Old Ideas Make Downtowns New

The author Jane Jacobs, famous for her work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” died last month at the age of 89. Although Jacob’s work mostly concerned itself with very large cities like New York and Boston, the ramifications of what she had to say 40 years ago has an effect on what city planners and developers do in Northwest Arkansas today.

In the decades stretching from the 1940s through the 1970s, cities attempted to revitalize older neighborhoods and downtowns with a process called “urban renewal.”

Urban renewal in large cities often resulted in the use of eminent domain law to demolish large areas of rundown or “blighted” neighborhoods and commercial areas.

For the most part, the demolished areas were replaced with freeways, large-scale public housing projects and vacant lots.

In many of our nation’s smaller communities, urban renewal was a little more benign and often meant covering old brick building storefronts with metal facades to make them appear “modern.”

City planners and designers like to think that we have come a long way since the days of old style urban renewal.

Planning policy now relies less on destruction and much more on renovation, reinvestment, tax incentives, historic preservation and community development.

Certainly buildings are selectively de-constructed where appropriate, such as with the Mountain Inn in Fayetteville. But rarely would we hear planners advocate large scale “slum removal” as in the heyday of urban renewal.

The planning process also attempts to include more public input and tries to steer away from the “command and control” approaches of urban renewal.

Many writers attribute much of this change in attitude and public policy to Jane Jacobs. In “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jacobs argued that vibrant cities and healthy city life arises from diversity. In order to encourage this diversity, Jacobs recommended four generators of diversity including:

the mix of primary functions such as residential, retail, and commercial office;

short blocks that encourage walking;

a variety of building age, condition, use and rentals and;

denser population with compact building design.

To prove her points, Jacobs used careful observation to show how people actually behave in cities, not on how they should behave according to someone’s idealized city plan.

As with many new ideas, Jacobs’ ideas generated much discussion and controversy. However, many of Jacobs’ ideas began to work themselves into the planning profession.

The author, Adele Freedman, wrote, “Jane Jacobs’ observations about the way cities work and don’t work … revolutionized the urban planning profession. Thanks to Jacobs, ideas once considered lunatic, such as mixed-use development, short blocks, and dense concentrations of people working and living downtown, are now taken for granted.”

In the 1990s, we have seen the rise of architectural movements and organizations, such as the “smart growth” movement and the Congress of New Urbanism, which have established working principles that incorporate Jacobs’ point of view.

As the population grows in Northwest Arkansas, civic leaders have and will continue to work on the redevelopment of downtown centers.

We, of course, have seen this with our larger cities all along.

However, as newcomers locate in the region’s smaller cities, we see increased planning activity taking place. For example, the city of Pea Ridge, with the help of a planning study completed in 2002 by the University of Arkansas Design Center, has completed new comprehensive and master street plans. The Design Center study presented a variety of downtown conceptual proposals. All of the proposals, one can argue, incorporate aspects of what Jane Jacobs advocated.

From a real estate market perspective, traditionally designed, pedestrian oriented neighborhoods with mixed-use town centers can produce higher property values. According to information from the Smart Growth Network:

“Research based on these developments has shown… that well-designed, compact New Urbanist communities that include a variety of house sizes and types command a higher market value on a per square foot basis than do those in adjacent conventional suburban developments.”

Ironically, one of the main criticisms of New Urbanist community development is that it increases property values so much that ordinary people can’t afford it.

One might suggest that the supply does not meet the demand.

Perhaps if more people read Jane Jacobs and people created more livable neighborhoods and town centers that incorporate these principles, such places would eventually be commonplace and readily accessible to all of us.