From Project for Public Spaces — How “Small Change” Leads to Big Change: Social Capital and Healthy Places

Farmers market in downtown Milwaukee / Photo: Ethan Kent

If we want to see people challenging the way that their places are made on a larger scale, we need to focus first on developing the loose social networks that are so vital to urban resilience. This is the stuff Jane Jacobs was talking about when she wrote, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.” When people are connected enough to feel comfortable talking about what they want for their neighborhood with their neighbors, it’s much easier to muster political will to stop, say, a highway from cutting through Greenwich Village–or, in contemporary terms, to tear down a highway that was actually built. Read more:Project for Public Spaces | How “Small Change” Leads to Big Change: Social Capital and Healthy Places