The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.
This short passage from the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs kept coming back to me as I read the rest of the book. While written primarily about New York in the early-mid 1900s, so many of the lessons are still vividly applicable to the cities I have called home. Her observations contrast the organic, human-oriented aspects of vibrant and diverse neighborhoods with the tendency of so-called “urban renewal” projects to segregate the city into functional blocks, as if designing a factory rather than a community.
I hope not to rob anyone of that same experience – I really can’t recommend the book highly enough – but I felt compelled to walk around with a camera and capture the scenes that came to mind as I read, pulled from my time in Denver. I’ll add to this post as I continue to do the same in more places.
“In the rebuilt city it takes a heap of fences to make a balanced neighborhood”
Private green space high above street level - Denver
“The point of both the testimonial banquet and the social life of city sidewalks is precisely that they are public. They bring together people who do not know eachother in an intimate, private social fashion and in ost cases do not care to know each other in that fashion”
Union Station - Denver
“More Open Space for what? … But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would”
Civic Center Park - Denver
“This mixture of uses of buildings directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times”
Commons Park - Denver
“On successful city streets, people must appear at different times”
17th and Curtis, a counterexample empty at street level during working hours - Denver
“Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. Downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled.”
Ball Arena Parking - Denver
“To counter the drop in intensity of use, the standard remedy is to try to increase further the accessibility by cars—usually, first, by making parking easier for them”
Denver Pavillions Mall Parking Garage
“However, if such a street goes on and on into the distance, with the intensity and intricacy of the foreground apparently dribbling into endless amorphous repetitions of itself and finally petering into the utter anonymity of distance, we are also getting a visual announcement that clearly says endlessness.
In terms of all human experience, these two announcements, one telling of great intensity, the other telling of endlessness, are hard to combine into a sensible whole.”
Broadway - Denver
“Therefore a good many city streets (not all) need visual interruptions, cutting off the indefinite distant view and at the same time visually heightening and celebrating intense street use by giving it a hint of enclosure and entity.”
Union Station - Denver
Coors Field - Denver
“Bridges that connect two buildings up above a street sometimes do this service; so do buildings which themselves bridge a street”
Denver Art Museum