[sustran] Re: Another contribution to Jane Jacobs and Land Use

[Lake Sagaris]

Hi folks

For those who are interested, aside from a lot of fascinating examples of 
efforts throughout the US to revitalize limp downtowns, the book "Cities: 
Back from the Edge, New Life for Downtown", by Roberta Brandes Gratz with 
Norman Mintz, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998,  in many ways picks up 
where Jane Jacobs left off (although of course she never really did leave 
off, as her wonderful influence on Toronto indicates). Interestingly, 
Brandes Gratz really puts transit issues at the centre of urban renewal, 
and in her last chapter The SoHo Syndrome and her conclusion: Back from the 
Edge, she cites multiple examples of where changes to a pedestrian-centred 
approach have been crucial to revitalizing urban centres.

Interestingly, many of the examples of grassroots rebuilding of urban 
life/centres that she cites were led by citizens' groups born from fights 
against major highway projects. Even more oddly, for us, not only is this 
very much our background at Ciudad Viva (Living City) but her first book -- 
which we'd never heard of when we were in the process of deciding our name, 
is called "Living Cities".

Anyway, for a good, provocative and well-documented read on the practical 
implications of urban transport policies, I recommend this book.

Best,
Lake

PS We are looking for contacts in Bogota, Colombia, since two of our 
members have the chance of a four-day visit there later this month, and are 
very eager to have a first-hand look at everything they've been doing in 
terms of changes to the urban transportation system. Any recommendations??

  At 12:35 AM 10/07/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Dear Wendell and others,
>
>In Jane Jacobs's 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' a powerful 
>insight is provided about automobiles and cities (Chapter 18).
>
>Jacobs states about horses and cars, "The power of mechanized vehicles, 
>and their greater speed than horses, can make it easier to reconcile great 
>concentrations of people with efficient movement of people and goods... 
>[the problem is that]...We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse 
>on the crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, 
>instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so 
>horses. The mechanized vehicles, in their overabundance, work slothfully 
>and idle much.
>As one consequence of such low efficiency, the powerful and speedy 
>vehicles, choked by their own redundancy, don't move much faster than 
>horses."  In her book she quoted the New York times stating, "The truth is 
>that a horse and buggy could cross Los Angles almost as fast in 1900 as an 
>automobile can make this trip at 5 p.m. today (1960)".
>
>This problem has not gotten better in our cities today. I feel this is due 
>to the fact that we have one main limited resource and that is land. We 
>need to work to promote sustainable transportation which means that 
>different solutions will work in different places. We need to reassess our 
>land uses first and then discuss the specific technologies of movement second.
>
>If you study the rest of her book and many other authors who have followed 
>her, you can begin to understand the configurations of land uses that 
>produce more sustainable outcomes for cities.
>
>Best,
>
>John Renne
>Visiting Scholar
>Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy
>Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia
>
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