Images From Polish Hill Jane's Walk Coming Soon

Um yeah, just like the two book reviews I promised. But seriously, it went far better than we could have expected in it's first year. By great luck, the neighborhood that stepped up happens to likely be Pittsburgh's best example of small scale grass roots oriented bootstrapping almost certain to have won Jane's favor. Not surprisingly, Terry Doloughty the Polish Hill Civic Association president and lifelong resident who guided the tour had read the book. Read The Post Gazette story.

Ms. Jacobs wrote that successful neighborhoods "are not discrete units. They are physical, social and economic continuities -- small scale to be sure but small scale in the sense that the lengths of fibers making up a rope are small scale."

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" became a classic that masses of sociology, public policy and political science students read. An attack on urban planning of the day, the book was a foundation for the New Urbanist movement.

The national non-profit Project for Public Spaces called it "perhaps the most influential American text about the inner workings and failings of cities, inspiring generations of urban planners and activists."

"All the things she talked about is what we are doing: sidewalk cafes, street trees, merchants groups, festivals," said architect David Lewis, one of the area's most venerable advocates of community-building urban design.

If you have thoughts, insight or images you want to share about art, music, film, urban design, architecture, transit or history in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Youngstown, Erie, Morgantown, Akron, Canton region--Cleveburgh, email me diggingpitt@gmail.com. We can hook you up to post.

This is not Hyper Local media, but regional media seeking local viewpoints.

Great Blog Profile: City Walkabout

I will be randomly throwing up posts about blogs I find of personal interest, most of which shine a light on the Pittsburgh cultural scene, urban oriented design or architecture.

First up is City Walkabout, a blog on the Post site touching on Pittsburgh's neighborhoods and streets from a more personal, practical and pedestrian perspective. One flaw so far is that this blog has to slim comment thread. It would be great if more people would join the conversation.

Check it Out.

City Walkabout

Still More Jane's Walk Talk

More general buzz and discussion popping up about bringing some kind of Jane Jacobs related events and walks to Pittsburgh and other former Rust Belt cities.

Diana Nelson Jones, who hosts one of the few blogs focusing on Pittsburgh from a pedestrian perspective did this post, which quotes one of my comments on Null Space. She also links to a number of other Jane related sites, articles-- and we can add to this the previous talk on Rust Wire, all of which point to some building support for doing something in the Spring.

Using the inevitable football metaphor, living here is often like watching a terrible coaching staff leaving almost all your best running backs on the bench, refusing to block, refusing to tackle while wasting time and resources on ever more bizarre hail Mary passing plays or relying exclusively on kickoff returns.

Not only do the coaches and owners, not put the best people on the field, we can't even let them practice and even worse, one always has to live in fear of which reasonably good or potentially great players might be traded away or cut next, whose property might be seized, whose street cut off and taxes raised for another "special teams operation".

It's not like Pittsburgh doesn't have some great walkable neighborhoods-- and it's not like they ain't successful-- there's plenty of game tape out there that shows what's working on a social and economic level as well as plenty of red ink, empty streets and failed shells to show us what hasn't worked. Yet almost all major government policies repeat these failed plays over and over. Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining!

Team is a good word to use, since as Jane pointed out city's are continuous experiments in social interaction.

Just one more thought, Jane always left a cop out for bad coaches looking for excuses when she said "no two cities or streets are alike". Obviously, this is self evident, but one just has to look at Death and Life's chapter titles, listed below to get the idea that she thought some things worked and some things didn't or only look at a few cities closely to see she was mostly right.

The uses of sidewalks: safety
The uses of sidewalks: contact
The uses of neighborhood parks
The uses of city neighborhoods
The need for mixed primary uses
The need for small blocks
The need for aged buildings
The need for concentration
The curse of border vacuums
Gradual money and cataclysmic money
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles

May not be sexy enough to always make the highlight films.