The New York Times is running a long and fascinating appreciation of Jane Jacobs, who died yesterday. I like this:
She came to see prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and building tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space to replace them, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians’ belief in bloodletting.
“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” she wrote in “Death and Life,” “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
Removing impediments to the “real order that is struggling to exist and to be served” — you could do worse.
