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Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs has written a landmark book on the topic of neighborhood planning entitled, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In it she details her thoughts on the nature neighborhoods and the activity of planning. She states that:
A successful city neighborhood is, "a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its defects and problems and is progressively more helpless before them." (Jacobs, 112)
As long as city planners, and the businessmen, lenders, and legislators who have learned from planners, cling to the unexamined assumptions that they are dealing with a problem in the physical sciences, city planning cannot possibly progress. Of course it stagnates. It lacks the first requisite for a body of practical and progressing thought: recognition of the kind of problem at issue. Lacking this, it has found the shortest distance to a dead end." (Jacobs, 439)
Objects in cities -- whether they are buildings, streets, parks, districts, landmarks, or anything else -- can have radically differing effects, depending upon the circumstances and contexts in which they exists. Thus, for instance, almost nothing useful can be understood or can be done about improving city dwellings if these are considered in the abstract as "housing." (Jacobs, 440)
City dwellings -- either existing or potential -- are specific and particularized buildings always involved in differing, specific processes such as unslumming, slumming, generation of diversity, self-destruction of diversity." (Jacobs, 440)
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