That is good stuff thanks! It leads me to an interesting article. Would you consider Davis square to be seedy or are the nearby quiet neighborhoods seedy? Would "seedy" apply more for say the assembly square area?
Check out this article: Can You Be an Urbanist and Still Like Cities? (http://www.alexmarshall.org/index.php?pageId=5469)
"Life begets life," Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets. Empty streets are dangerous. That’s no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago.
Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn’t possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. "The waterfront itself," she argued, "is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure."
She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-use development as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.
Perhaps even more important — and certainly less heeded — was Jacobs’ corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding will not restore a community whose social life has been depleted. "It is fashionable," Jacobs wrote, "to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods — schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!... There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior..." and "important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods." Billions of wasted dollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted by a public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.
no subject
Check out this article: Can You Be an Urbanist and Still Like Cities? (http://www.alexmarshall.org/index.php?pageId=5469)
"Life begets life," Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets. Empty streets are dangerous. That’s no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago.
Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn’t possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. "The waterfront itself," she argued, "is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure."
She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-use development as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.
Perhaps even more important — and certainly less heeded — was Jacobs’ corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding will not restore a community whose social life has been depleted. "It is fashionable," Jacobs wrote, "to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods — schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!... There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior..." and "important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods." Billions of wasted dollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted by a public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.