3 thoughts on “Find a City”

  1. I’d be willing to bet he isn’t very happy about being referred to as “A Talking Head” in the headline. He’s been distancing himself from that for years.

  2. “In my perfect city I’d feel that sense of neighborliness—that people weren’t in my business, but that I would be a familiar sight, as they would be to me.”

    Exactly. The whole idea of “Community” that I’ve coveted for years revolves around this idea (which, as he correctly attributes, was a central tenant of Jane Jacobs’ thesis).

    Go Byrne!

  3. I knew you’d catch that.

    He also correctly describes Jane Jacobs’ concept of “mixed use”, which is probably the idea of hers that most subsequent planners and developers mangled worse than all others. Real mixed use is correlated with mixed building ages and values and conditions. The massive “mixed use” clearance projects of the 1960s and 1970s, like SF’s Golden Gateway/Embarcadero Center, and their “new urbanist” descendants, are by and large the antithesis of what she was talking about. But I’ve played that tune before, I know…

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