The list continues:

• Jane Jacobs on railroad tracks:

Railroad tracks are the classic example of borders, so much so that they came to stand, long ago, for social borders too—“the other side of the tracks”—a connotation, incidentally, associated with small towns rather than with big cities. Here we shall be concerned not with the social connotations of areas demarcated by borders, but rather with the physical and functional effects of borders on their immediate city surroundings. “The curse of border vacuums,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p257, emphasis added)

• Kevin Lynch, introducing edges in The Image of the City:

These edge elements…are for many people important organizing features, particularly in the role of holding together generalized areas…. (p47)

• I keep coming back to the stories of the protectionism that inspired early zoning legislation and protective covenants. That protectionism grew under the Depression-era formation of the FHA underwriting standards and priorities. Another set of lending practices grew out of the depression-era financing undertaken by the HOLC - proto-redlining, perhaps. Here’s what FDR had to say to Congress:

This policy is that the broad interests of the Nation require that special safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guaranty of social and economic stability, and that to protect home owners from inequitable enforced liquidation, in a time of general distress, is a proper concern of the Government. (emphasis added)

The story of the suburbs picks up pace somewhere in here, before the end of World War II and the construction of the interstate highway system, as the abridged version of the story goes.

• Redlining’s destructive power appears only as an echo, or rather a shadow. The Community Reinvestment Act, recently scapegoated amidst the recent housing crisis, has been in effect my whole lifetime.
• Balkanized. We’ve got a verb referring to the hostile divisions of the Balkans. I think it’s scalable down to the neighborhood level.

Maybe there’s hope in a bit of synthesis I’m reaching for tomorrow.

(cc) Cornell University

Bullet points, sans synthesis:

• Some venture to say that the phrase, “the wrong side of the tracks,” has its origins in the pollution generated by early locomotive technology. The prevailing winds blew the pollution on to the “wrong side,” resulting in lower real estate values. This affected what was built where, and, consequently, who lived on either side. That is, lower real estate values, attracts lower class residents, which means the presence of the “wrong” or criminal element. This chain of causation seems much too simple. Fallacious logic, though it could be part of the story.
• Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, contends that we tend to self-sort—pinpointing a tipping point in such activity as Americans moved away from traditional social institutions around 1965. I’m sure this is the same kind of finger pointing that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone accomplishes by pointing the decline in civic engagement. That is, engagement in these traditional social institutions. Other theses I’ve seen on this take up the rural to urban transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries—that the rise in these institutions provided social structures once found in the relatively homogeneity of small town life.
• I’ve blogged about Putnam’s hunkering thesis:

New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies.

• Researchers Ann Bowman and Michael Pagano take up Kevin Lynch’s concept of the edge in discussing geographic barriers and vacant land

[T]he boundaries and barriers created by vacant land can serve the same kinds of ends that are considered problematic to both the fragmentationists and the consolidationists with respect to political boundaries. That is to say, individuals choose residential locations to maximize their own personal or familial needs, in many cases, the schooling needs of their children. In the process, however, segregation by income and race results. Terra Incognita: Vacant Land and Urban Strategies (p93)

They discuss the formation of microcommunities and neighborhoods by these barriers. Some delineations are productive in non-offensive ways by grouping certain types of land uses; others seem unpalatably racist.

The list continues tomorrow.

Trinity Church, Wall Street (cc) Ross CrawfordBecause commerce is so predominant in most city centers of activity, an effective landmark in such a place usually needs to be overtly uncommercial. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p387)

There are plenty of reasons to mix uses. I’ve argued against Euclidean zoning that separates uses into their own districts on this site. Jane Jacobs has plenty more to say about mixed uses, especially as a generator of diversity.

Mixing uses also emphasizes landmarks. Jacobs holds up the case of Trinity Church in New York City, surrounded by commercial and financial institutions. The contrast makes the church appear more prominent as a landmark — something the City Beautiful movement of Daniel Burnham and the like never quite figured out. Jacobs accuses them of wasting civic structures by clustering them in a district together, calling them “islands of pomp.”

Jane Jacobs explains two types of tactic to help clarify visual order for the city:

1. Emphasis
2. Suggestion

The tactics detailed in yesterday’s post were those falling in the former category, such as terminating vistas with landmark or interrupting a straight stretch of roadway with a plaza.

Jacobs’ chapter on visual order spends less time on the tactics of suggestion. That is, those that help unify a district’s character. Jacobs focuses on the street, again, listing different design elements that can help us perceive a street as a unified whole, even where there is diversity and vitality among the uses and structures:

• street trees
• strong and simple patterns in sidewalk pavement
• awnings

(cc) RachelH_ on flickr

(cc) Andrew A. Shenouda

Imagine a street where residences mix with commercial uses, where there is a mix of building ages and consequently their styles, materials, and craftsmanship. Adding such elements can suggest a unified whole.

These same strategies can be applied to larger districts. However, if every street and every district applies the same elements, the unified whole suggestion becomes untenable. The open sky can be a unifying element, but it’s presence nearly everywhere lacks the tactical weight of other unifying elements.

Town Planning in Practice by Raymond Unwin, 1909

Terminate your vista. Jane Jacobs shares the same sage advice as Raymond Unwin did 40 years earlier. Sites created by intersections like those from Unwin’s illustration above are great spots for landmark structures - statuary, civic buildings, churches, or even an attractively landscaped moment. Streets do not need to appear to continue on endlessly if you terminate and interrupt them well.

Kevin Lynch, contemporaneous to Jacobs, provides the the research and language for describing such a moment where two of the five elements of The Image of the City occur:

• Path
• Landmark (or substitute a Node)

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck return to such concepts in Suburban Nation, where they discuss TND and other takes on The New Urbanism, noting how modern traffic engineering has made such intersections illegal. This makes it impossible to replicate a plan, such as John Nolen’s Mariemont, Ohio:

Mariemont, Ohio

I hope to get a few pictures of Mariemont the next time I’m down in nearby Norwood. But, even here in plan, you can see the streets interrupted by an important node at the town center. Note the civic buildings with their large lots - especially the Town Hall south of this node. Nolen sure could terminate a vista.