In honour of the happy elision of #JaneJacobsDay and #MayThe4thBeWithYou here is Jane Jacobs during her period on the Jedi Council. As is well known....
... she battled Sith Lord DarthMoses about the routing of new dual airway skyways through city centre Coruscant ....
... and thankfully saved much of the city from being turned into a highways for air-cars. #Phew
Jane Jacobs was an important writer on cities, prosperity and planning in the 1950s and 1960s whose seminal book #TheDeathAndLifeOfGreatAmericanCities first highlighted the immense harm that traffic modernism was inflicting upon the liveability & prosperity of traditional towns..
... for daring to speak truth to a design, planning & development establishment that doing immense harm with perfect assurance she was called...
... by planners & architects a "crazy”, “militant dame”, “housewife” writing “trash”, “junk” & “bitter coffee-house rambling.” She was attacked for opposing modernist “anti-city estates” but (thank heavens)...
... she helped prevent the Lower and Mid Manhattan Expressways which would have destroyed much of Midtown Manhattan ..
This was a key part of the process whereby the post-war public realised that a city of fast roads and #TowersInThePark was not what they wanted. You can learn more in this fascinating film: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York:…
Or you may have heard about the excellent play #StraightLineCrazy by David Hare. It starred Ralph Fiennes who played Jacob's nemesis Robert Moses (who was not really a Sith Lord!)... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mo…
Jane Jacobs's work is now widely praised. However do city councils, planners, designers and architects really follow her ideas or just play lip service to them? And were her ideas correct? Our founder...
“No place, person, or institution echoes through British history as joyfully as the pub. From Chaucer’s pilgrims departing The Tabard, to The Queen Vic in Eastenders, local boozers have always taken centre stage in British life." says @boys_nicholas talking about our new report with @beerandpub ...
“If our streets were a home, then our local pub would be its hearth, the place where we warm ourselves and where we meet and talk, relax and revive. But our pubs are troubled. Over a quarter have closed. This matters. If we desire neighbourhoods where we can come together, then we should cherish our existing pubs, manage our streets and squares so that pubs can thrive, and create new places which weave us together and don’t spin us apart."
“The good news is that we know how. The evidence on where people like to be and why is ever clearer. Let’s lift the bar and create places in which pubs can thrive and people can prosper. This report shows how.”
Once upon a time, Leeds had trams, lots of them. They helped people get to work, come to the centre to shops and to meet each other for work and play. But then, catastrophically, for the city's long term future and prosperity in 1959....
... this extensive system was dismantled and ripped out of the ground, the trams scrapped or left to rust. So great was planners', architects' and the city council's confidence that the city of the future would be, as Le Corbusier had taught, a...
.... city of fast cars and towers would be the city of the future. Of course, ...
Why are so many of our streets spoilt by ugly & unnecessary phone boxes. Our latest report #BoxBlight tells the story of why, explains how we can stop it & caused a stir. Why?
The full report is here👇but first here's the story of why we have the phone boxes we have & the key takeaways from dozens of conversations with lawyers, planners & councillors. A 🧵.... (1/?)
..First up, we no longer need many phone boxes. Calls from phone boxes have declined 99.5% from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only 4 million in 2021-22 due to these things...
... however, phone boxes have not reduced as quickly as phone calls. From a late 1990s peak of 140,000 phone boxes, there are still around 15,800 across the UK, an 89 per cent decrease....
#StreetScar We’ve all seen this: the freshly laid paving, newly laid granite setts or Yorkstones lovingly laid on a slow street or in front of a freshly repaired parade of shops. Within months, weeks or, sometimes days, a slice or a square of them are pulled up thoughtlessly...
📸@stabiloFFC
..cracked, smashed or, worse, thrown needlessly away and replaced by a scar of tarmac , a scar which lingers for months or years or forever and which seems to laugh at any local or neighbourhood desire to live in a place with self-worth...
📸@WorcesterCivic & Timothy Evans
@WorcesterCivic ‘I am authority,’ it seems to say. ‘I am from nowhere. I serve the needs of a nameless, placeless corporation. I don’t care about you, your neighbourhood or your friends. You don’t matter. Your local aspirations are pointless & petty. Get lost. I don’t care.’
At present most British people assume that new development will make old places worse? Only 2% trust developers. One aim for the newly proposed #CambrigeQuarter, alongside creating new homes and supporting UK productivity must be to change that for the next 100 years. But how?
.. well @michaelgove invited us to "imagine a major new quarter for the city, built in a way that is in-keeping with the beauty of the historic centre" So we have...
..."shaped by the principles of high-quality design, urban beauty & human-scale streetscapes – emulating the scale & quality of neighbourhoods such as Clifton in Bristol or Marylebone in London, & with a high % of affordable homes & other properties set aside for key workers &… https://t.co/Wl49FgtjwCtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…