Horizon

Welwyn Garden City and Jane Jacobs

I've been reading Jane Jacobs' The Death And Life of Great American Cities, and a wonderful productively cranky book it is. I hadn't otherwise heard of Welwyn Garden City except in a snide reference from Orwell in his famous diatribe about "fruit juice drinkers" etc. Now it turns out the place was one of the early models for the now-discredited U.S. (and British, I gather) approach to project housing, according to which the people would be uplifted by proximity to green grass and separation from commercial or industrial uses.

As we now know, the green grass surrounding projects, even if well maintained, becomes dangerous ground because nobody has a reason to spend much time on it, and nobody walks on the promenades among the identical project buildings because they don't lead to a workplace or a movie theater or a shoemaker or a dollar store or a place to buy a cup of coffee or a newspaper. Jacobs adds the only-obvious-when-noted insight that awful boring uniformity is the near-inevitable result of any attempt to place large numbers of people on a finite piece of land that also must have some required percentage of green space around it.

Have other folks here read this nicely entertaining book? It's tremendous. She was the dean of all the Little Old Ladies In Tennis Shoes who fought to save U.S. neighborhoods from sweeping notions of urban renewal all through the twentieth century. Like Orwell, in a way, she had the courage to turn uncredentialed crankiness into a virtue rather than a liability, and the writing skill to get away with it.