From Strong Towns — Historic buildings get newer, greener lease on life

The story of Peggy and Tom Brennan who recently renovated and opened two unique buildings in downtown Detroit: the Green Garage, a business incubator and coworking space, andEl Moore, a residential apartment building and urban lodge. Find out how these businesses got started and where they're headed now. Read more: Historic Buildings Get Newer, Greener Lease on Life — Strong Towns

Historic Buildings get Newer, Greener Lease on Life #Detroit #CNU24 https://t.co/pxufZeJCgf pic.twitter.com/dazKN0J2D9

— Strong Towns (@StrongTowns) June 8, 2016

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From The Nature of Cities — Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom

Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom were both giants in their impact on how we think about communities, cities, and common resources such as space and nature. But we don’t often put them together to recognize the common threads in their ideas.

Jacobs is rightly famous for her books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and for her belief that people, vibrant spaces and small-scale interactions make great cities—that cities are “living beings” and function like ecosystems. Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work in economic governance, especially as it relates to the Commons. She was an early developer of a social-ecological framework for the governance of natural resources and ecosystems. Read more: Common threads: connections among the ideas of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom, and their relevance to urban socio-ecology | The Nature of Cities

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Jane Jacobs' "big R&D lab" in downtown Toronto industrial sites redevelopment

20 years ago Jane Jacobs was given the chance to put her ideas into practice in the renewal of two large downtown Toronto in-decline industrial sites. The King Street neighbourhoods were a priority of then-mayor Barbara Hall and she asked Jacobs’ advice. Details of this fascinating story are told in the links below by Spacing Magazine’s Shawn Micallef in Curbed.com and in a Globe and Mail piece by Stephen Wickens.

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401 Richmond in the western neighbourhood of the "Two Kings", which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization. Read more: Jane Up North - Curbed

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She wasn’t at all surprised to see people saying 

what would Jane Jacobs have thought; 

but what Jane Jacobs would have thought 

was think for yourself. — Jim Jacobs

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Richard Florida in CityLab — Inner-City Growth and Competition

Two new studies explore the movement of businesses and people back to the city, but outside the central business district. Over the past decade or so, inner cities have staged a comeback, leading to what’s been dubbed a “great inversion” as people and jobs move back to and near downtown, and poverty and disadvantage increasingly take up residence in the suburbs. Read more: Inner-City Growth and Competition in the U.S. - CityLab

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From Business in Vancouver — How Expo 86 changed Vancouver

World’s fair left key infrastructure legacies and turned a large tract of industrial land into an urban streetscape praised worldwide. It wasn’t just that the fair introduced the city to the world and came with SkyTrain, BC Place Stadium, the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre, a new Cambie Street Bridge and other infrastructure legacies. In the wake of the fair, the site’s sale helped spark the urban revitalization that has established Vancouver atop the world’s most livable cities rankings. Read more: The Expo effect: How Expo 86 changed Vancouver | Economy | Business in Vancouver

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From Strong Towns — Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter Lifting kids out of poverty

There’s a hopeful new sign that how we build our cities, and specifically, how good a job we do of building mixed income neighborhoods that are open to everyone can play a key role in reducing poverty and promoting equity. New research shows that neighborhood effects—the impact of peers, the local environment, neighbors—contribute significantly to success later in life. Poor kids who grow up in more mixed income neighborhoods have better lifetime economic results. This signals that an important strategy for addressing poverty is building cities where mixed income neighborhoods are the norm, rather than the exception. And this strategy can be implemented in a number of ways—not just by relocating the poor to better neighborhoods, but by actively promoting greater income integration in the neighborhoods... Read more: Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: Lifting kids out of poverty — Strong Towns

From DougSaunders.net — Citizen Jane

OCTOBER 11, 1997 It’s easy enough to find her. Just stroll westward past the bookstores and cafés of Bloor St and head north on leafy Albany Ave. Step up to the narrow red-brick house with the big front porch, and knock on the door. There will be a shuffling, and finally you will be greeted by a little old lady with an apple-doll face and a warm smile. Be careful, though: She isn’t what she seems. Read more: Citizen Jane

So good—@dougsaunders knocks on #JaneJacobs door “Her theories can alarm and offend even her most ardent supporters" https://t.co/1m9dxZO6L2

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) November 18, 2015

The conversations that formed this article were the beginning of a lot of things I pursued https://t.co/iQHhoviF5n

— Doug Saunders (@DougSaunders) November 18, 2015

From Planetizen — The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking"

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Michael Mehaffy refuted the contrarians and clarified Jacobs' lasting "Top 10" observations found in the incredibly influential book. 

