense. To try city life into organised town or suburban life. A successful city
neighbourhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed
by them. Our cities have all degrees of success and failure. Americans are poor at handling
city neighbourhoods, as can be seen by the long accumulations of failures in our great grey
belts on the one hand, and by the turfs of rebuilt city on the other hand, and by the rebuilt
city on the other hand.
Cause and effect are not simple in real life, Pittsburgh study, to show the correlation
between better housing and improved social conditions. This means other thing is more
important than housing. We fool ourselves to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious
grounds. Reinhold Niebuhr, this particular self-deception.
The upper side of Manhattan, failed area social disintegration has compounded by many,
annual turnover was more than 50% in 1959-60. Unstable neighbourhoods also have good
housing. To think as organs of city self-government or self-management, must first of all
drop any ideal of this as self-contained or introverted units. There are many flaws in the ideal
of the planned neighbourhood and its various adaption in New York.
Ebenezer Howard’s model towns are the ancestors of the idea, surely its durability from the
need to fill an intellectual vacuum. While seeing at city neighbourhoods as organs of self-
government, only 3 necessary kinds of neighbourhoods are useful: the city as a whole, street
neighbourhoods, and districts of large, sub city size/ largest cities. The neighbourhood is find
one another and get together in any arts.
William Krik of Union Settlement and Helen hall of Henry Street Settlement, mile apart in
New York, but get together with consumers union and so on. They have another function,
must draw when trouble is too big for the street to handle. Park Avenue is part of a set of
interweaving neighbourhoods containing great diversity, not a strip. We have plenty of city
districts in name. few have that function. Big cities are too complex to comprehended in
detail.
In Cincinnati, complaint that echoes and re-echoes in all our big cities. If they develop
conflicts with people in adjoining neighbourhoods, apt to be helpless at improving
relationships. The value of city districts that swing real power is no discovery of mine.
Monotony is the enemy of cross-use and hence of functional unity.
To sound nicer, are still votes and money. Neighbourhood accommodations for fixed,
bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability. Such places are forever way
stations.
Even the best streets and districts can stand improvement, especially amenity. If we
understand the principles behind the behaviour of cities, we can also build on potential
assets and strengths, instead of acting at cross- purposes to them.