The PBS website has one of the nicer tributes to Jane Jacobs, who passed away this week. Jane’s work, particularly her first book, Death and Life of Great American Cities, written in 1961, is central to the kind of healthy place-making that underpins Civic Tourism. Beyond community design, she wrote extensively about economics. The PBS [...]

“Urbanism must be understood as more than urbane amenities scattered between and within self-contained projects, more than cultural institutions, public parks, sports stadiums, attractive street furnishings, clean streets, and public art. Those are critical urbane embellishments, not the urban essence. The basics run deeper and are more complex than such surface attractions. Diverse economic functions [...]

To understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomenon. We have already seen the importance of this in the case of neighborhood parks. Parks can easily – too easily – be thought as phenomena in their own right and described as adequate or [...]