DOWNED CITY RISE: I’m about 100 pages from the end of Jane Jacobs’s terrific book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Go read it! It’s wonky (chapters on population density, number of streets in a neighborhood, that sort of thing), but lovingly coated with clear, passionate writing and sharp observation. Jacobs loves cities, and she loves watching neighborhoods to see how and why they work–and how and why they fail. The book is a must-read for people who love cities and people who wonder why they are so screwed up. Jacobs gives good explanations of what cities do for an economy–i.e. why they exist in the first place, and why they’re not just vestiges of an earlier economic order–and what cities do for the people who love them. She excoriates various urban-planning legends and precepts, and gives her own prescriptions for urban renewal. But the most important thing she brings is just the willingness to look at cities, to watch them in action, and to figure out how real cities work rather than assuming that cities work like suburbs, towns, or imaginary cities in one’s mind.

I do wonder about some of her prescriptions. She offers guidelines for zoning that could protect neighborhood diversity, keeping diverse and complex uses from being squeezed out by monolithic, powerful, but boring uses. (This is not a solely aesthetic concern, by the way–she makes an excellent case that boring and non-diverse land use makes a city neighborhood unsafe and economically stagnant.) Her zoning proposals attempt to prohibit as little as possible–everything not forbidden is permitted, rather than the other way around. But I wonder if it is as easy as that to turn flexible local knowledge into (relatively) rigid, top-down rules. It may be possible–and since Jacobs is exhorting neighborhoods, not cities or states, to draw up these regulations, she is aiming at the level where turning local knowledge into law is most likely to work. But even local zoning laws can easily be hijacked by special interests, and can become barriers to new, unexpected development. I’m not against all zoning laws–at least not yet–for example, I’m still convinced that DC’s height restrictions are, overall, a Good Thing, despite various obvious economic drawbacks. So I’m not sold (yet) on that particular prescription–but the attention to local life, diversity, flexibility, and economic needs Jacobs displays in describing her zoning proposals are characteristic of the entire book. (She doesn’t try to get something for nothing, either–she’s fully aware that zoning-restricted areas can’t sustain the same taxation levels that their non-restricted neighbors can, because the zoning-restricted sites can’t squeeze maximum economic use out of the land.)

In all, DALOGAC is an inspiring and insight-packed book. I’m very excited to read more about applications of her basic insights, especially applications in my own city, so if anyone knows of Jacobs-style investigations of DC, please let me know. You can read an interview with Jacobs here.