MICHAEL MEHAFFY Planetizen Dec. 15, 2011 Just now we are nearing the end of the 50th anniversary of Jane Jacobs' hugely influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The year has seen a remarkable series of re-assessments and, in some cases, revisionisms. Planner Thomas Campanella has criticized Jacobs' "evisceration" of planning,which created a vacuum into which privatizing interests rushed; economist Ed Glaeser has argued that Jacobs fed gentrification with her call for preservation of some old buildings instead of all new towers; and sociologist Sharon Zukin attacked Jacobs' alleged fantasy of the "social-less" urban block. Most recently, my friend Anthony Flint suggested that Jacobs was a libertarian with a mixed legacy of NIMBYism.

What I find remarkable about these accounts – speaking as an instructor who regularly uses her texts - is that in almost all cases these were things that Jacobs herself simply never said. Read more: The Power of Jane Jacobs' "Web Way of Thinking" | Planetizen: The Urban Planning, Design, and Development Network

The Economy of Cities

Jane Jacob's economics thought is often condensed as something called "import replacement." More accurately it can be said to be summed up as an economic self-replicating ecosystem. Better yet, as "new work added to old." Her hypothesis in The Economy of Cities is that there are three ways, and only three ways that she was able to uncover, by which a city's economy grows and prospers—" 

• By adding export work to other people's local work;
• By adding export work to different local work of their own;
• By exporting their own local work." 

"The significant fact about these processes is that they all depend directly on local economies... these are the only ways I have been able to discover. Indeed it soon becomes exceedingly tiresome to read the business histories of exporting organizations because their narrative plots are so few. One might be reading the same three novels over and over again." Chapter 6, How Large Cities Generate Exports.

"Something special about cities with compact urban places, they stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship, create opportunities"

—@globeandmail @shanedingman “something special about cities w/ compact urban places stimulate innovation, entrepreneurship create opportunities"

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Sunday, July 19, 2015

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapters four, five

“…science needs the same values and precepts as commerce. Honesty is the bedrock of science. Moral rules for research are: don’t lie, don’t deceive or cheat under any circumstances; if you’re making reasoned guesses, say so and lay out your reasons.

“Voluntary agreement is the agreement that counts among scientists. Forced agreement to findings or conclusions is worse than useless. Science thrives on dissent for the sake of the task. Any theory is thus only provisionally true in science. It’s understood that theories can’t be proved; they can only be disproved. An accepted theory is merely one not yet proved false—and the possibility always exists that it may be."

The group is unable to disprove Kate's hypothesis of two moral syndromes, the commercial and the guardian, examining the kibbutz in Israel, the Scandinavian welfare states, communist Eastern Europe.  And they prepare in Chapter 5 to take a closer look next at the Guardian System.

Of particular interest to me is Chapter 5's examination of historical cultural expressions of an aversion to commerce. 

In the days of chivalry, a man was unfit for knighthood if he had a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent on either side who had been a merchant or a craftsman, 'in trade', as they said. Shameful, base. contaminating. But why? The doings of craftsmen and merchants are so innocent compared with making wars, pillaging, extorting, persecuting, executing, censoring, holding prisoners for ransom and monopolizing land at the expense of serfs, peons or slaves—all honorable activities for people who would sooner have died than sink into trade. 

Consistent throughout the research that lead to the identification of the two Systems of Survival, as the syndromes are also called in Chapter Four, is the recurrence of the value in the guardian syndrome 'shun trading.' Contemporary examples include class attitudes that, for instance, ascribe a moral superiority to a non-profit enterprise, and class attitudes of distinguishing "inferior new money from superior old money cleansed of commercial taint by the passage of generations and time."

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapter three

Armbruster's  group has been unable to identify behaviour systems other than the two presented by Kate. In Chapter Two they get a little help from Plato. In The Republic says Jacobs, or rather her speaker Armbruster, Plato "or rather, his speaker Socrates... takes pains to distinguish between two great, major groups of occupations and their purposes, precisely to disentangle their contradictory virtues from one another... He said both are necessary... the commercial occupations to supply everybody's physical needs and also support the guardians, presumably by taxation.

"The guardians are the Moral Syndrome B people... Police, soldiers, government policy makers and rulers... They're necessary to protect the state from corruption within and enemies outside... I propose you call Syndrome A 'commercial' and Syndrome B 'guardian'."

The chapter continues with the group  discussing in more detail the Commerce Syndrome and it's precepts, their purposes and origins and instances where this system contradicts, or seems to contradict the values listed in the Guardian Syndrome.

In the mail this morning...

