More on City Planning

Wow how long has it been since I last entried.

I'm still working my way through Jane Jacobs' book, and now someone has put a hold on it, so I can't renew and have to return tomorrow. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind stopping a non-fic right in the middle and just taking away the ideas gleaned thus far. In this case however I find each of her ideas new and interesting enough to get all the ones in this book. I'd like to share an excerpt before I turn this thing in, it's a particularly indicative paragraph that shows quality of writing and the clarity of mind which created this work.

Jacobs has turned her attention to the financing of large, in her words, cataclysmic, urban renewal programs, i.e. projects. She is truly breaking down the approach that only huge dumps of cash and wholesale renewal is the answer. She clearly identifies problems, such as dearths of funding for areas that have been blacklisted by banks. She indicts city planners in linking their maps to the maps at the bank. She then starts to explain an alternative theory, not one to only rip to shreds the views she doesn't agree with.

This paragraph is her segue, and I think it's indicative of the ills of many many people who think in only one way, especially in an erroneous way, a way that was and so always will be so. From page 418:

All that is indeed no small accomplishment. The devices of large-scale clearance, slum shifting, slum immuring, project planning, income sorting, use sorting have become so fixed as planning images and as collections of tactics that city rebuilders, and most ordinary citizens too, face a blank when they try to think of city rebuilding without these means. To get past this obstacle, we must understand the original misconception on which the rest of the fancy structure rests.