Density is a by-product (of creating interesting streets)

Download PDF of "Density is a byproduct".

Then let's talk.

Comments

[Scott Shepard]

I've read the book of course a few times over, most of my planner and architect colleagues have as well. That's not to say I agree with the chronological or methodological approach to achieving the end result with respect to the comforts espoused in the publication.

[David Sucher]

You don't agree?
I am curious to know where and why.

[Mary Campbell Gallagher]

David,

I have read your book. The section on density of which you remind us contains many good suggestions. As to what facilitates densification, however, I must continue most respectfully to disagree that amenities come before density.

Only necessity starts the chicken-egg-chicken of density going. Chic and inertia keep it going. The greatest impetus to greater densification I can think of would be to make automobiles illegal. New York City's wonderful density arose out of public transit, at a time when people did not all have cars and so they could not drag a few thousand pounds of metal around with them all day, whining threateningly when their destinations provided nowhere for them to stash the thing.

Unfortunately, if people have money, even without a car, they de-densify in a New York minute. Here in my neighborhood in New York City, the densest place in America, where almost no one owns a car, although the sidewalks are crowded, in fact, de-densification is rampant.

De-densification defeats all the schemes both of the affordable housing advocates and of the anti-rent-control brigade. Most households in Manhattan are in fact one-person households. My respectably renovated tenement apartment houses me and, usually, a cat: it contains my office, where my assistant works. A hundred years ago, however, this place was home to a family of five. That's de-densification. My clientele live in 700-square-foot condos that their parents bought them as homes-away-from-home while they studied law. More de-densification. One of the effects of Welfare is to allow people to form separate households who would otherwise be living with family members. More de-densification. It's everywhere. I don't think amenities cure it.

I received a fund-raising letter from my parish in the East Sixties yesterday that reminded me of the fact that sixty years ago the neighborhood really was a neighborhood, with most people living in four-, five- or six-story tenements, knowing not just their neighbors in the same building, but the people nextdoor, and the ones out back, and the ones across the street, too. Denser really was better.

All the best,

Mary Campbell Gallagher

[Adam Villani]

I see the basic idea of "if a place is interesting, it will attract more people," but there are some crucial gaps in the mechanism. It is the development on a street that makes it interesting, not the amenities or features of the street itself.

[Tom Beard]

It's hard to have one without the other. If you build dense residential areas with no amenities at all, to the extent that no-one wants to live there, then of course that will fail. But on the other hand, how can the amenities be viable if there aren't enough people within walking distance? You're pretty unlikely to see many interesting shops and other amenities springing up in car-dependent quarter-acre suburbia.

So, I agree with you that density is not sufficient. Was it Jane Jacobs who made the distinction between density and intensity? But I can't agree that it is simply a "by-product". Both need to be planned for (or at the very least, allowed for) right from the start. It can be a tricky juggling act getting both to happen at the same time, but on the other hand, if the physical characteristics preclude density and mixed use (and suburban detached dwellings are not conducive to either) then amenity is not going to appear out of nowhere.