Michael Mehaffy refutes the contrarians and clarifies Jacobs’ lasting “Top 10” observations found in the incredibly influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“So, too, Jacobs argued, a city is a diverse mix of people and processes, with its own self-organizing dynamic. We can exploit this dynamic by design, but this is a different idea of design, perhaps. Top-down interventions can certainly be part of this process (Jacobs mentions, for example, the use of public projects as “chess pieces” to trigger other changes) but we understand that we have to pay attention to multiple factors and multiple relationships. We have to use different tools for different conditions – “tactical” urbanism as it has been called. We have to figure out where – and how – to change the “operating system,” the rules, processes and standards that constrain and corrupt our intended outcomes. And we have to plan with self-organization, in a way that exploits its inherent capacity to solve our problems.”
