Jane Jacobs & the web

By idfive \ May 31, 2006

For someone who grew up disliking the bustle, noise and apparent violence of the city, Jane Jacobs was a real eye opener.

She convinced me, and perhaps a whole generation of people who read her great work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities), that cities are an ornate ballet of competing interests and cohabitation. Her eloquent and heart wrenching look at her own block on Hudson Street in New York has made a lasting impact on how we, collectively, have constructed our ideal city.

The book contends, among other heresies, that playgrounds are useless (kids should play on large sidewalks in view of their parents – not away in a park surrounded by bullies), that population density equals safety (empty streets aren’t safe, crowded streets are), that zoning is a tool used to destroy the natural fabric and evolution of neighborhoods (she was a near violent opponent of Robert Moses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses ), and perhaps most heretically, she proposed that agriculture emerged because of cities, not the other way around. Cities, she contended with a tart tongue, are the primary social construct of humans, and everything from transportation to cultivation grew up in support of this elaborate cultural eco-system.

Jane Jacobs did much to inform our aspirations and humanize the details of our ideal common spaces. She liked short avenues, maze-like warrens that forced people to turn the corner, she hated cars and loved pedestrians, she liked late night bars on city corners and the squeals of naughty children being chased away by shouting shopkeepers. More than any other urban thinker, she filled out the nuances and details of what a city should be. It seems only right that we web designers see if we can’t learn a thing or two from her observations.

Websites aren’t Cities. But maybe they should be.

Every web designer I know is a frustrated utopian urban planner at heart, nudging pixels in the faint hope of somehow aligning communities, justifying populations or beautifying life. But beyond our urge to fiddle comes a vast emptiness when it comes to goals: what should an ideal site be, what could it be, and if anything, what would we have it be? We web designers have so much to learn from the venerated and highly charged field of urban planning. Urban planning is ancient and filled with eons of wisdom about how people live, prefer to live and sadly, can be forced to live. City planning focuses on quite a few issues, but central to the profession is a tenet quite close to a web designer’s heart – the belief that a city or website is an intricate network of linkages, and that with free flowing info and travel between these linkages at the right time and place can create a great city / website.

Here are some classic Jane Jacobs Tenets (I also stole freely from New Urbanism) and what I see to be their “website” corollary:

Jane Jacobs: Don’t create single use environments such as strip malls. Allow residences, rentals, shops and play areas to be interwoven.
Web: A page shouldn’t only have one kind of content, we aren’t doing poetry here. Allow a mixture of different kinds of content to show up on every page.

Jane Jacobs: Acknowledge that Mothers, Elderly, the Quick, the lazy, kids, the uninformed, the angry and those from all walks of life will be using this space.
Web: Do we ever know how vastly diverse our audience really is? Isn’t presuming we know the audience a form of hubris?

Jane Jacobs: We can focus on how three different size entities interact: the region, the neighborhood and the block.
Web: How does the page interact with the site, and how does the site interact with the web in general. Is it possible to form a neighborhood of sites? How would they interact?

Jane Jacobs: All neighborhoods should have a distinctive center and edge. People should know where they are going and where they are from.
Web: In our eagerness to create endless webs, have we considered creating centers, edges and barriers?

Jane Jacobs: within a five minute walk from your home (1/4 mile), you should have access to work, school, religion, recreation and other homes.
Web: Do we offer enough alternatives – with enough clarity – to make our sites truly usable for our visitors?

Though this is undoubtably an unfitting elegy to Jane Jacobs (she passed away in April, 2006) I have no doubt she would have been tickled if some of her thoughts made their way online. It is worth pondering how her many many insights into life in general, and urban planning in specific might inform web design.

To find out more read the related links here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs