The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955–1965

Abstract

Between 1955 and1965, the Rockefeller Foundation responded to the urban crises created by the pre-and post-war housing shortage and heavy-handed urban renewal strategies by sponsoring urban design research projects

Operationalizing Jane Jacobs’s Urban Design Theory

“…She argued that these forms of development were the primary culprits in the loss of a vital urban life that many cities had experienced (Grant 2002; Sternberg 2000). Jacobs noted that if planners wanted to maintain a vital urban life, they should pursue gradual, small-scale, voluntary civil efforts instead of large-scale, capital-supported redevelopment projects (Laurence 2006). In particular, Jacobs insisted that in order to restore, maintain, or promote a vital urban life in large cities, the physical environment should be characterized by diversity at both the district and street levels.…”

Townscape as a model of organised complexity

“…Her only cited source was a 1958 paper on 'Science and Complexity' by Dr Warren Weaver, of whom Peter Laurence wrote in 2006, "the importance of Weaver's complexity theories to Jacobs" book and subsequent thinking cannot be underestimated.' 17 Weaver's argument is presented by Jacobs in the form of an analysis of problem types, as 1. problems of simplicity 2. problems of disorganised complexity 3. problems of organised complexity.…”

Townscape and Urban Planning: My Research Agenda at Cal Poly

“…Its goal was to feed the center's main research and take a more scien tific approach to urban aesthetics. In fact, this project was born of a seminar on "visual form of the city", organized by Lynch in 1951 (Lawrence, 2006). According to Orillard (2009), although the seminar's bibliography was almost entirely composed of articles from the British magazine Architectural Review, cradle of the Townscape philosophy, there was a clear attempt to trans form the magazine's writing into a more academic discourse, for example, by converting the word "vision" to "perception" and by referring to environmental psychology and anthropology.…”