Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations by Jane Jacobs

Author:Jane Jacobs [Jacobs, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781612195353
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

KUNSTLER: You’ve said that it is much nicer to live in a city where things are getting better, not worse. I agree with you because I live in a city, Saratoga, that has gotten a lot better just in the last twenty-four months. We have gotten more main street buildings built in the last thirty-six months than in the entire twentieth century. Ones that are worth a damn, that are not one-story cinder block bunkers. And it’s a remarkable thing. So what’s going on in Toronto?

JACOBS: Our downtown keeps getting better all the time. Even the sidewalks are being widened here and there. You can hardly find a gas station anymore. Buildings have been put in, and often very nice buildings. And there’s lots of people living downtown now. That was a distinct policy of the city. We had a remarkable mayor, whose name was Barbara Hall. She went to work to get the zoning and the whole vision of this changed and believe me, it was very hard for her to educate her planning department to be able to accept this or do this. The various visions she had were excellent.

KUNSTLER: How did she whip all these guys into shape?

JACOBS: She just talked endlessly to anybody that might be involved, and she educated them and got them around to this view. It took a lot of work and a lot of talking and a lot of belief in what she was doing.

KUNSTLER: Toronto has a remarkable quality for a North American city—it’s alive. Have you visited any cities in the heartland recently—such as Detroit, St. Louis, Columbus, Indianapolis—and seen their desolation? I find them absolutely heartbreaking. The small towns are destroyed, too, by the way. Detroit went from being something like the fourth wealthiest city in the world to a complete wasteland in less than fifty years. What are your thoughts on what happened to American cities?

JACOBS: It’s a tragedy, and a totally unnecessary tragedy.

KUNSTLER: The destruction continues.

JACOBS: Yes, because nothing has really changed. Talk has changed, but regulations haven’t changed, lending systems for these things haven’t changed. The notion—and I tell you, this even extends into New Urbanism—the notion of the shopping center as a valid kind of downtown. That’s taken over. It’s very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

KUNSTLER: We are starting to return to that particularly in the work of Victor Dover and Joe Kohl.

JACOBS: I don’t know them.

KUNSTLER: They are young guys who were trained at the University of Miami by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, and they started their own firm about ten years ago. They have done two projects where they have taken dead malls and imposed a street and block plan over them and created codes so that the individual lots could be developed as buildings, not just as a megaproject. I think that’s definitely the direction the New Urbanists are going in. I think that we are leaving the age of the megaproject.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.