Jane Jacobs: Some Myths About Diversity

I cobbled this post out of common objections that Jane Jacobs refuted. It's not really a complete post, but since I haven't worked on it for a while, I'm just going to post it.

Mixed Uses Look Ugly

Sameness looks monotonous, which, though orderly, is dull. She claims that there is still a desire among homogenous uses to appear different, and that it can manifest itself in weird contrived features. So homogenous uses are either depressingly monotonous or "vulgarly chaotic." Admittedly I find this difficult to defend from either side, but I think her point is that mixed uses are not inherently ugly, and that homogenous uses are not inherently beautiful.


Mixed Uses Cause Traffic Congestion

"Traffic Congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves." 

I could just say, "Look at Peru's strip," where single uses cause traffic congestion. Nobody can really get there, except by car (I've walked it a few times, but it is not fun). The old downtowns are easily reachable by foot or bike. Homogenous uses create a need for automobiles by increasing the distance to go in order to reach other uses. Human lives are so entwined between uses that their physical separation does not make sense. Trips would be shorter with mixed uses. People might even be able to walk. Walking takes up much less space than driving. It would take far more pedestrians to create the perceived amount of vehicular traffic that exists now.

Mixed Uses Invite Ruinious Uses

"Successful city districts are never dotted with junk yards, but that is not why these districts are successful. It is the other way around. They lack junk yards because they are successful."

Ruinous uses are often space-consuming, low economic uses. Vital city districts raise property values and cultivate more profitable, space intensive uses. As far as smoky manufacturing goes, the "air doesn't know about zoning boundaries." Zoning is not a good way to combat pollution, there are other, much more effective tools for that. She concludes that few legal uses "can harm a city district as much as the lack of diversity harms it."

However she does mention a few uses that are harmful: parking lots, trucking depots, gas stations, and other enterprises that, on certain streets, have the wrong scale. The first few are easy to understand, they contort space and disorganize streets, because they are so visually dominating.

I think a lot of her objections have to do with rules being made for situations where rules don't quite belong. Somebody's idea of a good idea was codified and applied to an entire municipality and it should just have been a guideline or a good idea for those that want it to take it and those that don't to leave it.  Why have a standardized environment? It would be boring.

The Castle and Moat Model

Downtown development was originally dense. Buildings touched! The buildings that did not touch were arrange in such a way that they occurred regularly. These patterns made up the urban fabric.There was always something new to discover within a few paces.

In the 40's, parking lots started to catch on. Downtowns found it easy to purchase single family dwellings around the downtown and convert them to parking lots. This created an interesting pattern.

The fabric of the residential area is well and pleasant. People like walking through most residential areas. The downtown is relatively well and pleasant. It is not too bad walking through most downtowns (local downtowns anyways).  However walking from the residential fabric to the commercial fabric is no longer pleasant. There is a moat; a moat of uninteresting, hostile parking space. If I wanted to walk from Shooting Park Road to downtown Peru, I'd have to cross the parking lots to the north of the downtown. Pavement is usually uninteresting. It does not have a level of complexity that most humans can appreciate. Parking Lots, Driveways, Gas Stations, parking structures, blank facades, even just empty lots hold very little attraction for most.

The real problem is that no effort is made to improve the walking experience around these detriments. Sidewalks that surround these paved or unimproved surfaces are often left exposed. They are exposed to the sun, to traffic, to poor views. They need improving.

The following illustration is Peru's downtown. I (using remote sensing) determined that these streets are facing lots or structures, which are undesirable to walk past (possibly even drive past, come to think of it). 

Peru's downtown is ringed with a moat of sidewalks that people feel unease at using. Why not just stick to the residential area where there is shade and buffers from traffic? The only tolerably attractive stroll downtown would be from the Southwest. I wonder if there is any anecdotal evidence to support pedestrian traffic from the southwest... I know in my own dealing with Peru's downtown, I walk through Peru's residential fabric as far as I can go to the destination I have in mind and then penetrate the moat using the shortest perceived distance possible. Then I grab my goods and go. I don't linger or stay. It is not pleasant.

I started thinking about this the other day at a concert on Maud Powell Plaza. This really is not a bad plaza, but it seems underutilized. What about a pedestrian corridor on Putnam Street healing the divide between the North and the South (the Northeast's relations with the Southwest are probably unhealable, haha)?

