Urban diversity and great public spaces

San Jose debates how to create an iconic public space and how to design the Google Diridon project. Nate Hochman in National Review has some ideas for what to do, and what not do.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs, that keen observer of city life, published The Death and LIfe of Great American Cities, which called attention to one of the cardinal failures of modern urbanism. By enforcing strict zoning, and by consigning business, industry, culture, and recreation to different quarters of the city, planners were destroying the vitality of street life. Instead of drawing a vibrant and ever-changing variety of pedestrians throughout the day--office workers, shoppers, people out for lunch or a drink, moveigoers and so forth--the zone with a single function had a depressingly monotonous street life, and only at certain times. And without a rich street life, the public spaces of a city atrophy.

Jacobs' impressionistic account was bolstered by William H. Whyte, the brilliant social theorist who brought analytical rigor to the study of public space. Instead of blindly accepting the claims of city planners and critics, who could fawn over a calamity such as Boston's City Hall Plaza, Whyte decided to observe what people actually do. He simply pointed his camera and watched The results, published in the Social LIfe of Small Urban Spaces, were surprisingbut should not have been. People have a catlike sensitivity to small-scale features of their environment: They demand a sense of shelter and enclosure, a good viewing perch, and a variety of kinds of space. They also value features that architects generally disregard, such as moveable chairs, which are enormously popular and enormously loathed by property managers.

Read the whole thing here.

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