In the mail this morning... pic.twitter.com/RflkqcaPej

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 10, 2015

@1sidewalkballet Sorry for the confusion this post caused. By way of explanation: these are books. Like in your old uncle’s den.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

And they came in the mail but not that mail, they were delivered by a postie. That’s not an avatar or a meme or a metaphor.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

A real postie, knocked on my door with a pleasant greeting and said I have a package for you. These books are what was in the package. OK?

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) June 11, 2015

From Price Tags — Ed Glaeser (“Triumph of the City”) on Vancouver… and Sam Sullivan

Georgetown row house block; courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Ed Glaeser (“Triumph of the City”) on Vancouver … and Sullivanism | Price Tags

In a one-week period earlier this month, Edward Glaeser’s schedule took him from a conference in Leeds, England, hosted by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, to Stanford for an urban summit, to Milwaukee to speak at Marquette, home to Boston for a night, down to Washington to give a keynote address at a World Bank conference and finally off to Delhi for a two-day visit. What’s driving this demand for his views is not only his reputation as a top-notch urban economist, but his thoroughly researched message about our urbanizing world. Half of humanity now lives in urban areas, he reports, and by 2050, that figure will rise to three-quarters of humanity. In Glaeser’s eyes, this urbanization is a profoundly positive trend. Despite the challenges cities must learn to overcome — including crime, sanitation, services for the poor — they are sites of intense collaboration, innovation and opportunity. Read more: Humanity’s Greatest Invention? Face-to-face with Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City — Medium

From Next City — We Put 31 Artists, 25 Architects and 18 Urban Planners in a Room. Guess What Happens Next...

Credit: Ashton Lance

The team: 31 artists and designers, 25 architects and housing experts, 23 community members, 18 urban planners, 11 local foundation and city representatives, 2 landscape architects and between them, eight Next City Vanguards. Read more: We Put 31 Artists, 25 Architects and 18 Urban Planners in a Room.

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From The Atlantic — Nice Downtowns: How Did They Get That Way? "It wasn't easy"

JAMES FALLOWS I had anticipated some of the rewards and discoveries of visiting cities in the process of economic and cultural recovery and re-invention. An unexpected reward has been the chance to get a time-capsule view, a kind of real-life time-line diorama, of how the downtown areas of cities look through all the stages of a decline-and-rise cycle. The declining phase includes hollowing-out and pawn-shop-dominated decay. Then there is spotty and tentative improvement. Finally, if all goes well, full-scale health through a combination of stores, restaurants, theaters, downtown condos, and all the other elements of a region that attracts commercial and human activity through most hours of the night and day. Read more: Nice Downtowns: How Did They Get That Way? — The Atlantic

From Price Tags — How Vancouver does successful retail

Sam Newberg – known as ‘Joe Urban’ – sent this request to Price Tags:

 We’re having a crisis of urban design in Minneapolis. (How the City of Minneapolis Actually Influences Building Design). We’re talking too much about materials and not enough about frontage. One of the comments in this post is from a city planner who is sticking up for his staff at the city, but I still think we need to do a better job at frontage. More doors, more active, not just windows. Any advice on what specifically Vancouver does to get better results? More at: Advice for Minneapolis: How Vancouver does successful retail | Price Tags

Parking Madness 2015! It's depressing what we've done to downtowns @schmangee @StreetsblogUSA

Sorted through 26 N. American parking craters this year to make this list. http://t.co/ZoPInUpVFg pic.twitter.com/xiKKlMphxy
— Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) March 12, 2015

It's depressing what we've done to downtowns. We've featured 48 of these now. It's endless http://t.co/ZoPInUpVFg pic.twitter.com/O7khMKn1gw

— Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) March 12, 2015

More at: Parking Madness 2015! First Match: Camden vs. Mobile | Streetsblog USA

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From On the Commons — The Promise of Co-ops Connecting with the Commons

Is it possible to imagine a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other?

 That was the animating question behind a two-day workshop, “Toward an Open Co-operativism,” held in August 2014 and now chronicled in a new report by UK co-operative expert Pat Conaty. (Pat is a Fellow of the New Economics Foundation and a Research Associate of Co-operatives UK, and attended the workshop.) More at:  The Promise of Co-ops Connecting with the Commons | On the Commons

From Planetizen — Economic Thinking for Planners

This course shows how "Economic Thinking" can inform our thinking on big questions like why some countries are rich while some are poor and how so many us have become so much better off than our ancestors. Peter Gordon introduces the "Economic Thinking for Planners" series. Peter Gordon is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy. His research interests are in applied urban economics. 
More at: Planetizen Courses