To fix this, I would think the ideal solution would be to surround Putnam in structures--small, mixed use, very interesting structures. However, I'm sure capital restraints would make that a more long term goal. Temporary band-aids might include putting shade over the side walks, constructing walls using interesting materials, patterns, plantings, and artwork to shield less attractive views, placing repetitive objects such as trees or lampposts or planters on both sides of the sidewalk so that the pedestrian feels sheltered. Putting in benches, informal seating, or leaving space for food stands or spaces for events might even encourage some to visit these places to stay!

I hope to post again with a more detailed model. 

Tanagool Park vs. Rotary Park

On one hand we have tiny Tanagool Park, reincarnated at the end of Wright Street, on the other we have Rotary Park, a monolithic megapark out in the countryside.

Strengths of Tanagool Park:
Location-Tanagool is located in a relatively built up area near the activity center of LaSalle. Here it can take advantage of activity going on around the park. Shoppers, eaters, residents, workers, etc. can all go an use this park. It has a much more likely chance of use.
Size-Tanagool is small and human scaled.One can sit on the park an interact with any humans in any part of the park easily. It is easy to identify and communicate over the distances involved.

Weaknesses of Tanagool Park:
Design:
     Environment-The white picket fence just does not seem to go with the park. It takes its cue from nothing nearby. It clashes with its environment. The building next to it is too dull, it needs windows or some sort of interaction with the park. There is an empty parking lot next to the park. This does not contextualize the park well with such a hostile space next door.
     Seating-There could be more formal and informal seating.
     Transition-The park has no transition zone from city to park, no permeable strip of trees or plantings and pavement.
     Enclosure-Ideally a building would shelter at least two sides of the park, with some sort of permeable enclosure on the other two, perhaps a strip of trees or a trellis.  

So we see a disconnect between intent and execution. The general idea of a pocket park was good, pocket parks are fun, cheap, and add amenity to the surrounding area. The design of the park is less than glamorous though. It is if people were not the center of the design, it is more of a green band aid for the downtown. 

Strengths of Rotary Park:
Activities: Rotary park will offer a large amount of activities for all the family, this will attract people.
Public Spirit: The public, or at least the media, is excited about this. Large projects are noticeable projects.

Weaknesses of Rotary Park:
Activities: Rotary park will offer a large amount of activities, this will attract people away from the salvageable parts of LaSalle.

Location: Rotary park is too far away from any other sorts of activities. It does not build on previous assets, it destroys them. The bulk of LaSalle lives across the Little Vermilion River west of the park and to walk there, though not difficult, is daunting to most. The lack of proximity is going to make the park car dependent. The mark of a great park is not the park itself. The vitality of a park is based on its surroundings. There is not much of interest at the edges of Rotary Park. 
Access: Rotary park only has a single point of access.
Safety: The park is much too large and distant from society to be safely patrolled and monitored.

However, Rotary park is not all bad. There are certain function of a park that people do not like living next to, such as sports fields, and wildlife corridors. These would do fine in Rotary park. However, we already have more unique spaces that satisfy wilderness areas in the area, such as Starved Rock, Buffalo Rock, and Matthiessen State Park. Rotary park should play to its strengths and abandon its playground, amphitheater, and anything other that sports, picnicking, and wildlife. The park could try to take over the burden of sports complexes by removing them in Hegeler Park and Matthiessen Park and putting the more attractive amenities such as outrageous playgrounds and bandstands, and grassy open space that can be adapted to any purpose, in these existing more-integrated parks.

 I do not see that this project as proposed, adds any value to LaSalle. It does not build on current assets, and could actually destroy them. I do not see it as fitting that public monies are being mixed with it. This money could be better spent on smaller project to improve the current parks in LaSalle instead of abandoning them for a behemoth.

