The most recent issue of Ideas That Matter's quarterly includes an excerpt from a speech Jane Jacobs gave in 2001 when receiving the Vincent Scully Prize. Her main point (one of many significant ones in the article) is that consideration of the passage of time is key when addressing the design and identity of place.
At the scale of building/neighborhood:
Now for the related problem of commercial or institutional facilities intruding into inappropriate places. From time to time I glance at plans and artists' renderings for charmingly designed residences with their yards, and I wonder where future overflow of commerce can be pleasantly accommodated...
...So with time and change, originally unforeseen commercial and institutional overflows can occur in...neighborhoods. Where do they go? They may have to find and convert makeshift quarters. Occasionally the makeshifts are delightful, but most commonly they register as ugly, jarring, intrusive smears into residential streets where they were never meant to intrude. Watching this happen, people think, 'this neighborhood is going to the dogs.' So it is visually--and soon, as a sequel, perhaps economically as well. So much is this form of deterioration disliked and feared, that one of the chief purposes of zoning regulations is to prevent it...
Here is where the anatomy of natural neighborhood hearts (that is, the important intersection or public space in the neighborhood; the neighborhood focus) can come to the rescue. One important adaptive advantage of open-ended main pedestrian streets forming intersections is that these streets are logical places to locate convertible buildings before there is a need to convert them. They can be a designed form of neighborhood insurance...
...I am suggesting that urban designers and municipalities should not think about the street anatomy without also providing or encouraging easily convertible buildings on those streets as opportunity to do that arises. This is a practical strategy for dealing with time and change as allies, not enemies.
What she says is equally applicable to design of a single building, at an urban design scale, and also of the brand identity of a place. It is essential to think of identity of a place as fluid, as it is populated with a continually changing cast of characters who themselves continue to adapt and change. Recognition of constant change affirms the vitality of place rather than freezing it in time. It's interesting to consider how this is popularly being approached with the revitalization of urban neighborhoods: is "art" or "creativity" really any more open-ended than any other moniker?
She makes another point that I haven't yet acknowledged here, about places not conventionally regarded as "urban" whose identity and character might change even more rapidly than the typical gentrifying urban neighborhood: that suburbs are seeing massive flux as well.
Right now, in locations extending from the Virginia metropolitan fringes of Washington and the Jersey metropolitan fringes of New York to the Los Angeles fringes of Los Angeles, striving immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, the Philippines, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, are settling in woebegone city suburbs to which time has been unkind. Right now newcomers are enlivening dull and dreary streets with tiny grocery and clothing stores, second-hand shops, little importing and craft enterprises, skimpy offices and modest but exotic restaurants...
Of course, she is right; I saw this first hand over the last few years in my own part of West Philadelphia, which has seen a huge influx of Ethiopian and Somalian immigrants.
My main point though is that she is smart enough to consider that suburbs are no less legitimately "urban" in terms of how growth and change are occurring, and that everyone would be remiss to say that "suburban" life is boring, while "urban" life is gritty, vibrant, and exciting. There just isn't that dichotomy anymore--it's just a popular cultural perception--and arguably there never was.
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