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 inadequate in terms, say, of acreage ratios to thousands of population. Such an approach tells us something about the methods of planners, but it tells us nothing useful about the behavior or value of neighborhood parks.

A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiently complex to sustain city safety, public contact and cross-use, needs an enormous diversity of ingredients. So the first question – and I think by far the most important question – about planning cities is this: How can cities generate enough mixture among uses – enough diversity – throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilization?

Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

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