Some Links and Links to Links expounding further on the subject:
Park Economics,
Jane Jacobs on Parks
Jan Gehl's Planning Principles

Transportation Patterns and Business Districts

I noticed a basic pattern in urban development that early transportation innovations often complemented and reinforced previous transportation patterns. More recent transportation innovations are often quite the opposite, and seek to undermine or rearrange previous transportation patterns. I made a series of maps to show what I mean:

The first era is the era of water transportation. There was very little infrastructure in the Midwest in the mid 1800s and it was convenient to use water as easy transportation. The map below shows the business districts as identified by the 1926 Sanborn maps: Downtown LaSalle, LaSalle's 8th Street Business District, Peru's 4th Street Business District, Water Street Business District, and Oglesby's Downtown. This is a bit anachronistic since Oglesby was not founded in the days of water transport, but I threw it in to make mapping easier and to add reference. Peru was founded on the Illinois River and LaSalle, along the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Both received large volumes of steam boat traffic. 

 

Very quickly after came railroads, which effectively competed with the canal enough to shut it down. In this case the Rock Island Railroad was completely parallel to the canal. Railroads often followed old water routes due to the ease of transferring right of way along waterfronts and due to the gentle grades that locomotives need. The blue dots on the map represent stations, where the majority of passenger and less specialized freight would have entered and left the network.

Roads systems back then were very poor and largely unimproved. Major roads often supplemented the existing railroad and water systems. Thus many run perpendicular to the waterways and run through and radiate out of the business districts. Roads would connect people to where they wanted to go, this necessitated going through the business districts. Bridges were especially important, since they funneled traffic into the business districts. They replaced ferries, which were not limited by engineering in where they could start or stop.

The roads below are green and the data was taken from a 1922 highway map of Illinois. It is interesting that a fair portion of these roads no longer exist in an unbroken form. They were not roads with limited stops, like today's highways, they had very little traffic control. They speeds used by horses and men were not high enough to warrant much control except in especially dense traffic situations within the cities. These highways were really just marked trails. The innovation to label highways came to help travelers find their way across the nation.

The Rail era crested with rails in the streets. Streetcars mainly transported passengers within cities. They traveled at lows speeds of about 6 to 8 mph so that passengers could run and hop on. Streetcars were often built to connect speculative subdivisions to the business district. Interurbans were electric railways that transported passengers between cities. The streetcars and interurban systems are in red on the map beneath.

As automobiles grew in popularity, traffic signals came into being and roads were prioritized into feeders and arterials. In the 50's onward the idea came to try to relieve traffic in town by bypassing the town. Interstates and limited access highways were brought about. Old highways were routed to the edges of the business districts instead of through. Eventually automobiles and regulations ended passenger rail leaving Water Street commercially inactive. Eventually it was rezoned as industrial. Oglesby's downtown is more off the beaten path as well. Commerce and industry now hugs the Interstate systems. The beige blobs beneath are what would probably be considered the modern equivalent of downtowns.

Perhaps in the future, downtown style business districts will go the way of horses, passenger rail, steamboat, and canal packet as the infrastructure that sustained them is eroded:

...but I doubt it.

These maps show the assembly of people, traffic, and life into the business district and the reinforcing pattern created by early transportation systems. Modern transportation systems dealing with larger vehicles are much more concerned with providing larger capacity and prefer to disassemble the urban environment, as they divert people to different, further locations, in order to keep the old roads from congestion. And they succeed, perhaps too well, creating congestion in new places, while deadening the old. There is relatively little change in the total amount of activity on the whole, but it is taking place in a much more distributed and disassembled environment than in eras past. 

Jan Gehl's Planning Principles

Jan Gehl is an urban theorist who has done much research on the city as an organism that was created in response to human senses. The our size, height, speed, hearing abilities, social interaction, drove the cities-of-old to be created as extensions of humanity. Today our top-down institutional structures have created a city that appeals more to machines and their speed, social needs, hearing abilities. He recommends five principles to follow and five to avoid:

Assemble vs. Disperse
A city should locate its functions close together versus making them further apart.

Integrate vs. Segregate
Increase the diversity of form, function, and experience of buildings and spaces by mixing them.

Invite vs. Repel
Make city space attractive to humans on a human scale, that humans can walk comfortably and safely throughout.

Open Up vs. Close In
Open up the edge between buildings and the city, allowing the buildings to interact with the city.

Increase vs. Reduce
Invite people to spend more periods of longer says in city spaces.

Walking Series

Keep abreast of this week's series on walking by Slate:

The Crisis of Pedestrianism